Aviary Blog

If you have any suggestions for how we can make our new office more awesome, let us know!

Also, Aviary is hiring, so if you are in NYC and are awesome and want to join our flock send us a note: jobs@aviary.com

From Yotam “At first sight it [the smudge tool] seems to be one of the most disappointing tool in the program, compared to Photoshop’s smudge tool. But I’ve discovered that if you know how to use it, it can be a very powerful cloning tool.
First rule: Don’t drag the brush on the image, but instead draw quick, light strokes, Starting at the texture you’re sampling, and ending at the place you want the texture to be.
Second rule: keep the brush set to a low hardness (opacity). the smoother you want your texture to come out, the lower your the hardness needed.
Third rule: the lower the hardness, the more strokes and quicker movements you need”

See this tip in action.

Organize the connector lines with in Aviary’s effects editor by setting pins. In complicated files you may have several connector lines close to or even crossing over each other. You can move them out of the way by setting connector pins. A connector pin is an anchor point that the connector line will lock to. To set a pin, hover over a connector line, then click on it when it is highlighted, which will add a pin. Now you can drag that pin and the connector line out of your way. To delete a pin select it and press the delete button.

You may have seen a new button on the creations page called Publish Creation and wondered what it is. Well Aviary now will let you Publish a creation (images only at this point) to Flickr, and Facebook. This also will apply to Aviary. Let me explain.

The Publish feature allows you to control how you share your creations. Now, by default all creations will have a status of Draft. A Draft creation can be any creation that you feel is not ready for prime time. It will not be included on the undiscovered page, and will only show up in your creations. This will help to make the undiscovered page more relevant, by not flooding it with uploads and unfinished creations. Plus you can work on your creation in peace, sharing it only when you feel it is ready.

When you are ready to share your creation with the world you can Publish it. This can be done, from the creation page, or inside the application after you have saved.

Creation Page

Click on the Publish Creation to open the pop-up here you can choose to push your creation to Flickr and or Facebook. Then clicking the publish button will push the creation to the sites you have checked.

In the application

After having saved a creation a publish button will appear in the header, Clicking it will open the publish dialog. Here you can set which linked account you want to push the creation to.

Publish Dialog

The publish dialog is where you are able to set how you want share your image. Chose which account you want to publish the creation to. (Currently only available for images to Flickr or Facebook) If they are left unchecked your creation will only be published to Aviary. Once a creation is published you will see the date, time and the account that was published. If your accounts are not linked you will be able to link them from this dialog or from your Linked Accounts page.

Note: Images pushed to Flickr with transparency, will show the transparent areas as black on any image that is not at original size. We are working on this issue and hope to have it fixed in the future.