Colouring a downloaded image

[AndyD]

HI All,

I purchased a balloon graphic (.gif) from clipart.com. But I wanted to change its colour for a rollover effect on a web page. Unfortunatley when I try to colour it the whol image including background gets painted. I wanted to preserve the transparency of the background. The edges of the original image are a bit pixelated in the image with transpareny too. Can anyone suggest anyways I can resolve either of these issues?

Thanks
Andy

[Craig1128]

I'm by no means an 'expert', but as far as changing the colors of a clip art, I used the bitmap tracer, ungrouped it and then I could click on a part of it and change the color...

[AndyD]

Sorry, but I am lost straight away... Only bought and downloaded Xara Xtreme a day or two ago, as I was impressed with the tutorial videos. Care to elaborate oh how you did it please...?

Cheers
Andy

[molucca]

I photographed a few baloons blowing in the wind. The colors weren't that great, and were somewhat limited. I drew an object around the outline of each baloon, and clipped it from the image. This gave me several baloons in a vector drawings. You can make the odjects into PNG/alpha images to have just a bitmap baloon with a transparent background. I made clones of the baloons and recolored a few. I used a AAA plugin for the attached image showing a difference in the yellow baloon. I made a pearl brush for the baloon strings, and drew new strings where needed.

The XAR file is 605 KB, and maybe too large to post.

Rich

[Craig1128]

I am still pretty new to this program myself… the place I started and I think it would benefit any ‘beginner’ to the program is a series of pages that are referred to as the ‘Xara X Manual’… you’ll see them begin in Issue 16 on this page:
http://www.xaraxone.com/html/webxealot.htm

There are tons of helpful things such as this in the whole Web Site…
http://www.xaraxone.com/

I would recommend spending some time here learning the basic controls if you haven’t already.

About the clip-art, I was referring to… import the clip-art into Xara… start the Bitmap Tracer under Utilities… It might be helpful to read up on what each control does… I kinda play with them until I get a decent result, I’d set the accuracy high, the Final color tolerance and minimum area low… hit trace and a small version will appear, if you feel the result is sufficient then hit insert… what this does is turn the bitmap clip-art into a vector shape…

Select the clip-art trace, ungroup it (in arrange)… click blank space to get nothing selected, then you can select a portion of the clip-art and then click a color to change that part of the clip-art to another color…

This is very simple for simple clip-arts but if there are a lot of color variations or colors that blend, it may be quicker to re-trace the graphic and you can color the new shapes however you want.

I hope this helps you understand the process I was talking about… I’m very impressed with the Xara programs and it’s been fun learning and continuing to learn how the program works and all the different things it can do.

[graphicsfactory]

I believe you do not understand the difference between vector images and bitmap images.

The clip art piece you purchased (a GIF file) is a bitmap image. Meaning the image is made up of small dots (pixels) of color. Such images are resolution (the number of pixels per inch) dependant, and when enlarged will become very pixelated (jaggy looking). In order to actualy modify the image, such as changing the colors of the image, you would need a paint program like Photoshop or CorelPaint.

Xara Xtreme is a vector program. Vector images are made up objects with an outline and fill. They are not resolution dependant. In other words, no matter how big you enlarge it, it will always print as crisp as your printer can print.

However, Xtreme does have some special capabilites that allow you to modify bitmap images in certain ways. But you cannot change the colors in the image.

So in order to change the image, you must do one of two things. First you could use the various tools within Xtreme to recreate the image as a vector image. Than you can make each part whatever color you wish. The second is to use the "bitmap tracer" tool. Essentially that is doing the same thing, except Xtreme will do it for you. You may need to experiment some to get the best results.

There are many related training videos downloadable from Xara that will explain in a little more depth...good luck!

[Egg Bramhill]

graphicsfactory's advice is very sound. To understand the difference between Vectors & Bitmaps (i.e. gifs, jpgs, pngs) click here
Egg

[AndyD]

many thanks for the explanations. I do know the difference between bitmap and vector images, but thanks for the concise explanations in any case.
So from this I believe I have to embark upon a little playing with the software. I treid to use the balloon gif I have as part of a navigation bar as a transparent gif as the background of the page is a cartoon sky so various shades of blue and white.... needless to say the balloons look terrible at the moment.
The site I am working on is for a friend and can be viewed at http://www.kingdomoffun.co.uk/indextest.htm

Cheers
Andy

[Jon G]

There are some balloons in vector clipart, included with xara.

If you export one of those as transparent gif, placed against the same background as in the intended web page you will minimise the jagged anti-alias edges.

[molucca]

I tried saving a baloon to a 256 color GIF to see how the filters would work. The filters did work, and I was able to change colors. However, the filters saw the GIf with an opaque background instead of transparent.

The baloons were images in objects, and the filters worked. I saved out to PNG/alpha 32 bit, and the filters worked, also. I have several plugins that will make a color change.

Rich