Feathering clipped bitmaps

[Sunny7]

Hello everybody,

this is driving me crazy:

I have a bitmap which was professionally clipped for me by a designer in Photoshop, so I have a PSD file which shows a person with a transparent background. I import that PSD into Xara Xtreme and put a rectangle with my new desired background color behind it.

Now the edges of the person are a too hard. I want to use feathering to make it blend slightly more into the background. However I can not use the feathering option on the bitmap.

What do I need to do (see example)?

Thank you for your help!!!

Sunny

[Egg Bramhill]

Welcome Sunny,

You can't feather the bimap the way you require because the bitmap is a rectangle and not the shape of your person/subject(?)

You'll need to cut the person/subject from the bitmap and then you'll be able to do it.

[Egg Bramhill]

CLICK HERE to view a tutorial on the subject.

[gwpriester]

Welcome to the Xtreme Conference Sunny.

Bitmaps with transparency are still rectangular. Because part of the bitmap is transparent it would seem like this is not the case.

In Photoshop the background was made transparent by drawing a mask area to protect the image and making the rest of the image invisible.

In Xara, as Egg's video will show, you can also draw a mask around the image, but unlike Photoshop, you can mask the image inside the mask shape which can be any size or shape, and then feather the shape.

The alternative is to bring your image back into Photoshop and add the feathering there. This would be a lot easier. (But you would not learn as much )

Gary

[Egg Bramhill]

Gary,

I don't use PS so I don't know much about these things, but wouldn't it be possible to use the PS mask as a slicing shape on the photograph? That's assumimg the masking shape imports within the PSD file.

[Sunny7]

Thank you for your replies. And thank you for understanding my problem ;-)

The instructional video is great but the suggestion does not make sense for me:
I have paid a professional clipping service to do the clipping because the rest of the photo is quite complex. And they did a great job! It would not make any sense to re-do the same manual clipping in Xara again.

I have Photoshop Elements and I am trying to get the feathering to work in Photoshop now, so that I can import the already featherd PSD file onto XARA. I just don't seem to get it done in Photoshop...

Thank you anyway!
Sunny

[PhilM]

Hi Sunny,

Use the "Bitmap Feather" LiveEffect.

Select your photo, go to the LiveEffect tool, click New, choose Bitmap Feather from near the top of the menu. Then use the normal feather control to fine-tune the feather amount.

Phil

[Luciano]

Phil, great, great.

I never realized the difference between bitmap feathering and normal feathering.
This is really useful.

Now, what is the real difference between bitmap shadow and normal shadow?

Thank you again

Luciano

[gwpriester]

Wow! That's one that I never knew.

Normal feathering feathers the rectangle and bitmap feathering feathers the non-transparent image. Brilliant.

Phil - Is this a new feature with 3.2?

Gary

[PhilM]

I'm glad that the feature has finally found a use!

It was introduced with Live Effects so that you can feather the results of applying a live effect to an object (rather than only being able to feather the object before the live effect is applied).

Bitmap Shadow was introduced for a similar reason but its use is a bit more subtle because normal shadows can already cope with alpha-channel bitmaps. (It's so subtle that I can't remember exactly what the point of it is right now - too tired.)

Phil