Clker.com – weblog

I just updated the svg edit with a more recent version. Actually, after a lot of testing I found that the current trunk version has fewer bugs and way better performance than v2.5 . As far as clker’s application is concerned, we are much happier with the trunk.

An example is editing auto traced images. There is a significant improvement in the selection performance, a very notable one. You will find a grid control as well and the main menu changed a little bit. The older bug that forced the icons to smaller was fixed as well. IE9 now works without chrome frame plugin. Right click context menu shows copy/paste functions as well.

Things that I hope svg edit will add:

1. Run external plugins: If svg edit gets hosted let’s say at google, and another website loads it just like jquery, there should be a means for loading plugins without resorting to editing the code of svg edit. This can be accomplished by ajax call that adds a <script> tag.

2. Using the default web fonts instead of serif and sans. So I hope that the Arial, courier new and the other set of web fonts are the standard in svg edit instead of sans and serif.

We just released a new feature that allows professional graphics designers to show two things:

1. It allows you to indicate on your profile that you are a professional graphics designer. The work “PRO” will then appear beside your name every where on clker, including the community activity on the homepage and on all your uploaded clipart pages.

2. If you are a professional, you may now select another option on your profile that indicates whether or not you may accept projects from other clker users (for a fee). Clker will not involved in any agreements and does not plan to to nor will be compensated. If you get a big project it’s yours – we’re happy for you.

The opposite is true. Now if you need help designing your website or your fliers, look for those blue buttons beside clker user. See their uploaded images and talk with them.

The reason we released this feature is the numerous emails and requests from people who have projects and are looking for a professional designer. Unfortunately, I don’t do that.

Look soon for another feature that will even help professional graphics designers and seekers more .

Just solved some problems with the editor and internet explorer, now it works without problems as long as the chrome frame is installed. So now, every one can edit SVG.

Now you can draw new SVGs online on clker.com, thanks to svg-edit. This tool can edit the existing SVGs or be used to create a new SVG image from scratch. I disabled editing using IE due to buggy behavior, but the edit functionality works almost fine in chrome, safari, firefox and opera.

Now, you can upload a raster image to be vectorized then edit it and remove unwanted regions all online on clker.com ! .

Happy designing and editing

Clker will be down approx. at 8pm eastern time for around 2 – 3 hours for maintenance.

Automatic vectorization is up and working. Upload an image of at least 0.5 megapixel and after a little while you should see a vectorized version in your profile.

I got best results with images larger than 1 megapixel. The website service will automatically resize it in case it was larger than 1MP down to 1MP. Try to edit the picture before uploading and add any effects you want like an oval or heart shaped crop.

Soon, I will add another interface by which users can request custom trace or to retrace an image that has been already vectorized before.

It already started generating some pictures, and I already see some errors esp. with alpha channel png files, so stick with full color ones for now . I’ll go to sleep now, and tomorrow I will write a detailed post.

Send feedback whenever possible.

SI had some delays due to unscheduled projects that were done in my home. I’m just starting to gain control of my time again, together with the schedule of contractors. That pushed my two weeks off. Now, the tracer can produce outlines. They are not amazing, but some times they enhance the traced image. An example is this hot dog sandwich:

This is one example that I think edges produced good results. The thickness of the edge will vary with its position and my objective was to make it appear as brush strokes, which are thin at the start, and tapers off at the end of the line. Other examples which I think that it did not produce good results is the Hillary Clinton image.

So it seems that with simple images, the outline will produce better results, while with complicated images it will not. I will start integrating the tracer with clker form today, and will default its operation to trace without producing outlines. We will also allow every user to change their default behavior for the tracer. Watch for another blog post withing the next couple of days.

Automatic tracing of uploaded photos is one important feature coming to clker.com . I will describe briefly how far we reached, and what I hope to accomplish within the next few days until it is released.

First off, let me outline the benefits and draw backs of auto tracing. The obvious biggest benefit is no human work is put into the segmentation and vectorization process. However, it has been proven in lots of domains that when two humans segment the same picture their result will have approx. 80-85% common areas. This means that humans will disagree about the segmentation of the same image in about 15% of the image itself. That’s because the way our brain interprets an image depends on every persons own understanding and knowledge of the contents image, and that can vary a lot. Even when the human segmentation results are in a very specific context like brain segmentation, and done by radiologists the comparison between the similarity between their results was between 83-87% using a similarity measure similar to the Jaccard index. So the disadvantage of automatic segmentation is that if we were able to reach the perfect algorithm to segment an image, the user will always have around 15-20% disagreement with its result.

The results that I will show here are based on this helicopter image (also shown on the top). There are several parameters used as the inputs to the segmentation program. Most of those will either be selected by us to provide good results in average, or passed through clker’s interface in a more humanly understandable fashion. The image was reduced in size to approximately 1 mega pixel before processing.

Those two images are direct output of the vectorizing program without any modifications. The difference between them is the number of regions in each. In the image on the right, we attempted to reduce the number of resulting segments, which can help greatly especially if the user plans on editing the image after.

To see how hard it is to produce a clip art out of this segmentation, I tried to edit the image on the left (the one with larger number of segments) and delete all the sky regions. It took me around a minute to do so, just select and delete and the result is below:

However, some people will not perceive this image as a clip art. One reason is the lack of hard outlines around the object when compared to an image like the deck officer here . The other reason is the number of regions is way smaller. I will be spending the next couple of days trying to get some borders up and hopefully we’ll get some good results.

I imagine now two ways to have this feature up. The first one once you upload a raster image, clker will work on vectorizing it then you will get an email with a link to the vectorized version. The other way (which will come later in time) will be requesting a custom segmentation with the ability to adjust some of the parameters like for example requesting smaller number of regions, or different types of color enhancement including equalization, white balance correction ..etc.

Hopefully this will be running on clker by Monday next week.

We released a new clker interface on Wed. The new interface has white as it’s main background less colors with blue being the main focus. Some of the elements & buttons are currently being worked on to follow the same theme. The new interface is not colorish like the old one, as we learned from users that too many colors become distracting and interfere with the images that are already colored.

We redesigned the home page and reduced tons of clutter. An improved version will be released soon that will give larger space for the community updates.

I would like to thank both sciweavers.org & Florian with Das Elektronik Lexikon for valuable insights and reviews during the process.

Keep your eyes on clker for new features released within the next couple of weeks. Those are definitely worth watching (I’m not going to say what they are now ).

I’ve made the decision this week to work full time on clker.com . So clker.com, which was my hobby website will now get at least 10 times more attention and time from me.

How does that affect clker’s users? You will see faster improvements and updates – and may be more radical changes to Crayon and other new components. Make sure you file all bugs and feature requests here, which will greatly help me plan the releases.