Antialiasing/feathering in Xtereme Pro exports

[pauland]

I thought I'd have a go at exporting a circle as a png with a transparent background from Xtreme Pro. No matter what settings I use, Xara always seems to want to feather the edges of curves, leaving me with a fringe around the edges of the background colour.

I tried this exercise (with a circle) in Fireworks and had no fringing at all (OK, a bit jagged, perhaps, but the transparency was perfect, not fringed).

Can I get a 'perfect' transparency from Xtreme as a png without fringing from the background.

Paul

[Soquili]

Paul do you have a link to an example showing the fringing?

Are you using True Color with Alpha when you export?

If you are using 256 color with transparency you must use the same background color in your work as the page the png will be over. That is true with .gif and .png regardless of what application is used to create them.


A True Color with Alpha .png can be used over any background. However, older web browsers and in particular Internet Explorer before version 7 will have a gray background where the Alpha transparency should be.

[pauland]

Paul do you have a link to an example showing the fringing?

It's pretty simple to reproduce.

I've made a black circle on a document with a red background, then exported the circle as 256 colour transparent png. If you open the png file, you will see that it has a red fringe at the edges.

This doesn't happen with Fireworks. Xara Circle is bottom left, fireworks circle on right. The fireworks circle was over a transparent background, when imported to Xtreme it has no fringing at all.

Paul

[Soquili]

Paul fireworks is exporting with no antialiasing. That is why it has jaggies. You can do the same from Xtreme, change the view quality before exporting. Windows Menu > Quality > Normal.

The attachment is the same drawing as my previous post but is 256 color with transparency and view quality set to normal. Notice the jaggies.

[pauland]

Thanks Soquili - I hadn't considered changing the view quality as a way of affecting the export. Now I know better!

Paul

[Soquili]

Paul, you are welcome.

It took awhile before I caught on to the view quality working for the drawing view and the exported image.

[pauland]

Paul, you are welcome.

It took awhile before I caught on to the view quality working for the drawing view and the exported image.

Yes, I think it's a bit of a bizarre way of doing things. Personally I'd expect the export dialog to control what happens, not what I've chosen as my display options. That said, it does allow for some interesting choices, exporting the shape outlines, etc.

Paul

[gwpriester]

As you can see, Xara anti-aliases to the page color. And a properly anti-aliased GIF or 8-bit PNG is going to look a whole lot better, not to mention sharper even though the edge is softer.

There are two things you can do to improve your exported images. Change the page background color by holding down the Ctrl key and dragging and dropping any color from the screen palette onto the screen, or just by placing a larger rectangle under your art that is the color of your web page. Select your objects but not the rectangle, and Xara will anti-alias to the page color or the rectangle color and you will have a much cleaner image than Fireworks.

Trust me. I'm a doctor. Well, OK I'm not really a doctor, but...

[pauland]

LOL Gary, I trust you, and you were outlining what I would normally do. In this case I was experimenting with a web design in using png combined with CSS layers and irregular shapes. I wanted to use PNG because I didn't want my design to be dependent on which colour overlaid which other, which is the problem with transparent gifs.

Before anyone chimes in telling me that PNG support is patchy amongst browsers - yes I know - it's just an experiment, though the unaliased images are so bad, I'm going to pass on this one.

Paul

[WolfMoonHP]

Gary...

You are always dropping little pearls of wisdom! If I had ever known about using the CTRL key to change background color, I'd forgotten it.

It's a lot easier than making the background rectangle.

Thanks...
---
Will