In Siggraph this year, scientists Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir present technology called "Seam Carving for content aware image resizing" , which translates to something like "resizing of images in terms context ". What makes this wonder? to adapt to different media images display without having to croped or scale, keeping the important elements of the image unchanged. We will be much clearer viewing this video:
Best of all, incredible as this seems, it really is technology that is available NOW. Via Stock Xchange I find that good scientists have been recruited for the future Adobe Photoshop CS4 and importantly, there is a stand-alone application } {Windows-only and other Web application they can use FREE from now!
'm a Mac user, so I could not try the downloadable version, but I was playing around with the web application and I must say that their results are pretty decent:
Resizing:
_Original
_Resize 1
2
_Resize
Clear _Original
_Borrado
Photos with CC property and Chrissam42 Hounddiggity
see, the latter was a the diagonal bit odd, but nothing that a good PS can not solve. Try it!