• Zoom blur can fade out color towards the corners (along with fading into black);
• there is a new b&w vignette (along with a blurred one) in Camera & Lens tools;
• all objects in the Decorate tool can be desaturated (ie made b&w);
• the b&w tool inside Color tools now supports three ways of desaturating a photo;
• in Camera & Lens tools, the masks’ background can now not only be monotonized, but also desaturated. Also, we added two new masks (circles, one blurred, one sharp).

Zoom blur with fading to b&w

Blurred vignette

On the blablatechbabble front, we made phixr once more faster. This time, we’ll simply save you the details.

PS: If you find bugs in Phixr, we’d be grateful if you posted them here or on our Facebook page. Thanks!

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• The Crop tool is now enhanced. It has a couple of presets which allow you to crop parts of a certain aspect ratio. Also, Phixr can resize (scale) the photo immediately after cropping, without using the Resize tool. This way you can create avatars or icons in a single step.
• The aspect ratio of the selection can be locked. This is especially useful in connection with the enhanced Crop tool. You can move and resize the selection without losing its current aspect ratio.
• Phixr can now resize photos on-the-fly when e-mailing them. Do not be afraid: The original remains untouched. Only the photo actually sent is resized.
• Phixr can now upload photos to Snapfish, Tumblr, Cosco (welcome back), PictureTrail and a few more. Buzznet removed their upload facility, so we ditched them. Fotolog changed their way to upload photos, and we adapted to this now.
• Uploading to Facebook and flickr is now up to 30% faster. SmugMug access is now up to 50% faster.
• Phixr is now all UTF-8. All file names, album names etc. work correctly if they contain UTF-8 characters. Also, Phixr handles file names correctly when uploading (some of the third party services do not like non-ASCII characters in their album or file names).

Back to work…

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Warholize

• The old “zoom tool”, which in fact wasn’t really a tool, has been relocated and is now found in the corner of the photo area:

Relocate zoom button

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Yes, it has been a bit quiet here recently as you might have noticed.

No, we have not spent the last 7 weeks on the beach.

In fact, we have been very busy working on Phixr and changed a lot of stuff “under the hood” to make Phixr faster and better. But most of that stuff isn’t blog material really (or is anyone interested in the fact that we reduced database access by 25%?).

A few of the presentable changes of the last weeks include:

• Text with transparency and shadows: The “Add text” tool got a few new features. You can now add shadows to your text and select a level of transparency for your text:

Text with shadow

Nearly transparent text (with shadow)

• 2-colored vignette: Another nice effect is the new vignette. It uses two colors and can make an awesome photo even more awesome:

The two-colored vignette

• Lots of new greeting cards: Phixr has now more than 30 greeting card templates for various occasions:

A greeting card for Halloween

A greeting card for Thanksgiving

• Lots of new decorations: Most of them are holiday-specific and therefore only accessible around these holidays (holders of permanent accounts can make them visible anytime):

Soccer decorations

Sketch decoration

Rainbow border decoration

• Last, but not least: Phixr can now handle six photos at a time, instead of three.

That’s a wrap. Have fun folks!

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From now on, the Spanish version is found at http://es.phixr.com and the German one at http://de.phixr.com.

In the process we unfortunately had to disconnect all users of phixr in Spanish and German from Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket and Picasa Web Albums.

Our appologies.

In other news, we adopted Facebook’s new authentication scheme. Don’t get shocked – for Phixr to provide all its previous services, it needs all those permissions and intends no harm. For the privacy interested, here’s what we do:

“Access my public information“: Phixr only uses your name in case you tag yourself in a photo, and the list of your friends. No other information is accessed or used.

“Post to my Wall“: As dangerous as this might sound, in fact, this is only needed to upload photos to your albums. Phixr does not “post” anything “to your wall”.

“Access my photos and videos“: This is for allowing Phixr to download your photos from Facebook, including photo tags. Phixr does not even touch your videos.

“Access my friends’ information“: This is for accessing (speak: reading) photo tags in your photos, targeting your friends, and for being able to download your friends’ photos. No other action is performed.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to comment to this post.

Again, sorry for the hiccups earlier today.

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Last week we added some little helpers for easy and quick first aid: Auto-whitebalance, auto-contrast, color enhancement, equalize. And a fun one: Invert brightness. All of them are Color effect tools.

Auto-whitebalance tries to detect unwanted or unnatural color tints and removes them. Auto-contrast carefully lifts the contrast to a mathematical maximum. Color enhance increases the saturation range of the colors, without altering brightness or hue. Use this one with care, it can easily over-do the colors (such as in the sample below). Equalize takes care that every brightness level in the photo is represented in the same amount of all other brightness level. Invert brightness … well, it inverts the pixels’ brightness (unlike the Invert tool, which inverts the colors). This tool can make people look really funny, but also mercilessly shows image defects caused by lossy compression such as JPG (look at the man’s teeth in the sample below).

Here are the usual samples:

Auto-whitebalance

Auto-contrast

Color enhance

Invert brightness

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We wish you all a happy Easter!

Easter 2010

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Here’s the usual sample:

Happy Mother's Day!

As said, more to come, so stay tuned.

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Starting today, you can edit your friends’ photos, not just your own.

• Browse your friends, their albums and their photos,
• phix your friends’ profile photos.

As regards profile photos, Facebook only allows accessing small versions (max 200 pixels in width) directly. However, you can download the original photo in your friend’s “Profile pictures” album.

If you don’t want your friends to play with your photos, you can disable access to them in your Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites on Facebook.

Happy phixing!

PS: Of course, you cannot upload photos to your friends’ albums.

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We are planning to add extra features for other events or holidays, too. Easter and Halloween are partly done, others are in the works. Holders of permanent accounts will have access to these specials anytime (selectable in Settings). For temporary accounts, folks will have to wait. Specials will generally be enabled a few weeks in advance.

Enjoy.

St. Patrick's Day 2010

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