How to Use the Effects

This page has general informations about Picture to People online tools. Most of softwares have specific tips in their own pages and occasionally that particular informations can override these generic ones.

If you have more doubts or need some extra help, have a look at the Picture to People discussion group. If you can't find there an answer for your problem, post a question to get support.

To have the best experience using Picture to People site, please regard these important rules and tips presented below:

• You MUST configure your browser to accept Javascript. If you don't, you will not be able to use Picture to People online effects correctly.
• You MUST upload jpg files. For most P2P online softwares, other file formats will not be allowed. This format gives very small files in average and can be opened/saved in almost all graphic programs.
• There was a big effort to make this site work correctly in old browsers like Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7. It was a very boring and bothering task. People make Internet standards, but they are not followed, so software development is a mess. Furthermore, Picture to People site was thoroughly tested with Chrome and it works smoothly. All other not so popular browsers were not tested, so you can try to use them, but there is no guarantee P2P will work perfectly. It's also worthy to notice that Internet Explorer doesn't work correctly with some CSS features, so it's not a so suitable browser concerning P2P site appearance.
• Despite Firefox makes a better work than Internet Explorer concerning page rendering, some deep tests showed Firefox is very worse concerning the cache engine. Sometimes Firefox shows an old (cached) page/data even if it should refresh (request again) such page/data. This problem can affect Picture to People behavior in some specific situations. If you have this kind of problem using P2P with Firefox, consider disable Firefox cache (using "about:config") or use Internet Explorer.
• The "back" button of Firefox can have some bad consequences never seen in Internet Explorer (its very similar to the cache problem, but disable the cache doesn't solve it). Some strange behaviors concerning this can be solved with a simple explicit page refresh.
• Professional level Computer Graphics effects don't come easily. In general, P2P procedural effects are not very fast, because they need very time and memory intensive calculations, what is intrinsic to them. Usually they take from some seconds to kind of one or two minutes to be calculated, depending on the effect chosen and the input image.
• After you ask for an effect calculation, respect the warning message that says to you WAIT FOR THE RESULT. You probably will get your result in 1 or 2 minutes at most, so be patient. If you click the "back" button of the browser or refresh the page, you will lose your request and will need to start again.
• No input or output image is saved in server hard drive, what is a very important project decision concerning eficiency and security. For all effects, you will receive the result image in a simple empty page got from a stream, what makes possible to send the final image to you without recording it in file system. Catch the result image by copying it to clipboard for example (don't forget to paste it in your favorite free or commercial graphic software). After so, you can go to another P2P page by using the "back" button of the browser or your bookmarks.
• Concerning the text effects, you should know that a lot of fonts are not perfect, because they have wrong, lacking or inconsistent data in their original files. Some possible consequences are: 1) absence of lower case (or upper case) letters; 2) absence of some characters; 3) partial truncation of the first and/or the last letter of a text. If you get some strange result using a font, very probably it's not a P2P error. Try the same effect with some other fonts and probably you will have a correct result.
• There are rules concerning the maximum size of the input images. The reason is very simple: avoid processing overhead in server caused by just some few requests. This way, everyone will be able to use the effects without harming the other users.
• Uploaded photos can be at most 1200x1200 pixels for most P2P softwares (despite some effects can accept bigger sizes). Any image with more than 1200 pixels in width OR height will be refused and the effect will not be calculated.
• Uploaded images to be used as patterns can be at most 400x400 pixels. This size is not big, but there is a good reason for that. Since you can upload any weird image to be processed, keep its size not large helps to avoid some bad behaviors for some effects that don't converge in some situations.
• The maximum upload size is 200KB. It's needed to control the individual traffic, so everybody will be able to use the P2P project. This size seems small, but it's pretty enough. Almost always a file of a photo with 1200x1200 pixels in jpg format is smaller than 200KB. Anyway, if you need, increase the compression level of your jpg software before saving the photo to upload.
• The bigger the image you use as input for an effect, the more time its calculation will last. Don't use large images (photos) if you don't need they large.
• Several text effects don't work well with some kinds of fonts or some sizes. Anyway, every available font can be used at least with some effects giving good results. You need to use the effects to understand their behavior and find the effect-font combinations you like most. As an example, there are some effects that simply don't work with thin typographical styles (the reasons involve a lot of Math). When it's the case, be sure to choose a thick font face to get better results.
• One easy, understandable and still useful way to change the final result of an effect is to make some smart preprocessing of the input photo. Changes in bright, contrast and histogram, for example, are very simple to get and can improve drastically the final result depending on the chosen effect and the result you are looking for. The more you use the effects, the more confortable you get about what you need to make to achieve the result you want.
• Uploaded pattern images should be black and white. If you send a gray of colorful image, it will be accepted and preprocessed by P2P libraries. Anyway, if you wanna have some control about the result (choosing the threshold for black and white transformation), you should change your image to black and white before submition.
• Sometimes you can get very nice and unexpected results mixing individual effects. Think about using the output image of an effect as the input image for another one if you feel it could give you a beautiful art. It's always interesting to use the imagination and try something new.