New Pixlr Service - Imm.io!

This is a exciting day, we are happy to announce our latest service - Pixlr Imm.io. Imm.io is a one click image sharing service, that alone is of course not that special. But if you hook the other pixlr services onto imm.io that's when the real power arise.
Both Pixlr editor and Pixlr Grabber now has a choice to publish your image direct onto imm.io. In return you will get a short url to share among your friends and foes.




We also released Grabber 2.0 for Firefox.

This version of the popular extension we have redone the entire thing and I'm very happy with the result. Now you can choose to Edit, Share, Save or Copy the screen grabs you make. So as soon as Mozilla have approved the new version it will pop up in your browser.

The next time you what to show of something you did just select the "Share to imm.io" in the new editor save dialog.

Peace!

//Ola

New release!

We just sent out a new release of the Pixlr Editor, this time we focused on the selection tools and updates to filters and adjustments.

Since we have added anti-alias and feather all of the tools, filters, cut/paste, mask etc had to be updated.
Now if you want to make a cutout or filter a specific part it will be smooth sailing.

This is whats new:

- Feather in Lasso and Marquee tool.
- Anti-aliasing in Wand, lasso and paint bucket tool.
- Hue/Saturation, Brightness/Contrast and Threshold adjustments are now shown in real time.
- Cross-process, desaturate and Tilt-shift are much faster.
- A bunch of small tweaks and fixes.

That' all for now :)

Out!

New decade - major release!

Hope all of you had a nice decade and looking forward to this new one. I can tell you that we are very pepped to see what the turns of the web and cloud services takes us.

This first release of 2010 we bring you more advanced users good news, we just release a update of Pixlr Editor with the possibility to add Layer Masks. This is the first release of masks so the basic stuff should be there and will be updated later on.

Since masks are a very big deal this also means that to get masks into the application we had to go poking in all areas of the code, all from saving to resizing and painting. If you run into any bug or weirdness please please help us by submitting a bug report.

You find the mask in the "Layers" top-menu, in the right-click context menu of the "layer panel" and also the icon.

Other updates in this release:

• Fixes of a couple of bugs and glitches.
• The image will always open to fit on screen so you don't need to zoom out.
  
• You can now press CTRL+J to create a layer copy.
• If you save the same image you are working on often it will remember the type and name.

Thank you for this amazing year!

Cheers
Ola

Adding Christmas hat to your profile picture - 6 easy steps!

So Christmas is just around the corner and you of course want to add a Christmas hat to your twitter, facebook, myspace etc picture. In this quick tutorial I'm going to show you how to do this in just 6 easy steps!

Step one: Select and open a hat in Pixlr Editor, just click the hat you like and we will do the magic.










I choose to click the third one and a window opened which look like this:

Hope this is similar to what you see :)


Step two: Now it's time to open a image of you. Click "File" -> "Open" in the top menu. Locate a nice and happy image of you and click "Open"

The image of you will now be open in the editor on top of the image of the hat.









Just like this :) (Oh no I'm not Brad Pit, but it's Christmas and one can wish)








Step three: Click on the window with the hat to put it in front of the image of you, now locate the layers panel at the right, with your mouse Click and drag the "Layer 0" layer to the window with you (yes it's now behind the hat window), drop the layer on-top of the image of you.

The image with you will now pop up in front of the hat and the hat will be copied to the image with you.


Step five: Transform the hat so it fits your head! The image you just copied to the image of yourself kinda don't fit, so now we need to move, resize and maybe rotate the hat so it fits.

In the menu click "Edit -> Free transform". Outline and corners will be added to the image of the hat.



See the Corners!


Move the hat by dragging the entire square. Resize by dragging in one of the four corners, hold down the shift key to constrain the proportions. Rotate by dragging outside of one of the four corners just like I do in this screen-shot:

When you are happy with the size and placing just click outside the square and click "yes" in the dialogue.


Step six: When you are satisfied with the result then it's time to save. Click "File -> Save" in the top menu. Select Jpg and type the name of the file you like, click OK.



Woila´, now just upload the image as a new avatar and spread the Christmas Spirit!

Merry Christmas to you all!
Ola

Copy & Paste Layer style, Drag & Drop Layers.

Ok I'm not going to make this such a big thing that apple did when they added Copy/Paste to iPhone ;)

But you can now copy and paste layer styles between layers in the same image and between different image.

You are now also able to drag and drop layers from one image to another. Just grab a layer in the layer panel and drop it in a other image, tada!

And yes both features where requests from you users!
Over and out - Ola

Grabber branding

Icons for pixlr editor and pixlr express was added a while ago. Now we have got the icon for pixlr grabber, so soon you will see a update to the grabber firefox add-on.

The last couple of month we have been working hard on delivering a custom editor to a large German web service, now it's done and we can go back to adding candy to the pixlr.com service. Stay tuned for new great updates, might be some of the requested items on the list!

//Ola

Whats next - take 2

A couple of month ago I asked what we should do next with pixlr.com, since then a lot of the stuff you wanted has been released and some great stuff you didn't know you wanted ;) like the excellent pixlr grabber.

But once again I want to know; if it was up to you what would the next thing to be released be?


//Ola

Drag and Drop support added in layers panel!

I'm still working on creating a better work flow for you .. just added drag n' drop to the layers panel.

This is what you can do:

1. Drag the layers to sort them. Unlock the background to be able to move it.
2. Drag a layer to the trash to delete it.
3. Drag a layer to the New Layer icon to duplicate it.

I'm quite satisfied with it, ie it works as i should :) What do you think?

Peace!

//Ola

Pixlr Grabber for Windows now available!

