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Got a great photo with with an unfortunate element -- an old boyfriend, for instance?

No problem. This technology will remove him and "fix" the background. It's called Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing. The video above shows how to create the photos you wish you had shot from the ones you actually did shoot.

Photo too wide or too narrow for that space you need to fill? It will identify the least important parts of the photo and convincingly remove or expand them. A beach scene can stretch or shrink in one direction without distorting anything. The software will fill in the blanks.

Much as this may enhance your personal slideshows, it's just not what the camera saw.

Photojournalists try to show reality, not distort it. Editors don't alter photos, except to balance color, brightness and esthetic qualities. The photo may be cropped, but not rearranged: You can't cut out the middle of a photo with interesting things happening at both sides and not much in the middle, which this technology makes easy -- and invisible.

It could alter accident scenes, add or remove people from compromising photos and wreak havoc with all sorts of photographic evidence and truth in advertising. ("How come my cabana is only two feet from the next one? I saw 20 feet of beach sand in every direction on your Web site!")

Watch the video. It's very convincing.

Tech Crunch reports that the co-inventor of this technology, Shai Avidan of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, who developed this with Ariel Shamir, started work at Adobe, maker of Photoshop, in Newton, Mass., last Monday.

The video was shown at the Siggraph 2007 conference in San Diego earlier this month.

Dial-up warning: Dr. Shamir's fascinating site is full of images that load slowly. The pdf of their paper on the technology isn't coming up easily either.

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