Resizing images is typically thought of in a "whole image" concept. You shrink the horizontal and vertical axis at the same time to maintain proper perspective and appearance. Recently though, two gentleman (Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan) came up with an amazing technique for dynamically scaling only portions of an image called seam carving. Parts of your image are scaled or even removed, yet the image doesn't appear to be "stretched" or "cloned" in any way.

You can use seam carving on your own images by visiting the rsizr Web site. You can upload an image up to 2880 pixels in width (the Flash limit) and begin pegging areas of your image to stretch, not stretch or remove completely. Then simply adjust the sliders on the sides of the image to scale the image. There are no instructions, but it's fairly straight forward.

Below is an image of the beautiful Arizona desert by Kevin Conners I grabbed from MorgueFile.

The photo below shows the entire image, uncropped, but vertically scaled down and horizontally scaled out. I chose to "protect" the opening in the middle of the photo from being scaled. As you can see, no real loss of detail is visible, and the image shows no negative signs of cloning or stretching.

Now look at the image below. In this version, I chose to protect the side walls of the cave and just stretch the opening for the most part. As you can see. The details of the sandblasted cave wall in the middle still contain all the details of the layers of sand, the shading and the shadows are nice and natural.

And below, I chose to completely protect the side walls of the cave, vertically scale the image and just horizontally scale the opening in the middle. The image still contains all the detail.

It may not appear at first to be of much use to you, but if you visit the rsizr Web site and check out the gallery, you'll begin to see where you can put this to practical use.

The site claims that they're working on releasing a Flash applet you can download and use on your own computer with all the images you want - enter your email address to be notified when it is released if you wish.

Oh, and as a side note, Dr. Shai Avidan was recently hired by Adobe. I'm fairly confident we could be seeing this technology find its way into Photoshop sometime in the near future. Wouldn't that be cool!