How did they show the rest of the cat in the demo?

[atomota]

Hello! I'm a hobbyist user who's been checking out the impressive Xara Xtreme, and I can't figure out how they did something in one of the demo movies, although I've learned a lot by trying, and I'm hoping someone can clue me in.

In the demo movie with the "catwoman" photo composition example, about 6:20 into the video at http://downloads.xara.com/products/x...ies/intro1.wmv, they use "live mask" to reveal the rest of the picture of the cat. I can't figure out how they did that. The closest I've come is use clipview to show a piece of a bitmap, then select the clipview, click the keyhole, and resize, but that is not what they're doing in the demo -- there is no keyhole in the demo, and the image is revealed in realtime as the size is changed, unlike my clipview where the image is revealed only after I release the mouse button.

The bigger picture of what I'm trying to do at the moment is photo composition like in the video -- being able to dynamically pick parts out of one image and overlay them smoothly into another, and being able to dynamically adjust the size, shape, rotation, feathering, etc., of the image would be really nice.

I also tried converting the bitmap to an editable shape, but resizing the shape scales the image, it doesn't reveal more of it.

Finally, congratulations to Xara for open-sourcing Xara Xtreme to get Linux support! Although I'm of course using it on Windows at the moment.

[Soquili]

Hi Atomota,

Welcome to the forum.

Watching the move it appears they used the Combine Shapes > Intersect Shapes to obtain the Cat's eye. This appears to remove the other parts of the Cat's image. The resulting shape can be resized and otherwise manipulated and the eye is the only part that is seen.

However, if you use the Shape Editor Tool to move the outer edges of the selected shape you can reveal hidden portions of the original photograph of the cat.

[Charles Moir]

Many people ask because this little trick is not explained, and it's a little known feature. When you resize an object you can select not to resize the fill (in this case a bitmap fill of the cat). If during the resize operation you press the numeric - minus key, it will not resize the fill. This works with all fills actually.

The eye is cut out of the cat by using Intersect shapes as Soquili says. The resulting shape has the cat image made into a fill, and the entire image is there (and is tiled in fact) so that as you resize the shape this way, the rest of the cat is revealed. So as you say this is like live masking.

Hope that answers your question.

[atomota]

Incredible. Thank you both Soquili and Charles. That is some support! I had tried intersect shapes; holding down the minus key was the missing link. Now that I know about it, I see it is mentioned in the line at the bottom of the window, I'd missed that before.

It's a bit of a stretch though to hold down both shift and minus to resize around the center .

FWIW, I'm now happy as a clam and have just paid my $79 + shipping with two days left on my demo. Since using Xara Xtreme won't be something I do every day (well, it would if I had the time, it's truly a pleasure to use), I probably won't be seen around here too much in the near future.