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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  06/16/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  05/31/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  05/15/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  05/04/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  04/19/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  04/06/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  02/10/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  02/08/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  01/29/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  01/28/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  01/17/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  01/04/2009 ]

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.

[ Posted by Leonardo  -  01/02/2009 ]