A system and method for expansion and reduction of images uses pyramidal retargeting to reduce complexity in image resizing. An image pyramid may be generated dependent on a function of pixel data or energy values for each pixel of an input image. An image resizing solution may be developed by applying seam carving techniques to a lower-resolution version of the input image represented by the image pyramid, and may identify bands in the higher-resolution input image to be resized. A resizing operation may then be applied the bands based on local content. The resizing operation may include seam carving techniques, scaling techniques, and/or hybrid resizing techniques, and may be selectable by a user. Identified bands may be expanded to obtain a smoother solution. Different bands may be expanded by different amounts, based on local content. The number of bands and the expansion factors may be configurable based on user input.