Resizor :: Overview
What is Resizor?
Resizor is a free software for high-quality image resizing and retargeting.
Want to make a big picture smaller? Or a small picture bigger? That's what Resizor is made for.
It also features a recently published image retargeting technique called seam carving. This allows you to change the size of the image without changing the content by removing areas of low importance. Check out am impressive demo video by the scientists who invented this technique if you want to learn more about it.
But Resizor also offers conventional resizing via resampling using a variety of filters, some of them offering quality even superior to industry standard Adobe® Photoshop®.
In fact, as a Photoshop user you will feel right at home, since the intuitive interface closely resembles its counterpart in your favorite software.
In addition, you get a full-size preview, so you can be sure that you find out which resampling filter offers the highest possible quality. You can tweak the settings as often as you want to, Resizor will always use the original image as a source for its computations.
Here is a screen shot (click to enlarge):
Who is it for?
Home users: Want to quickly send a photo via E-Mail, but it is too big? Want to fit an extremely wide panorama into standard-photo size without cropping anything off or everything looking stretched? Open the image, change the size using the retargeting option, save it, and you're done. It's that easy.
Photoshop users: If you want a wider selection of resampling filters to choose from to ensure that you always have the one filter that works best with your image, Resizor is for you. Also if you want to have access to the great and innovative new image retargeting technique called seam carving, which won't premier in Photoshop until at version CS4 (possibly even later), Resizor is your tool. It even looks like Photoshop's Image Size dialog box, so you will feel right at home.
Depending on the image you have, the results in Resizors might even be superior to those obtained in Photoshop (notice the stair-stepping artifacts):
Creators of mobile content: If you need to fit an image onto the screen of a mobile device, the retargeting feature in Resizor is your best friend. You can change the aspect ratio of the image without the content getting distorted. And you can make images smaller without the important parts in the image getting smaller, thus taking maximum advantage of small display sizes.
Note that all the important information has been retained, yet the image size has been reduced significantly. The image was not stretched. The tree and the castle still have pretty much their original size, but the same information was compressed into a much smaller image.
Note: The color change was introduced during the web optimization of the images, not by the retargeting step in Resizor.