Just released the Pixlr Grabber for Windows. Now you can right-click any image on your desktop and edit them in the Pixlr Editor without the hassle of manually starting the browser and browsing the image.



Download it from http://pixlr.com/grabber/ and install it today!

A plus is that the Pixlr pdx documents now has its own icon and you can just double-click it to open them.

A new take ..

On the look of things ..

Over and out !

Ola

New version of the editor is out!

Yepp just relesed a new version of the Pixlr Editor. We did a large re-factoring of how the layer handeling works. This means we have made changes to all parts of the application and this also means that I need your help to report any bugs you might find.

For you as a user the changes are:

• Lower memory footprint when working with layers.
• Free transform is just around the layer and not the entire image.
• Layers can be dragged and moved around (and outside) of the document without them being cropped.
• New layout of the Menu, layers box and history box. Yes it's blue and not so many lines, the scollbars also just shows when they need.
• Rotate/flip layer works as it should.

So not that much news for you but a lot of changes and small fixes is done, it will help in future development of the editor.

All out!

Ola

Icons for the applications ..

We are getting some real application icons for the editor and the express applications, here is some sketches I've gotten :) I love concepts.

One year anniversary! *hurray*

Today one year ago I (Ola Sevandersson) released the first of the pixlr services, at that time I had been coding/designing for almost a year. All done in my spare time since I had a regular job as a product development mng for one of the largest social networks in Sweden.

The release was followed by these words in the blog:
"So it's sunday afternoon in Sweden and tomorrow I will let a few know about pixlr. I wonder what they will say about the result of from a years work and thousands of lines of code?"

Well I have to say that the "few" people i let know about the service grew to about 50.000 visitors in the FIRST two days .. quite a good release from my perspective .. Of course it was because it was featured in a couple of large tech-blogs (More on the first week)

Here is a graph of the growth of pixlr.com per month until today:

Solid climb :) Thanks to you all!

One of the key to success was that I didn't just focus on the English speaking part of the world but made it easy to translate the service and today pixlr is available in over 25 languages.

Visitors from Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Brazil, Sweden, Mexico, Germany is often seen on the site :)

The first version of the editor was pretty basic and lacked a lot of features, but continued development has added a lot of tools, adjustments and filters for you all to enjoy. The first version didn't even have Type tool and free transform, wild times ;)

Some other facts:

Firefox add-on (rel 9 dec 2008)
Over 50.000 downloads of the plugin.



Pixlr Express (rel 28 mar 2009)
Great for inclusion in other sites via the API



Pixlr on Twitter (9 nov 2009)
More then 1200 followers.



Pixlr facebook apps (rel 16 june 2009)
Edit your facebook images direct with pixlr editor and pixlr express



Be first!
Pixlr has always tried to move the line of how a application on the web behaves and performs, still the Pixlr editor is just 186 kb large and is one of the most advanced online editors out there. With features like open psd, white balance, tilt-shift filter, curves, levels, dodge, burn, brush editor and more.

Does it end here ..
Noooo, now we are looking forward on the year to come .. you will meet the pixlr products in several more of the largest sites of the world and you might even use our product without knowing :)

I can't say to much but more connections to your desktop are in the pipe as well for a new redone version of the editor. A bit more clean look and a lot of optimization of the footprint.



Thanks you all for this wonderful year!

With the greatest gratitude
Ola

Help needed!

Are you good at writing and know the workings of wiki systems? Want to contribute to the free pixlr service? I need som help getting the support pages updated and i'm so short on time.

Tutorials and other stuff would be great as well.

E-mail me and I'll add a wiki account.

Cheers
Ola

Release me!

A couple of days ago I made the desiccation to stop supporting flash 9 in the new development and with over 85% using flash 10 that's not such a big impact on the users.

All flash 9 users will still be able to use pixlr editor but it will be a version that don't get any future development. (Update dammit! ;))

Due to the fact that we only develop for flash 10 we can use all of the new great things to make a even better product. First out is a optimized version of jpg saving and drawing, now we will focus on the new text engine to get great type possibilities.

I also released a set of features yesterday. First of the "Auto Levels" and also ...


Rename Layer



Color Lookup Filter


Tri Tone Filter


Peace
Ola

Poking around with the brushes ..

Just released a new update with changes to the brush handling. Optimizing the work-flow again.

Also added short-cut keys for resizing/soften the brush, click "," and "." on your keybord to change brush size. Holding down shift and clicking "," and "." will change the hardness.

Use pixlr with facebook

Now you can use the pixlr services on you facebook images.

Image Editor
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=110226352246

Photo Express
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=44331323412

And also be a Pixlr fan
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pixlr/35846011511

Let me know what to do to improve the apps.

Cheers
Ola

Whats next ..

The backlog for pixlr is quite long and just some of the items are on the wall to be done soon.

It's always hard to prioritize what's the next thing to put your hours into.

If you had your wish what would you like to be the next thing released?

Cheers
Ola

Finaly .. our own format :)

So I just added or .. did add late last night a pixlr document format (.pxd). Saving a pxd file will keep all the layers, filters, texts etc so you can revisit the image and continue working on it.

It's also good if you would like to share files with friend or colleagues or for creating templates.

The pxd format will be open for anybody who wants to create readers, I'll add the document specification later on.

Remember this day!

Yes you can now open Photoshop PSD files in the Image editor and Photo Express. We are first to do this native in Flash and online!

For all you who are not always in front of your desktop or just need to preview psd images. The Image editor opens layers and the express version open an flattened version.

We will optimize it more and give some feedback on loading etc, but I just wanted to get it out there!

Out!