Improving the Shadow tool

It's extremely frustrating to work with shadows in Xara. You cannot select shadows by themselves in the the layer gallery. If I have a situation where I need to apply the same shadow to multiple objects, it would be nice to not default to red. It would be nice if Xara remembered the attributes of the last shadow you created. As it is, I have to select each shadow object individually and make a manual change by pasting attributes. If I make a change to one object, I then have to copy that object and paste attributes to all the other objects. This is made more complicated if I have done this to text objects. I might want to paste only the shadow attributes, but not the font or font size attributes. This gets tedious when you have to do it more than 5 times for multiple objects. It would be nice to be able to select shadow objects by themselves and copy and paste shadow attributes all in one shot.

Alternatively, it might be nice if Xara would generate a named "Shadow colour" so that you could select that color from the color gallery and change it that way.

I think I'd like to be able to select by shadow in the name gallery.

This method of only being able to change one shadow at a time is a big inconvenience. Especially when doing cast shadows and trying to get the angles all the same on all the objects.

What I would like would be a perspective tool, like with the mould tool where you can move the vanishing point to have it affect the object. If you have many objects with cast shadows, it would be great to be able to select the vanishing points and be able to center them all together and move them all together in order to control the cast shadow.

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Originally Posted by Sheff

It's extremely frustrating to work with shadows in Xara. You cannot select shadows by themselves in the the layer gallery...

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I do this all the time.

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I've also used Named Colors for the shadows frequently.

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But yes, absolutely on the copying attributes, etc. Think this has been on wish lists before.

Mike

another thing I'd like to see added to the shadow tool is the ability have a shadow casting in front of your object to create a back lit effect currently the only way to do this is to create your own shadows from scratch.

I feel that features such as the Shadow Tool get added, and then that's that. The Bitmap Tracer is another example. I do not see a lot of effort in revisiting existing features and making improvements. I have said this before, I would be more interested in a version, perhaps a .5 version that offers no new features, just fixes bugs that have existed from many versions past and/or that improves standard features such as the Shadow Tool and Bitmap Tracer.

For years we have been begging for grayscale support and spot color support in PDF files. This would be a lot more valuable to me than some wizzy new feature that I may never use.

As far as selecting just the shadow, Ctrl click on shadow and the start bar will indicate the shadow is selected.

And I just created an object, added a shadow, changed the shadow color, blur, and transparency, then copied and pasted attributes to several other objects. Same thing with the Glow shadow.

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Originally Posted by angelize

another thing I'd like to see added to the shadow tool is the ability have a shadow casting in front of your object to create a back lit effect currently the only way to do this is to create your own shadows from scratch.

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With XDPX11, I convert the Shadow Group to editable shapes and move the shadow to the front.
I do keep a clone of the Shadow Group should I need to tweak the shape or its shadow.

Acorn

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Originally Posted by Acorn

With XDPX11, I convert the Shadow Group to editable shapes and move the shadow to the front.
I do keep a clone of the Shadow Group should I need to tweak the shape or its shadow. Acorn

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Which is what I do--with the exception of keeping a copy of the group. But for that matter, I often separate the floor shadows when they are projected behind in order to manipulate the shadow cast to lay behind that cannot be accomplished with it live.

A floor shadow that could be positioned in the front would be a good thing. The idea of a common perspective vanishing point could be useful for floor shadows.