Picture to People

What is going on behind the scenes

2017-10-15T17:34:00.003-02:00

It has been a while since I have posted here. I have been very busy, because it's hard to escape of a very difficult situation.

What I can say is that I'm looking for new models and operation styles for my project, so Picture to People could naturally get funds to stay online and evolve fast. The failed crowdfunding campaign was a horrible experience and I don't want to pass through something similar again. On the other hand, I don't want to give up a so cool project that already took me thousands and thousands of hours over the years.

In future, I intend to offer a better site along with new outstanding features, but P2P will be focused on subscribers, that is, people who support the project and help it to be healthy.

I didn't decide yet if there will be absolutely free apps and tools as the ones that Picture to People offers nowadays. To be honest, currently I have no motivation to keep free graphic design tools online, because the failed campaign was very devastating. It has shown to me how our millions of users are really selfish.

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New cool UI feature

2017-07-20T00:05:00.000-03:00

Now Picture to People has a cool output page that is shown when you click the "Generate" button from one of our online design apps. This page is responsive, so it works well in any device and any resolution.

It offers a nice way to show the images and effects you create. It also has a handy way to download each image you have just generated.

This new feature is not compatible with the old implementation using HTTP streams, so if you have used Picture to People recently, you must clean your browser cache.

As a bonus feature, each time this page loads, it shows at bottom several suggestions of very popular online graphic apps. They are used by thousands of people daily, so you could like to try them out too.

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Counting in statistics of a massive cyber attack

2017-05-13T21:38:00.001-03:00

Picture to People site was attacked yesterday, just like thousands of sites around the world (including many big companies sites). The host server software was deeply damaged, including the OS, so our site stopped working correctly. No harm was caused to users, except an offline P2P site.

Almost miraculously, after hours of a very hard troubleshooting, we were able to set up P2P site precariously online for a while. After that, we started working to make a real site recovery that can last days or weeks. During this time, outages can happen anytime for hours or days. Until everything is really solved, the site can apparently load, but occasionally any page can fail in any strange way.

We also need to be sure we got rid of the OS vulnerability that attackers exploited.

When P2P site gets more protected and fully functional again, we will notify on our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Picture-to-People-105265599561619/

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After a failed crowdfunding campaign

2017-05-04T21:39:00.002-03:00

The crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for Picture to People project ended almost two weeks ago.

I can tell this campaign was a complete fail, because it was unable to raise any relevant amount of money to keep Picture to People project online. Picture to People became too big, so it needs a big investment. If a small part of our millions of users had donated $1, the project would be safe for 2 or 3 years.

I keep facing a big list of pending problems to solve:

Pay for expensive servers that Picture to People demands at least for a year. If the number of users keeps increasing, we intend also to be able to make at least one server upgrade;
Create a pure CSS, simple, cross-browser and responsive site template suitable to Picture to People needs, with fixed and flowing parts (couldn't find one as we want);
Redesign and recode our interface components to be more reusable, responsive and match the new site template;
Completely rewrite all our Javascript pieces of code, making them more reusable, more scalable and more encapsulated;
Rewrite all hundreds of site pages according to the new template, new Javascripts and new interface components;
Fix the issue of ids collision in pages with multiple color components;
Create a flexible scheme for lazy media loading that is design friendly;
Modify content and presentation of many pages to make them faster to load.
Rewrite our HTTP connector (back-end) to include more features like sessions, result page generation, etc;
Create a more modular and extensible architecture of input and output filters to our request processing pipeline;
Develop an automated procedure to optimize to the extreme thousands of images used in the site;
Improve, extend and optimize our inter-process pipe implementation;
Investigate thoroughly and try to solve the problem of intermittent mysterious Apache crashes.

One thing I know for sure: I will never have again the same excitement to develop free tools for user that turned their back on me.

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Picture to People crowdfunding

2017-03-22T19:52:00.001-03:00

Picture to People is at risk of getting permanently offline due to lack of resources. Visit our crowdfunding campaign launched on a secure and reliable platform. There you will know better the perks you can get by making a donation.

We really would like to receive donations via PayPal, but we couldn't make it work. To receive donations directly through PayPal in our country, it's needed to have a registered company or a registered non-profit organization.

