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Picture to People Blog
Here you get informations, tips, tricks and all kind of informal news about Picture to People project researches, developments, evolutions, tools and uses.
If you wanna know what is going on concerning P2P, keep following this blog and reading its posts.
A new professional Text Generator is coming
After some months of very hard work, the Picture to People graphic libraries were improved and received some new infrastructure it didn't have before. The preliminary tests were very positive and now, using this new low level software, a new text generator is been developed. It's not procedural like the effects you can use in "Text Effects" section.
Until now, you just would be able to make many kinds of artistic texts using the most expensive desktop graphic softwares in the market.This new Picture to People tool should bring to users a big variety of new, last generation, professional text effects. It will be possible use its professional text effects with any True Type font.
Keep following Picture to People project, because this new, powerful, text generation tool will be released in some weeks.
Picture to People: more than 500,000 visits!
According to Site Meter, Picture to People site already had more than 500,000 visits. The counter is at bottom left of each page. It's real counting, because each Picture to People server request runs a request to Site Meter server too.
Thanks for visiting the site and using Picture to People tools. I hope they can always be useful to you, no matter if you work with graphics very often or not.
Keep up with Picture to People project: use the site, read the blog, join the discussion group. This project has professional quality and it's free. You can help giving to Picture to People a link in your blog/site, or with a positive comment in a forum or in your blog. Be sure I'm working hard to release new beautiful and useful graphic tools to you.
Transforming photos in stone
A tool to make your photos look like stone was released.
Most of carving effects can be easily done are far from realistic. If you are bored with the old simple non-realistic carving filters, probably you will like this.
Despite the feature tries to be realistic, it also tries to preserve as much as possible the original space and color informations. These properties make this effect very suitable to photos.
Try it in "Photo Stone" section. There are four styles to you choose from.
Drawing text with liquid
Now Picture to People has a powerful tool to create any kind of liquid text over an image. You can easily get very impressive results even uploading an image with a flat color.
It has a very high configuration level and brings a new concept concerning digital art: every output is virtually unique. Behind this feature is a very powerful randomizer, so, once you run the engine, nobody will get a result exactly as yours. It's like a real liquid that never repeats itself exactly the same way.
The input font can be distorted in a vector based way to improve the realistic appearance of the liquid. This distortion can go from a rounding of sharp corners to a much more advanced "liquifying".
Picture to People vector drawing library
If you are a software developer or are just curious, you could like to see how Picture to People is inside. Feel invited to know how our Computer Graphics software is constructed on a solid basis visiting the page about Maccala.
There you can see a lot of examples about what the library is able to do. Each image has proper comments about what is relevant or interesting. Some features are not easy to find in vector based libraries, free or comercial, mainly when made from scratch.
You can give suggestions about the next library features. You just need to join the Picture to People discussion group and start posting.
More than 200,000 visitors to Picture to People
Picture to People already had more than 200,000 visitors. You can see the counter at bottom left of each page.
Thanks for visiting and using Picture to People. We proudly offer free Computer Graphics tools to everyone able to access the Internet. If you can, give us a link in your site or blog, so maybe we can achieve even more people.
We are working very hard and some nice tools are under development right now. As always, some exclusive algorithms are been created to bring you the best on Computer Graphics.
Picture to People discussion group
It was just created a group to Picture to People project. Google was choosen because it offers some nice features.
There you can:
- Tell about your experience using the project;
- Call for help;
- Know about relevant anouncements;
- Ask for new features;
- Suggest new tools;
- Discuss about algorithms and software developement, since related to Computer Graphics.
As you can see, it will work like a mix of forum, rss, ... So It can be worthy if you join. It's your chance to say something. The group is here: http://groups.google.com/group/picturetopeople.
Real Pencil, second version
The realistic pencil drawing engine from photos was released in its second version some days ago.
Now there are 4 plain (gray) pencil effects and 3 colorful effects. When you have a photo with a big amount of midtones, usually a colorful effect gives better results (unless you make some smart color preprocessing of your photo).
Sometimes a lack of details in the output drawing can prevent you from achieving the result you want. In this second version, Real Pencil has a very conservative pencil effect (the style 6 one) able to tackle very detailed photos.
Transforming photos in pencil drawings
Now Picture to People has a new and powerful tool to transform photos in pencil drawings. It is named "Real Pencil".
Despite the other P2P effects to create pencil drawings, colorful drawings and paintings from photos, this one is different. It's totally vector based and its renderer makes complicated calculations to generate thousands of delicated strokes.
The more important point is all Real Pencil calculations are made trying to draw the strokes in a very similar way to the style used by many human people.
Just a good tip: if you prefer clear, soft pencil drawings, possibly you will need to ajust the bright of your input photos before applying Real Pencil effects.
New header to Picture to People site
Some users had given a feedback telling the site is very beautiful and functional, but the header was not so nice.
Some days ago Picture to People site has received a new header. It is not so simple, more modern and uses an effect from the site itself.
I hope now the top banner is good enough compared to the rest of site.
By the way, Picture to People already got over than 150,000 hits. Thank you for using it and be sure new Computer Graphics effects are under research for you.
Artistic vexel renderer, second version
The vexel renderer to create artistic drawings has just reached its second version.
The algorithm behind this renderer is VERY complex, so many times it's very hard to fix the found bugs. This task can take days or even weeks, because it can be too difficult to understand the reason of a bug.
The artistic vexel renderer was already working, but several minor bugs were removed. Now this tool is more precise and robust, helping to create drawings that are more similar to the input photos.
Artistic vexel renderer released
A very innovative and useful tool is now online in Picture to People site.
Using the just released artistic vexel renderer, you can transform your favorite photos in a large variety of stylistic drawings. There are many choices, since this tool is highly configurable.
