onOne buys seam carver

Adobe software plug-in maker onOne Software, of Portland, Ore., announced today it's buying, for an undisclosed sum, the seam carving technology of Liquid Resize. The technology was developed by an Austrian-based couple, Ramin Sabet and Irmgard Sabet-Wasinger based on the research of Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir (see video above). What seam carving allows you to do is resize photos in radical ways--turning a vertical into a horizontal, for example--with a minimum of distortion. According to onOne, a beta version of software incorporating the seam carving technology will be available at its Web site at the end of this month. A Photoshop plug-in using the tech has a release target of the middle of this year. If you can't wait until the end of the month to tinker with this stuff, you can try your hand at it at a Web site called Rsizr.