We decided to run our campaign on indiegogo.com. It's the world's second biggest crowdfunding platform and it's trusted by thousands of projects and millions of donators around the globe (currently they have almost 500,000 fans on Facebook). Indiegogo site communication is protected with HTTPS (encryption) and they use an enterprise class platform to process credit card transactions.

Moreover, Indiegogo have some useful advantages:
- Indiegogo's fees are much lower than PayPal ones, so Picture to People project can get a larger part of the raised funds;
- Indiegogo makes easy contacting donators, so we can handle the problem of delivering the perks.

Please make a donation before it's too late.

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Google PageSpeed Insights can degrade image quality

2017-01-16T17:28:00.001-02:00

I'm really very tired of being a slave of Google dictations about what is a good site and what is good content. However, there is no way to deny that most sites depend on Google search engine results to become known to computer and mobile users.

Anyway, Google gets more and more arrogant as time goes. Since some time ago, they have a tool called "PageSpeed Insights". Despite the name makes it seem like an advisory report generator, probably someday, if a site doesn't reach good results, it can be penalized in search engine. It already happened with their tool to test if a site is "mobile friendly". From advisory to slavery. They really decided to dictate what is good or bad in internet. Let the user choose is not good enough for them.

I don't like Google playing God, but the situation becomes unbearable when they make things with wrong premises or technical flaws. Their PageSpeed Insights tests any site page and can give you the "right answer", so you can get a good score. In other words, this tool lets you download the optimized resources from the tested page, so you can use them "as they should be" to deliver a fast page.

In the Picture to People case, for most JPG images, the only way to make PageSpeed Insights satisfied about the images size is using the images it "optimizes" by itself. I have made many tests and no "non-destructive" optimization was good enough to PageSpeed Insights.

PageSpeed Insights decreased the JPG quality of my images (increasing the lossy compression rate), but usually it's negligible just for regular (high entropy) photos. For my JPG images that are not regular photos, Google "dummy optimization" generated visible graphic artifacts (noise), degrading visual quality. Saving these images as PNG files is not an option, because JPG format generates much smaller files, even when using a small (non visible) quality loss as I made to publish them at the site.

Saying it another way, many Picture to People pages will just get a high score from PageSpeed Insights if I use poor quality images. It's not reasonable and Google should immediately fix this. They can optimize images as they want, but they NEVER can decrease original image quality based on general naive assumptions. It can just create a poorer and uglier web.

Below I show you three examples. First you see the original image, after the same image visually corrupted by PageSpeed Insights (click an image to see it full-size). Maybe the problem is not strong in your monitor, but it can be annoying in many ones.

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Text effect tutorials (43)

2017-01-10T13:34:00.000-02:00

I invite you to see some more text effect tutorials I have posted at the blog about how to create text logos online. This blog presents tips and tricks to design hundreds of cool text logos.

- a cookie text effect logo online;
- a realistic icy text logo effect;
- a led lamps text effect logo.

Below you see the text logos you get by following the listed tutorials.

Picture to People offers thousands of cool logo makers. See by yourself at the online logo generators page.

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Torn paper text logo generator online

2016-12-30T18:36:00.001-02:00

Since a small time ago, Picture to People site offers an text generator to make torn paper text effects. We already had several paper logo generators online, like for example: 3D paper text logos, burning paper text logos and folded paper text effects, and now there is even one more.

This Torn Paper Text Effect Creator costed me some very hard work, because it was difficult to implement a generic procedural way to render the torn paper borders needed to make the effect realistic. The solution I found was a kind of "stacked fractal".

There also is the option of producing text effects with transparent background. In this case, the paper effect creator returns a graphic as a semi-transparent PNG image file. See below a sample of paper text logo designed by using this new online logo generator app.

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Photo to graffiti online

2016-12-19T23:09:00.002-02:00

If you love graffiti art, probably you will like to know that Picture to People offers a nice photo effect editor related to this subject.

By using the Photo Graffiti Effect Editor you can create graffiti paintings from regular photos. You can even produce several gradient effects that are seen in some kind of graffiti designs.

Below you can see a simple example. There are several graffiti drawing styles and other interesting configuration options. By setting them up wisely, you can transform virtually any photo into a beautiful graffiti.

