It seems a bit difficult to do it by hand - are you guys all using those pen things?!
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It seems a bit difficult to do it by hand - are you guys all using those pen things?!
This is correct.
All bitmaps are rectangular, even if the background is set to transparent.
Not all gifs are set to have transparent colours (or backgrounds) though.
Xtreme imports 'as is' from the source.
Auto tracers like Xtreme and Vector Magic will trace everything within the bounds of the rectangle. So the white bg (as in Stuarts example) will become a white rectangle behind the other traced paths.
You can select the result, un group it (or ctrl+Click) delete it or click a colour on the colour line to see it against the page background.
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I dare say most people aren't. I do have one of those pen things, but I don't actually use it to draw. (What can I tell you, I'm just weird.;)).
Actually, it's fairly easy to do the cutout stuff, especially on your green leafy shapes. The ball is essentially a circle/ellipse, so it's mostly an issue of getting the size right.
Personally, I'd recreate the text areas rather than trace them. They will be difficult, especially the "shaping a future" line. If you don't have the font/s, perhaps you could use Mehdi on the text part and cut out just the graphic elements.
Another way by making the image a mask.
Rich
Rich,
Is that possible with Xtreme's standard tools?
You need to use levels which is available. It is something you can try. If you were to recolor, recoloring dark only affects the black pixels, and light gets everything else. So, levels instead.
When you have a mask image, use it for bitmap transparency. The image will be like having a floating alpha channel. Making a bitmap copy will stablize the image.
I never use eliminate white plugins because Xara can do this itself.
Black will retain the opacity, and white will cause transparency.
I use this to clean images that have pixel clouds from plugins as well. If you have a graphic (PNG) that you can recolor both light and dark to black, then a bitmap copy will work as a mask.
Rich
Rich, I'm sorry, I can't understand what you have said in relation to Xara Xtreme . :o
As far as I know, I'm pretty sure your image in post #15 was not produced in Xara Xtreme.
I'd love to be proved wrong because it's an area of Xtreme which I never knew natively existed or thought would be viable in a vector application.
I think it best that the OP is not confused (as I now am) with techniques which are native to raster applications yeh ;)
You can use a black object in saturation transparency to make an image gray.
When you have an image selected on screen, you can go to the Bitmap Gallery and select an image. With both selected you can hit transparent, and the on screen image wil become transparent depending on the gray of the image in the Bitmap Gallery. A color image will work the same. Making a bitmap copy of an on screen image will place a copy in the Bitmap Gallery. I think an on screen object will work, too. Bitmap transparency is just one of the Xara options. It has several controls as well.
When I texturize, I drag an image from the Fill Gallery on screen. This will be available in the Bitmap Gallery. My textures are grayscale. Black retains the opacity, and white makes transparency. Gray give a variation. Same idea.
Rich
Ah, now I see what you were trying to say - I'm a bit thick this morning.
Though I'm still not clear about the 'mask'.. Seems to work fine with transparency applied directly to Stuarts file, though I needed to clone a few times to add opacity back to the non-white areas.
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