Xara Ltd. - Here's a good idea for you...

[Ross Macintosh]

Klaus started a thread in the New Gear Forum on a program called S-Spline. You can find the thread here. I just downloaded the program demo and trying it out I was struck by how great it would be if the next version of Xara X incorporated the technology.

The S-Spline program allows high-quality resizing of bitmap images. I can imagine a future Xara X that would apply the licenced algorithms automatically whenever a bitmap is resized. That would greatly add to Xara's bitmap support and further enhance what can be achieved with Xara X. I believe Xara X should do something like this and keep Xara X leading edge.

If royalties make such an idea difficult, I'd suggest incorporating the capability as a plugin feature. Charge extra for the plugin. It is such a powerful technology and so relavant to working with bitmaps in xara that I, and I suspect many others, would be willing to pay extra to have it. The plugin approach could be very marketable.

In the meantime I'll just have to buy S-Spline. Oh how much nicer (and productive) it would be to have it do its magic automatically within xara.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[Ross Macintosh]

Klaus started a thread in the New Gear Forum on a program called S-Spline. You can find the thread here. I just downloaded the program demo and trying it out I was struck by how great it would be if the next version of Xara X incorporated the technology.

The S-Spline program allows high-quality resizing of bitmap images. I can imagine a future Xara X that would apply the licenced algorithms automatically whenever a bitmap is resized. That would greatly add to Xara's bitmap support and further enhance what can be achieved with Xara X. I believe Xara X should do something like this and keep Xara X leading edge.

If royalties make such an idea difficult, I'd suggest incorporating the capability as a plugin feature. Charge extra for the plugin. It is such a powerful technology and so relavant to working with bitmaps in xara that I, and I suspect many others, would be willing to pay extra to have it. The plugin approach could be very marketable.

In the meantime I'll just have to buy S-Spline. Oh how much nicer (and productive) it would be to have it do its magic automatically within xara.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[RAMWolff44]

very kool. I don't have the bucks to buy that sort of software right now, but it's been added to my list. I agree, I think that Xara Ltd. should look into adding that sort ot technology to the application.

WOW!!!

RAMWolff [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[Klaus Nordby]

Yes Ross, it would be a nifty addition to XX - though I would much rather have S-Spline functionality built right into Photoshop 7! The XX coders should concentrate on further developing XX as what it is: a vector program. A vast array of new bitmap features is the LAST I want XX's code to be bloated with!

K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara

[Wolfgang]

Well,

I'm with Klaus here. XX is a Vector application. Even though it has limited Bitmap capabilities, I did never and will never use it for Bitmap manipulation.

That's what Photoshop is for. And while some people here are still on the 'kill Adobe' trip, I use PS with the same intensity as XX.

PS 6 now has Vector-tools as well, but I never even touched them ...

Wolfgang

[Ross Macintosh]

Where I notice it would be useful in Xara X is when you have bitmap fills such as textures. When you adjust the fill handles beyond the original bitmap size the bitmap is degraded. With the s-spline technology it could be degraded less significantly. Klaus and Wolfgang - you guys may never use bitmap fills as textures but I think most Xara X users do. I do it enough that having to go outside Xara X to reprocess the fill bitmap would be a hassle. (I never do that now and am unlikely to do it often if I had a full copy of s-spline).

I notice the FAQ on the S-Spline site makes mention of the algorithm being self-contained in a dll. Their interface is not, they appear to be suggesting developers could negotiate to use the dll but that their interface is off limits. I never wanted to see their interface added into Xara X - I can open S-Spline for that. I'd just like to see Xara X have the option of bitmaps automatically processed by the algorithm when the image is resized. I'm no programmer but I'd suggest it is premature to assume this would be a bloated feature - perhaps it could be incorporated very simply.

Regards, Ross

<a href=http://www.designstop.com/>DesignStop.Com</a>

[Sean Sedwards]

I recently enlarged a batch of digital photographs (1280 x 960 -> 1800 x 1350 then cropped to 1800 x 1200) which I uploaded to the Fujilab website for
optical printing on 6 x 4" photographic paper. The software technology, provided by Pixology, can do this automatically, however I got better results by processing the images first. Bicubic gave good results, but X's bitmap smoothing (automatically engaged when you enlarge a bitmap unless you specifically turn it off) was more natural and less pixelated at the expense of being slightly blurred. Adding a small amount of unsharpening gave me the best of both and allowed me to vary the sharpness.

I tried S-Spline for comparison and found that it offered little or no improvement for my application - I got smoothness at the expense of texture and detail. I tried it with a Zoneplate test image and compared it with other methods, including a 'perfect' mathematical enlargement. From this test it appears that S-Spline's strength is enlarging bitmaps derived from vectors, i.e. with well defined blocks of colour, rather than with continuous tone photographs. As far as X is concerned, I'd prefer a sharpening filter added to the bitmap export dialog, as suggested by Klaus some while ago.

BTW, applying S-Spline to the original orange swirling test image on the Shortcut website doesn't produce as good a result as they show, although it is close.

Regards - Sean

[Klaus Nordby]

Sean, your comparison does not do justice to S-Spline at all! Where it really shines is in making large rescalings - 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x - of the original size. It leaves Photoshop 6's bicubic interpolation totally in the dust. The origin of the original artwork is irrelevant, as it works great with photos. And that's the only relevant comparison - much as I love XaraX, I would never use it for rescaling photos.

K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara

[RAMWolff44]

I am with Ross and Klaus on this one. XaraX can improve it's "sellability" by offering things that no other vector program offers. This would be one of them. If they could get the .dll and leave out the interface and intergrate it into XaraX then the bloat wouldn't be that bad.

I do have a concern, though. My copy of XaraX with the newest patch crashes here and there, and it' usually if the program is asked to do allot of redrawing of too many objects. Like if I do a really high quality bitmap trace, BAM!! goes down. Some of the brushes crash it as well. So that is my one concern. If they were to add in this amazing extra, if I were to take a texture and wanted to use only a single tile instead of choosing to repeat it and needed a quality, larger version of that texture to use in a shape I have created, will this also be to much for XaraX to handle?? Enlarging anything to highly and too many objects on the same page ultimately will crash the program and I don't get to save my work. This has happened one to many times, not a happy camper about that, but I am learning to save all the time.

Seems to me that XaraX needs some further tweaking before adding anything else to the features list, but at the same time, I would LOVE something like this. Just out of this world!!!

Thanks for listening

RAMWolff [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[Trekart]

Had a look at the S-Sline demo and was admittedly impressed. For some, but not all types of image, the quality of enlargements is better than normal bicubic re-sampling, particularly for retaining sharpness on small details.

On first glance it would seem that Xara is closer maybe to this technology than you might think. Looking at the results using the S-Spline algorithm, some areas of a bitmap image (usually areas of high contrast) look very similar to the result of a bitmap trace in Xara.

I'm betting the S-Spline technology uses a clever method of identifying edges within a bitmap and applies a similar "vector trace" algorithm on the detected edge and combines that result into a bicubic or similar resample of the rest of the image - in essence it looks like S-Spline gives the best of both a regular resample and the equivalent of a bitmap trace.

Anyone agree?

Stu.