.. that you can move the tool windows in Phixr? Just like any window, just grab it by its title bar, click and move.
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Did you know… (again)
December 12th, 2009Phixr vs. MySpace
December 10th, 2009Just 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.
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Tool of the day: Mix photos
December 7th, 2009
Today, we go for the Mix tool. This is actually quite powerful: Using this tool, you can make several photos into one. For example:
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:
For 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:
In other news, scientists finally found evidence of what we all already knew: The moon is made of cheese.
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Did you know… (pt 1)
December 5th, 2009
Today, 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:
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:
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:
So, go ahead now, try it for yourself!
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Recovered from translation paralysis
December 1st, 2009Finally the new versions are officially on-air. The Chinese version is completely translated (the expected exception is the help page … anyone?), the Japanese is almost finished and requires a close review for typos and grammar. Many thanks to Vivian and Shiny for their help.
While we were at it, we also updated the English, German and Spanish pages as well. The site now loads much faster (thanks to compression and some other neat tricks), and the “mix photos” feature has received some long needed attention; you can now scale the second photo into the first one, or the selected area.
Any ideas for further improvements?
PS: Please stop spamming us. No chance that such “comments” come through.
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Lost in translation
November 24th, 2009Sorry for the quiet, people… we’re all busy with the translations (and other necessary code changes).
For the Chinese and Japanese among us, we uploaded a pre-release version, with incomplete (and probably partly yet incorrect) translations to http://cn.phixr.com (simplified), http://tw.phixr.com (traditional) and http://jp.phixr.com (Japanese). Signup is disabled for the moment, so you can only work with temporary accounts. These sites also give a sneak preview on updates coming up on the .com, .es and .de sites.
If there is anyone out there who can support us with especially the Japanese version (our translator is very busy… hence slow, and google is below our standards…), we’d be grateful. Just comment on this post if you can help.
We hope we can officially launch these sites on Dec 1.
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Zeitgeist humor
October 22nd, 2009Why do bankers love golf?
Because you can play it even with handcuffs on.
Hehe.
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Mixin’ time
October 14th, 2009Yesterday we were bored. Terribly bored. Until someone had the idea to check out MySpace for their members’ current in-stuff. A few minutes later, we added some more images to the “Mix with preset images”-tool. Folks, now you can finally create those neat “glittering” graphics using Phixr. These seem to be extremely popular among the MySpace crowd.
While we were at it, we also added a “mode”-selector to both of the “Mix” tools. The different modes (not every one looks good in all situations) allow a bunch of new effects. Here’s one using “Dodge” mode.
And here’s another one. The same image mixed twice, each time using a different “Copy XXX channel” mode:
Erm, now there’s one more thing. We accidently dumped the “Position”-selector in the “Mix with other Photo” tool. This must have happened shortly before the relaunch. Well, long story short, it’s back. Sorrrry.
Finally, we have a 中文(简体) version of Phixr in the pipeline. The translation is in progress.
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Phixr vs. Facebook
October 11th, 2009Did 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.
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Twitter really rocks…
October 6th, 2009phixr’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?
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