Heavily Distorted
July 7, 2013 1:24 PM   Subscribe

Content Aware Scaling is a Photoshop technique which allows you to selectively change the scale of one portion of an image without affecting the rest of it. This technique can be used on still images (like so) to create insanely proportioned compositions, or on moving images to create shifting, disorienting, and often hilarious animated .gifs (like so, and also). Digital artist Neil Cicierega provides a tutorial and a Photoshop script to do this yourself.

Some other examples... Related: a technical article that goes over the technical process of seam carving as it relates to content aware scaling. A still image gallery of celebrity content aware scaled faces.
posted by codacorolla (23 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Whoa. You could really mess with someone if you set up subtle gifs on a page so that the viewer thought that the gifs were still images, and that they were just losing it.
posted by umbú at 1:54 PM on July 7, 2013 [2 favorites]


Man is this going to be a sex thing.
posted by The Whelk at 1:58 PM on July 7, 2013


Man is this going to be a sex thing.

Already is.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:59 PM on July 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


that is disturbing and i am disturbed
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:07 PM on July 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


Neil Cicierega, of BRODYQUEST fame.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:10 PM on July 7, 2013


Aha. I always wondered why the cheap clothing catalogs from Asia always have models with unrealistically long legs. I give to you: exhibit A
posted by Xere at 2:45 PM on July 7, 2013 [4 favorites]


It kind of blows my mind that I've been enjoying Neil Cicierega's animutations and other crazy internet goings-on for 13 years now (since around 2000-2001), and the guy is still only 26 years old. That's so ridiculously young.
posted by Strange Interlude at 2:50 PM on July 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


Oh man, that Paula Deen one reminds me of a bunch of the stuff the Residents have been doing with video. Kinda like the interstitials on the Icky Flix DVD.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 3:01 PM on July 7, 2013 [2 favorites]


Suddenly overcome with Kai's Power Tool nostalgia.
posted by davebush at 3:15 PM on July 7, 2013 [8 favorites]


Neil Cicierega of animutation, The Ultimate Showdown, Potter Puppet Pals, and Windows 95 Tips fame.

The dude practically created Internet culture singlehandedly. I've been a fanboy since I was literally in the 6th grade; he's been a central cultural icon for my group of friends since forever.
posted by Rory Marinich at 3:18 PM on July 7, 2013 [5 favorites]


I wonder if Adobe developed this feature with the knowledge that they were building an automatic Spitting Image-ifier, or was it just a lucky coincidence?
posted by Suddenly, elf ass at 3:45 PM on July 7, 2013


Is anyone using this to prove the existence of reptilians yet?
posted by dumbland at 4:03 PM on July 7, 2013


Close, maybe?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:44 PM on July 7, 2013


Kai's Power Goo is back!
posted by Ad hominem at 5:12 PM on July 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


We visited Japan recently, and my kid took some Print Club pictures with his friends in Tokyo. (Game arcades have these machines that are sort of like the old snapshot booths that would give you four B/W poses of you and however many people you could fit into a booth built for two. But in Japan, the machines produce a sheet of adhesive sticker photos.)
The Japanese machines automatically find and enlarge eyes, smooth skin, and put pink gloss on lips (in addition to adding stars, rainbows, hearts and typed messages). The effects are pretty good for an automatic tweak, given the small final size and modest resolution.
posted by spacewrench at 6:43 PM on July 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


So, it's a way to make people look like Gollum. It's a Gollumifier.
posted by JHarris at 7:27 PM on July 7, 2013 [2 favorites]


There're also Youtubes, which I didn't check before making the thread:
Wicker Man
American Psycho
The Office (marvel as Steve Carrell becomes Mitt Romney in the second iteration)
Star Trek II
posted by codacorolla at 7:41 PM on July 7, 2013 [3 favorites]


That's a fascinating effect... Anybody know how to achieve something similar using Pixlr?
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:50 PM on July 7, 2013


Doesn't create the most attractive image I've ever seen. Still, be good in wedding photography - Whadya you mean the groom's head doesn't look like that? Lady, I shoot is as I sees it,
posted by Mario Speedwagon at 9:37 PM on July 7, 2013


Thorzdad: Man is this going to be a sex thing.

Already is.
Started out with idiots who would distort asses or breasts (often on selfies) so cluelessly that they didn't notice the warpage on doorframes and tile patterns behind them.

Nowadays these idiots make sure they're standing in front of a white wall, or blue sky, or the like before doing their 10-second photoboob surgery (or search for photos like that). It's still pretty damned obvious; there simply aren't that many 42DD-22-48 women out there.
posted by IAmBroom at 10:03 PM on July 7, 2013


We implemented this in my undergrad computer graphics class! Surprisingly trivial.
posted by town of cats at 10:21 PM on July 7, 2013 [1 favorite]


This is fairly amazing. I'm glad that the internet's existence has made whimsical photo manipulation mainstream comedy.
posted by sp160n at 10:22 PM on July 7, 2013


Some of the animated gifs introduce other artifacts I find interesting. Some have an up-and-down jitter that I think is an exaggeration of the TV interlacing. I think some used an animated gif as the source, the Pooh ones for example, and you can see it interpreting the dithering as detail that must be preserved.

Another fun thing, the last link with the celebrity faces, wherever their skin has been airbrushed smooth, that means it has no detail and it gets squished.
posted by RobotHero at 9:00 AM on July 8, 2013


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