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Turn photo into sketch online

2016-12-05T22:39:00.000-02:00

After a lot of research, I could finally develop a new sketch photo effect editor. It brought to Picture to People project a completely new level of non-realistic drawing photo editor.

With this photo sketch generator, each drawing is made of thousands of even millions of individual strokes, but they are chosen and rendered in much more intelligent and coherent ways, making possible a higher preservation of original fine details.

Moreover, this photo sketch algorithm has several important freedom degrees, so its interface has a lot of useful and interesting design parameters. This can help users to get artistic styles like made by using pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel, charcoal, crayon, chalk, etc.

As a bonus feature, I added options to customize background and strokes colors, what helps to increase the plethora of available design effects.

By using this photo sketch maker, it's possible to produce, in a few seconds, pencil drawings that look carefully drawn by talented artists. Below you see a drawing created with this professional Photo to Pencil Sketch Converter Online.

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Colorful photo sketcher online

2016-10-22T15:04:00.000-02:00

The second photo sketch maker I created to Picture to People project was based on other algorithm I researched myself.

After this development, it became possible to create colorful sketches from photos in a few seconds. Each final drawing is made of thousands or even millions of individual strokes. Each stroke is chosen based on local image properties and not set randomly.

To offer more stylized options, some color sketch styles have an interesting mix of colored and gray strokes. Besides, there is a special algorithm that takes care of drawing relevant contours.

I inserted in such algorithms the possibility to use the "smart strokes" technology. Based on the results from my test images, it seemed the right thing to do. Now I know it's a "dangerous" options for colorful images, because it can cause an unwelcome oversaturation in many cases. Anyway, you always have the option of disabling this feature.

Despite at that time my researches about non-realistic image rendering were just beginning, for sure this photo to color sketch effect was an important advance. Its development gave me new knowledge and insights to keep creating new algorithms. Besides, usually you don't see good quality procedural colored photo sketch effects out there. They usually just cheat using layer blending with textures, but it can generate poor results because of the low coherence with the line and color flow from original photo.

Now you see a sample of colorful sketch effect created online by using the Color Sketch Photo Editor.

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Photo sketcher online

2016-10-10T21:43:00.000-03:00

The first Picture to People sketch effect generator was published online some years ago, and it was a big success. A few time after its release, it started receiving thousands of page views per week.

In my opinion, at that time it brought several innovative and advanced features, and some of them are amazing until current days, as for example:
- you can produce fast wild sketches or smart clean drawings from your photos by using the same photo app;
- each drawing is made of thousands of unique pencil strokes drawn individually and selected based on information extracted from the input photo. In other words, it's a really procedural sketch effect, and each image produces a different drawing. It's not a pseudo-effect always based on the same texture or pattern;
- you can choose between drawing styles with thick strokes or delicate small strokes;
- the designed sketch effects really look like drawings made by human hands.

Despite the cool features just cited, it's also worthy to mention that you can choose the paper and pencil color, what can be very useful in many situations. You can even use a feature I invented that time called "smart strokes" that can, in many cases, design an improved drawing.

Below I show you a photo and a sketch effect designed by using our first Photo Sketch Creator.

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Text effect tutorials (42)

2016-09-15T16:21:00.000-03:00

In this post I present some text effects that I discussed about at the Text Effect Logo Tutorials blog. I hope some of them can be useful for you.

- a stylized happy new year text logo effect;
- a hot speed text logo effect;
- a dug stylized garden text effect logo.

These tutorials help you to design the logo effects shown next.

Generate top class text effects for your banners, titles, headers or whatever you want at the best online text logo makers.

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Love text logo effect maker online

2016-08-20T22:03:00.000-03:00

By using Picture to People, you can easily create a text logo about love, romance, passion, couple, wedding or anything related.

Our Romance Text Logo Creators offer a cool control over lights and colors, and you can produce a beautiful glow or 3D love text effect.

There are more than 450 font faces to choose, so for sure you can find a very beautiful font style to fit your needs. This app is perfect to celebrate a relationship date or Valentine's Day.

To inspire you, below I show a cute love text logo created with our 3d passion logo effect software.

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Online polaroid photo effect generator

2016-08-10T14:33:00.000-03:00

It has been a long time I intend to create a polaroid photo effect. It's a popular effect, many users already asked for it and most generators or tutorials of this subject don't show inspiring results.