All this power has a price. This functionality is not so trivial as it's usual in P2P site. At least while there is no tutorial for it, you will need to spend some time trying the many possibilities until you feel confortable with all offered options.
Artistic vexel renderer preliminar examples
Currently Picture to People tool to make artistic vexel drawings from photos is under development.
Its power is very high, since it has several freedom degrees. There is a going study to decide what it's the best way to present it to the final user.
This blog is not used to show outputs from unreleased tools, but there is a increasing amount of preliminar results concerning the artistic vexel renderer here.
Picture to People site: over than 100,000 visits
According to Site Meter, Picture to People site already had more than 100,000 visits. You can see the counter at bottom left of each page. It's not an estimate, since the site runs a source code directly from Site Meter.
It's a very good mark, since Picture to People is a baby site (it's online just since December 2008). As the time goes, probably the visits number will increase faster, because an uncountable number of tools and features will be released in the site yet.
A lot of thanks for visiting and be sure that some new and very advanced graphic tools are under research to let you get really nice graphics with very few effort.
Artistic vexel drawing from photos
Now there is a very important and exciting Picture to People sub-project under development. Since P2P vector based low level libraries already are really stable and powerful, it's time to tackle a new and hard challenge: develop a never seen, higher level, vexel based, rendering engine with data extracted from photographs.
The focus is about getting a very flexible (configurable) tool, able to make very artistic and innovative drawings, but without lose the most important informations from input photos.
Just after doing this, Picture to People libraries will be taken to an even higher level: be able to make vector based drawings with directed field warping and arbitrary multi-level alpha.
Picture to People vexel renderer
Picture to People site now has a vexel renderer. It's configurable and have 3 shape/color levels and 3 line levels. If you prefer, you can use no lines at all. Using this renderer you can transform a photo in a nice "artifical looking" draw, always keeping the main information from the original image.
This tool uses a different interface style, where you have, in the same page, an example of all possible configurations. Like most Picture to People graphic tools, you can also change the renderer outputs preprocessing the input photos. Another good idea is to use the vexel renderer and other effects together to achieve new and different results.
Possibly more vexel tools will be added to Picture to People in future.
New Picture to People tutorials
Picture to People tutorial list is getting bigger. There you can already learn about several interesting points of the software and how to use it better.
Generally speaking, the already released tutorials cover the following subjects:
- Using pattern effects to draw useful pieces of art like a smoke column or a realistic cloud;
- Getting the best rendered texts using text effects and/or pattern effects;
- Tricks for the best results when using not so obvious photo effects like the pencil sketch one;
- Good uses of the palette generator;
- Using photo effects and the image editor to get very different results starting from text effects.
You can also suggest subjects for new tutorials contacting us at picturetopeople@gmail.com.
Changes in main page
Picture to People site now has an improved main page. It's a evolution planned more than 3 weeks ago.
Now its appearence is more modern and makes the overall layout not so simple.
More important than the looking itself, now the first page shows a little bit about what you can do using Picture to People tools.
Computer Graphics tutorials
Now Picture to People site has a "Tutorials" part in left side main menu. This section already started with two articles.
Each tutorial intend to show you how to get a nice result or how to make things better with P2P tools.
Every survey written will get a post here, so you will know easily what's new about that.
New tool for palette generation
Using Picture to People now you can create a complete palette from an input color. It's done by ranging a suitable value concerning the original color like saturation or brightness.
The palette can be used to find colors that make a good combination with your "pivot" color. It's very usefull, for example, to help deciding what colors to use together in software interfaces.
You can range one of the following color values to get a palette:
- Red Channel;
- Green Channel;
- Blue Channel;
- Brightness;
- Saturation;
- Hue.
You will find the Palette Generator in the Colors section of the left side main menu.
New tool to convert colors
Now Picture to People has a tool for color conversion among the more important color spaces.
The conversion is made automatically from a color model to all others, and you see all the results together. This way, it's possible to make interesting comparisons among the different color representations and learn a lot about these models.
Here you have a list of the supported color spaces:
- RGB (Red Green Blue);
- CMY (Ciano Magenta Yellow);
- HSB (Hue Saturation Brightness);
- HSV (Hue Saturation Value);
- HSI (Hue Saturation Intensity);
- HSL (Hue Saturation Lightness);
- YIQ (Luma In-phase Quadrature);
- YUV (Luma Chrominance(U) Chrominance(V));
- YCbCr 1:1:1 (Luma Blue-Luma Red-Luma);
- CIE 1931 (X Y Z).
By the way, there is a new section called "Colors" in the left side main menu. There you can find a link to the Color Converter, and there are another color tool in development.
The more used effects
Now, in the right side bar of Picture to People site, you can see a list of the more used photo effects and text effects.
Clicking any of the small images in the side bar, you go to a page with better examples of these top effects.
In top text effects page, in addition to the example images, you can find simple tips and explanations on a smart use of these effects.
Improving site organization
The original idea was publish just hard to get Computer Graphics effects. Since Picture to People site got online, users have been asking for "common" graphic utilities like bright, contrast, reduction, mirror and crop.
I already started releasing this kind of functionality and much more will come. Anyway, there are several kind of graphic tools online and a certain restructuring was needed to make it clear. I want to keep separated different stuff.
Now the uncommon effects more suitable for photos are in the "Photo Effects" section and the simple utilities useful for any image are in the "Image Editor" section.
New year, new blog!
It's the first post of the new Picture to People project's blog.
I will keep the old blog for personal posting, but I'm glad now even the blog is under the same address (picturetopeople.org).
I will try to keep this blog as clean, soft and light as I can.
Be welcome and I hope you come back soon (and always) to know the news about P2P free tools.
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