Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Did you know… (again)

Saturday, December 12th, 2009

.. that you can move the tool windows in Phixr? Just like any window, just grab it by its title bar, click and move.

movetoolwindow2 movetoolwindow1

Phixr vs. MySpace

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Just to let you know what’s going on developmentwise: We are in the process of implementing support for uploading and downloading photos to/from MySpace. The good news is that our code is ready and working. The bad news, however, is that MySpace’s new framework “OpenSocial 0.9″ (or rather their very own incarnation) is yet somewhat flaky as to especially user authentication sometimes working, sometimes not. We will observe their servers’ behavior for a few days and then decide on a release.

Tool of the day: Mix photos

Monday, December 7th, 2009

mix2 Today, we go for the Mix tool. This is actually quite powerful: Using this tool, you can make several photos into one. For example:

cheese+eiffeltower

In this simple example we worked with the cheese photo, selected the target region for the Eiffel Tower photo, activated the mix tool, selected the Eiffel Tower photo for mixing, set the opacity to 0:100 and executed. By varying the opacity and the blend mode, you can create sophisticated collages:

cheese+tower+moneyFor the “projection” of the dollar bill on the cheese, we used the “overlay” mixing mode. This actually works best if the background of the source image (here: the cheese) is white. The Eiffel Tower was mixed (mode: normal) with an opacity setting of 50:50.

Another application of this tool is merging photos. This involved a second tool, the “Add space” (or “grow canvas”) tool. We use it to add space to our first photo, into which we then mixed the second photo so that the photos don’t overlap:

cheese + tower aside

In other news, scientists finally found evidence of what we all already knew: The moon is made of cheese.

cheese + moon

Phixr Online Photo Editor

Did you know… (pt 1)

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

decorateToday, we decided to start a series of articles about Phixr’s features: Some of them are “buried” in the tool palette and not easily found and/or obvious. A good start is the “Decorate“-tool, symbolized by the “heart”. This tool pastes preset graphics or patterns into the photo in many different ways. A simple example is the following:

decorate with "one heart"What better way to say “I love cheese”? Here, we first selected the target region of the photo (just click into the photo, and move the mouse with the button clicked) and then mixed “One heart” into the photo, at 90% opacity. Simple, isn’t it. Here’s are two more samples, with “party hat” and “light bulb” respectively:

1000000_dollar_bill_phixr 1000000_dollar_bill_phixr(2)

I think you get the idea.

The “Decorate”-tool also has some stock images that are meant for the entire photo, not just a part of it. In the following two examples, we used the “Snow” and “Starglitter 3″ alternatives:

EiffelTowerSmall_phixr EiffelTowerSmall_phixr(2)

So, go ahead now, try it for yourself!

Phixr Online Photo Editor

Zeitgeist humor

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Why do bankers love golf?

Because you can play it even with handcuffs on.

Hehe.

Phixr vs. Facebook

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Did you know that Phixr is also available as a Facebook-app? It’s public profile page is here.

To be honest, it’s not really a Facebook app. Phixr’s interface is too big to fit into Facebook’s small working area, and re-sizing it would leave you with an unusable miniture. So we decided to integrate at least a part of Phixr into Facebook.  In essence, you can login, sign-up and select the photo to edit inside Facebook, the rest will be happening in a new window or tab.

BTW, if you like Phixr, we’d be grateful for a review (clicking on the stars does nicely, if you are lazy) or if you even became a fan. Not fishing here, really.

Twitter really rocks…

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

phixr’s visitors’ numbers. On one day alone, people sent 2132 twitter tweets through phixr. If we had expected that, we’d implemented that feature earlier…

BTW perhaps this new blog page (to which we transferred all our old blog posts from our old, slightly primitive blog page) will help gather the crowd. Hm. Phixr really lacks the social aspect. What if we added some sort of what’s-hot-and-what-not of phixr work…? Would that be appreciated by the masses?