Finally I could find some time to develop it, and I think the work was worthy. This new photo editor creates beautiful polaroids and has useful design configuration options.

Among the cool features of this online photo polaroid effect are:
- optional photo improvement;
- great control of color configuration;
- one or two optional lines of text at the label border;
- labels with handmade styles to improve realism;
- several shadow configuration options, generating many paper layout styles;
- shadows adapts to input photo size;
- optional transparent background;
- result image obeys real polaroid proportions.

Below I show you a polaroid effect created by using Picture to People Online Polaroid Effect Photo Editor.

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Responsive web site development

2016-07-31T14:37:00.000-03:00

I decided to make Picture to People site responsive. It's really a very painful task as usual for any web development job.

Despite Picture to People site is narrow to be easily used in mobiles, I know P2P project deserves a new site layout that looks more beautiful and professional according to dominant market concepts. So, there is no sense on creating a new site template and don't solve the responsiveness problem once for all.

After reading about many responsive frameworks, templates, grid systems, libraries and boilerplate implementations, I could see a lot of things that most of these solutions have, but I don't want, like for example:
- depend on development pipelines that use intermediate tools like LESS, Sass or whatever (even because these tools can depend on other tools like Node.js);
- use Javascript libraries, mainly external ones (like JQuery);
- use CSS 3 features, because they don't work on old browsers;
- use HTML 5 features, because they don't work on old browsers;
- have a lot of work to port my customized interface components to the chosen solution.

Besides, after making some tests with some responsive templates (from frameworks or not), I could see that none I could find adapts immediately to site layout I want. In other words, I would need to create my own template, what demands a deeper understanding of the related framework.

Since I couldn't find a really easy and encapsulated solution, I'm evaluating the possibilities, but I already know it will take a lot of time that I could use to research and develop new online graphic design apps.

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Picture to People project future

2016-07-20T19:32:00.000-03:00

Picture to People project is growing fast in number of users and number of image effects generated per day. The more the project grows, the more money is needed to keep it online satisfactorily.

I have no more doubt that I need to make something now, or, in a near future, the project will not be able to bear so many load, so most users will get unsatisfied.

Since I can't spend more of my own money with Picture to People, I decided to make two main things to collect more financial resources for the project:
1) properly monetize the site with a good number of ads;
2) ask for users donations.

According to my experience, ads don't make a big money, unless you have thousands of people clicking them, what usually is hard to get. Maybe because the ad networks I already tried don't offer really relevant products/services to my users.

That said, I really need to get donations for P2P. I'm planning a way to reward donators for their money. Probably I would need to create a "special" or "premium" area with exclusive design services. This area would be accessible just for donators. I'm still thinking about it.

By the way, I'm trying to finish the research of a new astonishing sketch photo effect generator that is even better than the very famous and professional sketch effects Picture to People already offers. Maybe I will keep it apart to be used by donators.

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Text effect tutorials (41)

2016-07-10T19:54:00.000-03:00

It's time to show some more text logo tutorials published at the Text Logo Creation Tutorials blog. Subscribe there to view all text effect tutorials earlier.

- a bloody Halloween text logo effect;
- a furry text logo effect;
- a realistic reflective chrome text effect logo.

These lessons teach you how to design these text effect logos (you can see bigger logos are at the original tutorials):

Design high level text effect logos as a pro easily with these top text logo creator apps.

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Apache web server crashes on Windows

2016-06-30T21:54:00.000-03:00

Picture to People already passed through 3 outages this year. It's really sad and embarrassing, and it have let me very upset.

These problems were caused by an anomalous behavior of the Apache web server we use to set the site online. The main symptom is that Apache log shows the error "Server ran out of threads to serve requests. Consider raising the ThreadsPerChild", so Apache just hangs and stops responding the HTTP requests.

The worst thing about this bug is that rebooting the machine of even reinstalling Apache doesn't solve the problem, neither for a few moments. It makes the situation very nerve-racking.

I was using a Apache 2.2.15 32bit on a Windows 2008 R2 64bit with Service Pack 1. So I replaced the original web server for an Apache 2.2.31 32bits (last version of 2.2 series). I also tried the Apache 2.2.31 64bits. They were compiled with Visual Studio (downloaded from Apache Haus), but the result was the same in all cases: Apache got out of threads in a few seconds.

