Member
Magic Red Lines
Greetings All,
Xtreme is going to be great. Plus, the magic red lines are more in evidence.
Pick a few hundred (or thousand) shapes from a bitmap trace and bevel or coutour them. See the magic red lines !?! Amazing. Now try to screen grab them. Not so easy. My best attempt is attached.
Rgds,
tad
Member
Re: Magic Red Lines
Hi Tad,
I just happened to have a traced bitmap on my computer. I opened it and ungrouped it (took 2 minutes), then had no problem seelcting the 21K shapes... see screenshot.
Member
Re: Magic Red Lines
If you are after a good vector trace and you do not want to import the background, then simplify the drawing via posterization, touching up or eliminating the areas before you to the tracing first.
Xara's tracing ability is good, however, if you ask it to do the impossible, it is going to try to do it anyway. When vectorization occurs this way, it is not the way you would draw it if you started from scratch: you might draw 15 shapes and decide that it would be handy if those shapes were grouped. So in your drawing you have lots of groups and sub-groups or you may also organize with layers. However, you have one group typically in vectorization and then you have all the items as individual shapes and editing can be horrible.
Simplify your bitmap first.
A good design balances areas which are complicated with areas which are simple in order to give the eye a chance to rest. When everything is emphasized, nothing is important.
If you do need to have the whole thing vectorized, then do it in sections and reassemble later.
Member
Re: Magic Red Lines
Hi Sally thanks for the tip... I had a very nice photorealistic trace done many years ago with corelxara 1.5... The attached screenshot is the same file without all the 21,000 shapes selected.
If ya can't be smart, at least you can be a smart a$$...
Member
Re: Magic Red Lines
Yes but,,,,,,,,,,
The red lines appear when you contour or bevel a shape. Not such a big deal, they just show where you are going. However, if you have a few hundred or thousand shapes selected they bounce around a lot. I have been facinated with them since the early CorelXara days. Seems almost impossible to screen grab. Probably something to do with video refresh rate. Who knows ??
Nice to know that I am interested in the "really important" Xara features, yes...
Rgds,
tad
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