Torn paper text logo generator online

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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)

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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New Picture to Picture project logo

I have designed a new logo for Picture to People project. It's already online at our site.

It was designed to be:
- simple;
- beautiful;
- modern;
- monochrome;
- understandable at small sizes;
- based on "P2P" acronym;
- related to design and art;
- more adherent to the recent site design improvements.

As the time goes, I will replace P2P logo at all official places, like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.

I hope you like our new logo and enjoy using all huge collection of online graphic apps from Picture to People.

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Upgrade to a new powerful server

As several times before, Picture to People site's traffic increased more and more, so our dedicated server became overloaded. In the hours of day when P2P is most used, many requests had been receiving a slow response and, in some worse cases, our web server stopped responding.

I had no choice but pay for a more powerful server, otherwise in several parts of day users wouldn't have a smooth experience using P2P. It became a non optional decision.

The good news are that now Picture to People runs on a monster dedicated machine with a powerful processor and lots of memory. I'm optimistic that our new server can support some more traffic increase and I also can release more graphic software at the site with confidence.

The bad news are that I don't have money to pay for this very expensive server. Currently the site is very poorly monetized (in fact, most pages has just a small lateral ad), but probably I will need to set up a good number of ads to get money to pay for our new server.

At least I hope I will be able to achieve the most important goal: keep Picture to People project alive and providing a high quality service.

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New bevel text logo effects online

Since a small time ago, Picture to People offers hundreds of realistic bevel text effects online. After its release, this bevel text maker application made a big success and become one of the most used P2P text generator tools.

This tool was developed extremely versatile and powerful, because it uses some real 3D algorithms to generate its results. When I transformed this it into an software to be used online, I made many simplifications, so it became easy to use even for non geek and non designer users.

Recently I was seeing some text logos online for inspiration and I found some cool beveled logos. That time I realized that my bevel text maker could make logos like that, but not through the interface I have published online.

So I decided to improve the online bevel text effects by offering very useful new configuration parameters. Below you see a new style of bevel text banner (in this case, a bevel metallic text effect) that can be designed by using the more complete version of Bevel Text Effect Generator applications.

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Long shadow effect generator online

Since many users requested it, I developed a text effect generator able to design beautiful long shadow logos, banners and headers.

Now you can create amazing long shadow texts with no effort, including the trendy flat long shadow effect. You can even create a logo with shadow only, so you get a "phantom text".

This shadow effect maker is so powerful and customizable that, if you don't choose wisely your configuration parameters, you can turn your long shadow into a regular small shadow.

Below I show you a dense long shadow effect created by using our Long Shadow Effect Text Creator.

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Faster text logos online

Picture to People site implements a very aggressive cache policy. This means that, if you wait for a page to load completely, it will load much faster next times you use it.

Anyway, I was not satisfied. I want to make P2P as fast as I can, so recently I was looking for a way to speed it up.

After some hard work, I found a way to make all text effect pages faster to load. Now they open faster for the users, so any page you open for the first time (or after a long time) will be ready to use in fewer time. This improvement benefits, for example, our most popular 3D Text Effect maker.

Besides and not less important, this optimization helped to generate less traffic on my web server when one of these pages is requested. This for sure will give some refreshment to our server that already is very overloaded, since we have tens of thousands of his every day and most of our graphic effects are hard to calculate.

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