Something Interactive

UPDATE: Adobe has put this feature into their latest CS4 version of Photoshop!

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is a graphics designer’s Swiss-Army knife, bundled with an amazing set of tools like Camera Raw, Photomerge, Vanishing Point, Liquify,… the list goes on.
I’ve dreamed of a couple tools that might help me with my image resizing too.

Well by coincidence, one of my dreams has been put into application reality – it’s called Seam-Carving Content Aware Image Resizing.

Also known as Media Retargeting, rather than me use words to explain what it means, these geniuses have put it into a nice video for us to learn all about this new image processing technique.

There are two online examples that allow the public to upload and retarget their photos:

I assume that they heavily use Adobe Flash’s latest bitmap API to do the processing on the fly.
The concept of the programming is pretty straight forward, but the application is still computationally-intense.

Seeing as how it has already been built with Adobe Flash, and since it’s quite slow, I figure it’s only a matter of time before Adobe incorporates an offline adaptation into Photoshop’s next version toolset where they can really harness the appropriate computing power to make the process a bit more “real-time”.

And look at that, Adobe CS3 is less than a year out and I’m already looking forward to CS4.

Dove launches “Evolution” follow-up commercial.

I gotta ask this question though.

If my friend’s tried and true home-made soap lasts me 4 months, and Dove’s soap lasts me 4 weeks, isn’t their “clever” marketing just another way to regain popularity in their product that is designed to waste away faster so you’ll be forced to buy more?

It’s one thing to combat the problem with complete juxtaposition, but it’s altogether just as bad.

I feel the most disturbing and influential scene in that commercial is the snap-frame animation of the girl on the weight scale, rapidly yo-yo dieting.

Well hello,.. this is obviously not ideal for anyone.
We can’t forget that losing pounds is a positive thing at one point either.

People die sooner from complications of being overweight OR underweight – that is medical fact.

The positive image of women losing weight is misrepresented because of the way that it is thrown together amongst all of the other negative advertising.
It’s easy to distort the message and absorb the overall concept that “losing weight is futile” in the end.
That kind of thinking can be a useful crutch for people who have a weight problem and are unmotivated to do anything about it.

People want to fight a fight that they can win.
People watching the video may identify with :

• being fat,
• not participating in healthy management of their weight,
• and, buying Dove soap,

Does that mean that they have finally achieved beauty? “Being fat is beautiful”?

In my personal opinion, skinny models aren’t beautiful – they’re gross and just as unhealthy as people who are fat.
I generally find healthy people beautiful.

Dove should be tackling the real problem with their advertisement campaign: HEALTHY beauty.
A company as large as Dove could be spending their marketing money on figuring out how to portray beautiful health.

I’m not seeing any effort towards that at all; just buy Dove soap and keep doing what you’re doing, or lack thereof.

Okay, so my co-workers often get emails from me,… surprising!
But I’ve started to send a trend of emails that contain only a subject line and a YouTube video link.

One email in particular stands out amongst all the rest, it’s my compiled list YouTube videos showcasing various groups of people reproducing the dance routine seen in Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Don’t ask why, just sit back and be thrilled.

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