You can’t stay Yonge forever – and that’s why I used the Liquid Scale app to remove the longest street in the world from my picture. All I had to do was load the image inside of Liquid Scale, paint Yonge street in ‘red’ to indicate that it was one of the first things that […]
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Quick Look: Liquid Scale, a content-aware cropping tool for your iPhone photos [iPhone App Reviews]

Feb 5th 2010 by

v1.0

You can’t stay Yonge forever – and that’s why I used the Liquid Scale app to remove the longest street in the world from my picture. All I had to do was load the image inside of Liquid Scale, paint Yonge street in ‘red’ to indicate that it was one of the first things that should be cropped out, and then I just pinched the photo together — literally squeezing the disgustingly long street right out of the picture.

I actually had nothing against Yonge Street, but ah well, it’s too late now.

without Yonge
without Yonge
with Yonge Street
with Yonge Street
v1.0
v1.0


[Images from left to right: intro pic, pic with Yonge Street, pic without Yonge Street, example of painting interface]

Liquid Scale is a small app that specializes in smart auto-cropping: just choose an image (landscape or far-off shots work best) and you can pinch the details together vertically or horizontally. The app does a decent enough job at recognizing key points in the picture that shouldn’t be distorted, but you’re really much better off using the pop-up control panel to specify the portions that you want preserved or pinched to death.

There’s a small +/- bar along the bottom of the screen: painting things in green will preserve them to the best of the app’s abilities, and painting things in red ensures that they’ll be the first things cropped out of the picture. One of my favourite parts of this app is watching the actual cropping process (which happens live, by the way), and there’s even a setting to make lightning bolts flash over parts of the picture that are being distorted or cropped out.

Controls
Pinching and cropping is pretty simple in Liquid Scale, and the in-app tutorial is quite helpful. Controls are ever only one screen tap away, and you can always swipe across the screen to return the picture to its original resolution (i.e. undo). One thing that the app still lacks is any sort of fine grain control over the ‘painting’ process. There’s no digital zoom available within the app, so painting specific objects for removal can sometimes be a challenge, and the default brush often feels several sizes too big.

Lower resolution output
The iPhone 3GS features a 3MP camera, but Liquid Scale can only save files with a maximum resolution of 1MP. I actually played with the app with all image settings on medium, and so the shots you see above are in the neighbourhood of 0.4MP, or around VGA resolution (640×480). What I’m basically trying to say here is that all of this image manipulation comes at a price: the photos that liquid scale emails or exports to your photo library are usually smaller and lacking in detail.

Conclusion
Despite the lowered resolution on exported images, I think Liquid Scale is definitely one of the more novel and useful photo manipulation apps I’ve gotten to play with lately. It’s true that there are other ways to quickly remove objects from a picture, but none quite so flashy as pinching a photograph and watching lightning bolts decimate everything you wanted removed.
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Liquid Scale is available for $1.99 on the App Store.
This app was provided by Savoy Software for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.

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