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October 9, 2007

FotoFlexer Continues To Innovate; People Love It

Michael Arrington

31 comments »

FotoFlexer, which we first covered in August, continues to be my favorite online photo editing tool out of a batch of…many.

Most of the tools are for creating fun changes to photos (see my previous post on them for an overview), and users can easily pull and push photos to social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr. But it’s also a serious editing tool (it supports layers, for example).

Since their July launch, the company says over 5 million photos have been edited using their tool, from 150,000 registered users on their site and another 275,000 users of their Facebook application.

Today they will announce a few additional editing tools - one serious, one fun. The fun one is a morphing tool that lets you take two photos and morph them into a single image. See this YouTube video for an example.

The second tool takes advantage of some of the recent thinking around seam carving to allow people to intelligently resize photos, and/or remove things in photos without distortion. The video below shows it in action and, as always with seam carving demos, it’s stunning what can be done:

If you’re interested in more information on seam carving, see this working demo, and check out Rsizr (see Go2Web2 coverage).

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 12:16 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. photographyVoter.com

    October 9th, 2007 at 8:01 am

  2. Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » FotoFlexer - Online Photo Editing

    October 9th, 2007 at 9:14 am

  3. The Savvy Boomer

    October 10th, 2007 at 12:07 am

  4. The FotoFlexer Blog » Blog Archive » TechCrunch

    October 18th, 2007 at 12:35 am

Comments

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  1. Jason Nazar

    October 9th, 2007 at 12:20 am

    this is just the tool I was looking for, I’m editing a 6 pack into my out of shape ass and uploading it to fb

  2. MikeW

    October 9th, 2007 at 12:35 am

    I assume that they created this “Smart resize” feature in reaction to the recent hoopla about seam carving.

    If this is truly the case, I’m really impressed. How long will it take Adobe to add this feature to one of its products and accessible to all users (not just the tech savviest of the bunch that regularly install updates and new plugins)?

  3. John

    October 9th, 2007 at 12:45 am

    That’s pretty impressive. I’m an avid Photoshop user and I don’t think Adobe has released anything like this yet. Kudos to these guys, a small company beating the big boys to the punch…

  4. Koji Shinjo

    October 9th, 2007 at 1:04 am

    this is very cool photo editor.
    i am fairly certain that the day when we don’t need photoshop anymore will come.

  5. John Allsopp

    October 9th, 2007 at 1:07 am

    They also feature some far from recent (try stone age) thinking in marketing - using this “fun” tool to make some models breasts larger. Yay.

    Can we all grow the eff up now please?

    sigh

  6. Yohay

    October 9th, 2007 at 1:54 am

    A really cool tool indeed.

  7. Dji

    October 9th, 2007 at 3:01 am

    Really interesting tool.
    Will check it out. Big thanks for enlighting this kind of tools.

  8. iHero

    October 9th, 2007 at 3:05 am

    Good Stuff, Thanks.

  9. Allen Stern

    October 9th, 2007 at 4:33 am

    Poor Tara :)

  10. Dan Schawbel

    October 9th, 2007 at 6:13 am

    Thats really cool. Bush does kinda seem like a monkey.

  11. Fabian Schonholz

    October 9th, 2007 at 7:57 am

    Very cool.

    As I mentioned in several occasions, I was the VP of Technology at Pictage for 6 years. We built at the time - and continues to be somewhat so - a great image server that allowed you to do a bunch of things. It is indeed a very powerful tool. We never really surfaced even a 1/8th of the functionality. We built an Album Designer that combining the image server and AJAX on the front end, it is just awesome. But I wish we had something like this. It would have made things way easier and better.

    Good job guys.

  12. Anurag

    October 9th, 2007 at 8:41 am

    I’m very impressed with the wide-ranging sophistication of the technology behind this site, and the fact that it’s delivered through the browser for free makes it even better. The morph feature, the seam carving, and even the insert-a-face (which looks simple, but in fact is quite sophisticated) are all nice work indeed.

  13. phenom

    October 9th, 2007 at 8:51 am

    that is impressive. Nice work

    http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

  14. Joey

    October 9th, 2007 at 9:10 am

    LOL @ their marketing dept: I guess there’s no end to the products that can be sold by bigger breasts! Seriously though, impressive for a web based application.

  15. Steve Ballmer

    October 9th, 2007 at 9:19 am

    But have you tried MS cloud paint?

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  16. Sean Drofnats

    October 9th, 2007 at 9:30 am

    As Borat would say, WAWAWEEWA! Verrrry Niiiiice.

  17. Alex

    October 9th, 2007 at 10:03 am

    My favorite program for editing photos, hands down.

  18. Hongliu Li

    October 9th, 2007 at 10:22 am

    I would like to see how to use same approach for MyGrowUp.com user to edit their old photos

  19. Michael Lambie

    October 9th, 2007 at 10:39 am

    the social tools they offer are amazing. the ablility to work off albums off my friends facebook & myspace is incredible. i love it.

  20. Hornswaggled

    October 9th, 2007 at 11:06 am

    This is pretty cool. Thanks for linking to the videos as that really shows what can be done. Since I am apprehensive about even opening Photoshop this seems like its actually something the average person can do.

  21. Vijay Chakravarthy

    October 9th, 2007 at 12:17 pm

    Regarding Adobe, they have some of the brightest minds in the industry working on this. In fact, they even demoed some awesome functionality at adobe max:

    http://www.peterelst.com/blog/.....eak-peeks/

    Apart from the seam carving stuff, the other videos are pretty interesting as well..

  22. Ron

    October 9th, 2007 at 12:37 pm

    Great tool, but for morphing, I use http://www.morphthing.com. Love the resizer though.

  23. Charles

    October 9th, 2007 at 1:24 pm

    omg, this is awesome… gonna have so much fun playing with “insert-a-face”… facebook profile pic =D

  24. PhotographyVoter.com

    October 9th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    Most of the tools are for creating fun changes to photos, and users can easily pull and push photos to social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr. But it’s also a serious editing tool (it supports layers, for example).

  25. Toonerstan

    October 10th, 2007 at 11:27 am

    Since one of the inventors of seam carving joined Adobe and presumably has or will patent it, I wonder if FotoFlexer will face an Adobe cease and desist.

  26. Lauren

    October 12th, 2007 at 6:38 pm

    I really like FotoFlexer. I broke my foot last weekend just before an important event and I’ve been able to foto flex my splinted foot out of all the pictures taken from the event. Awesome.

  27. yummypii

    October 15th, 2007 at 2:02 am

    If seam carving is already published and in the public domain, I wonder if it is still patentable. Even if it is, I wonder how broad the patent will be. Why don’t Adobe buy/learn from Fotoflexer and be done with it? Save all the legal hassle and save Adobe from reinventing/re-implementing the wheel.

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