Despite I couldn't really find a cause of this behavior, it looks like if Apache instantiated all threads as defined at httpd.conf, but all sockets didn't return, so the web server gets "out of threads". I really believe it's a misbehavior between Apache and winsock.

I have tried many configuration changes to make Apache work as expected. If I can find a httpd.conf modification that apparently solves the issue, I will publish it here. I don't desire that anybody pass through the bad times I'm having because of this.

By the way, I subscribed to official Apache discussion list to get some useful help about all this subject. Sad to say, it looks like everybody at that e-mail list uses Apache for Linux. I received just one answer to my very detailed question, a very useless answer. As usual, people from open source projects are not really concerned about Windows users. It's really unfortunate.

If you know any solution for this problem, please contact me. This information needs to be revealed to the world. I don't believe I'm the only unlucky guy facing this mysterious problem.

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Watercolor effect photo editor online

2016-06-20T22:12:00.000-03:00

Picture to People has an advanced Watercolor Painting Photo Effect. It's the newest application from our collection of realistic painting effect generators.

This watercolor creator app was developed to be easy to use and smartly configurable. It presents just interface elements that can be very relevant, but it can help you to create many different styles of watercolor effects.

Below you see a photo turned into a watercolor, so you can feel inspired to create your own artistic paintings. The most beautiful watercolor strongly depends on your input photo, so make tests with the parameters to produce amazing pieces of art.

Also feel invited to know all our Painting Effect Photo Editors. Together they can produce a very big number of different painting styles.

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Text effect tutorials (40)

2016-06-11T18:26:00.000-03:00

This post is about some more text effect creations posted at the Text Effect Making Tutorials blog. Subscribe to see more effects as they get posted.

- a water and soap logo text effect;
- a stainless steel text logo effect;
- a realistic plastic text effect.

By following these tutorials you design cool header text effects (the real size logos are at the tutorial pages):

Design top class text effect logos easily by using these cool banner effect generators.

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Realistic frozen text effect logo makers

2016-05-31T20:31:00.000-03:00

Picture to People offers a very powerful graphic app that many users don't know: a special collection of realistic ice text renderers.

By using these frozen text logo creators, you can produce text effects that represent very well the ice colors, textures, bright and light reflection, so you can generate high quality ice banners, headers, titles and more.

These text effect makers were improved recently and received some minor upgrades, so they are able to design icy, frozen, polar, arctic, wintry, iceberg, frosty, crystal, melting, blizzard, snow and glacial text effects among other styles.

Use the Realistic Ice and Frozen Text Effect Editors to generate cool ice text logos like this one.

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Create country flag photo effects online

2016-05-20T21:01:00.003-03:00

Picture to People has a cool photo composition effect generator that can use flags from all around the world to produce cool graphic designs.

By using this online photo effect app, you can mix you favorite photos and your country flag, so beautiful patriot photo style are a few clicks away.

This flag photo editor have several interesting features like:
- offers a photo color preprocessing;
- let you choose a flag from any country;
- has several photo composition styles;
- you have fine control of composition level;
- offers spacial photo fitting.

Below you see a flag photo composition created by using our Country Flag Photo Editor.

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Drawing paper shadow effects

2016-05-10T01:46:00.000-03:00

I'm developing a sub-library to produce "paper shadow" effects easily. In other words, this code intends to create that kind of shadow that paper sheets usually have.

When in production stage, that software will be able to design several paper shadow styles, so it could be used to make images look to be printed on paper or to be in 3D perspective, among other possible uses.

The final presentation still needs some refinements, so the shadows can look even more realistic, but the main Math calculations are made using Maccala drawing library and are almost complete.

Below you can see a shadow effect example created in a few seconds by using my new shadow software that soon will help to create new outstanding photo effects for Picture to People project.

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Text effect tutorials (39)

2016-04-30T20:37:00.000-03:00

This time I show some more cool text effect tutorials posted at the Text Effect Tutorials blog. Subscribe to know about new tutorials with ease.

- a realistic lava logo text effect;
- a 3D inked logo text effect;
- a bamboo text logo effect.

These tutorials teach you how to design these beautiful banner effects (see the logos in real size at the tutorial pages):

Design high quality text effect logos easily by using these cool header effect generators.

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