We’re finishing the year strong, with impactful updates both to our front-end platform and back-end image processing.
New FTP Service Beta Complete
As we’ve written about before, we’re in the process of launching our new FTP service based on the AWS Transfer Family. The new service will provide even higher levels of speed and security, as well as support for SFTP.
Our new FTP service has been running successfully in beta with a few select clients, and will soon be available on an opt-in basis.
Shadow Automation
For the last half year we’ve been working on automating some of our shadowing using various generation and training techniques, and it’s been live since October. Currently we’re automating between 30% - 50% of our natural shadows — 100% of which are validated by our human QA team.
Pixelz is now automating 30% - 50% of natural shadows
New and Improved Image Viewer
We have completed the process of switching all users to our advanced image viewer when doing QA on completed images. The advanced image viewer was originally a feature developed for Enterprise that is now available to all.
And if you like the functionality, you can use it for pre-production comments as well using the Markup extension.
“Extensions” Now Available to Trial Users
For years we’ve had powerful extensions like Colorways, Stacking, Image Library, and Markup. Until now, they’ve only been available to paid subscribers. We’ve now opened them up to trial users, so new users can review the full platform.
The Advanced Image Viewer can be used to QA retouched images, and is available as the Markup Extension for Pre-Production comments
API Updates (JSON, color matching, deep linking)
For the tightest, most custom integrations, use Pixelz’ RESTful API! It can return either XML or JSON, and is well documented.
We’ve added options to send information about color matching, and will be adding further color matching data to the Templates methods in the coming weeks.
We’ve also added the ability to deep link to our Advanced Image Viewer for easy QA integration with your own tools.
If you have integration needs, please don’t hesitate to contact us for assistance.
Improved Notifications Management
Get granular with notifications regarding order completion, invoicing, and more. For a while we’ve had the ability to add additional emails to some events, but now it’s even more clear and more customizable which notifications are sent to each address.
In the Background…
Many of the updates and advances we make are visible to end users only in performance, ease of use, and image quality. But we’d still like to make you aware!
Increased bespoke automation — as you may know, Pixelz is a lean smart factory. That means we break retouching down into micro-steps completed by automated processes and specialist retouchers. This month, we’ve made it possible for our automated steps to run custom scripts and actions tailored to specific clients. That’s a best of both worlds feature: we remain lean and automated, but are able to provide even deeper customization than before.
Refactored backups — we can backup 50,000+ images a day, no problem. (Did you know we backup all images for 1 year after they’re sent to us? Restores are something we can do upon request.)
Updated AI Mask - we’ve launched another update to our AI layer mask based on a new state of the art architecture. Learn more about AI layer masking.
Speed optimization - we’ve optimized code for loading orders using Redis and optimized how we communicate with our database