Advanced Color Properties - Share your Tips, Techniques, or Suggestions for their Use

[HayTay]

Recently, I've been trying to incorporate Xara Xtreme's Advanced Color Functions, including Tints, Shades, Linked Colors, Named Colors, and Spot Colors, into my drawings to make them more flexible. Besides the Xtreme Help file and manual, several example drawings in the Design Gallery and Gary Priester's Xara Xone Workbook #43 article entitled Editing Named Colors there seems to be little information available on the subject. My take on Gary's Workbook #43 is attached. Using Shades of a Color is a quick, easy and powerful way to quickly add or change an objects color attributes.

To me, the ability to better control and adjust drawings and objects color schemes is a very powerful feature of Xara Xtreme. So far, I've been learning through trial, error, and practice. I know that several other users (right off, Ron Duke springs to mind) take advantage of the advanced color properties within Xtreme. So, that said, I'd like to be able to reduce my learning curve on this subject while trying to introduce others to advanced color control.

Anyone who incorporates Tints, Shades, Linked, Named or Spot Colors into their drawings and is willing to share any tips, tricks, suggestions, or techniques you've picked up along the way I would like to hear from you. This includes planning a new drawings color scheme, incorporating advanced color control into an existing drawing, the best way to get your color palette set up on the color line, when to use a tint, a shade, a linked color, a named color, or spot color (and why), or anything else that is helpful when it comes to color in XX or XWD.

Your color suggestions welcome here,
Harry

.

[Egg Bramhill]

Here's a video I did a few years back Harry.

[Egg Bramhill]

[HayTay]

Egg,

Those are two excellent video tutorials. I like how you use the base color as the middle color and extrapolate or blend from there to make the 5 colors to either side of your base. I don't know how I missed that first tutorial of yours when I was looking for reference material on named colors. It would have saved me a chunk of time.

That second video shows the true power and time saving potential of using named colors, tints, and shades of colors. Since I've been trying out the advanced color features on Gary's colored sphere examples in my OP, I have a time saving tip in regards to creating object copies then quickly changing and adding the new colors to the color line as shown in your second video.

I've found that it's much faster to copy the original shapes (Ctrl+C), change the color of the original object(s) via the named colors, then paste the copy of the shapes back into the original drawing (Ctrl+V or Ctrl+Shft+V). The results are the same as in the video, two objects of different colors with their colors added to the color line, but without having to paste the objects into another document only to copy and paste the objects back into the original document after recoloring. No doubt, that was probably about as clear as mud. For anybody that didn't quite follow that, let me know and I'll try to clarify it a bit more.

Thanks for the vids,
Harry

[Egg Bramhill]

Yes, clever idea Harry. The copy on the clipboard retains the original named colour. Good one, never crossed my mind to do it that way.

[HayTay]

I'm glad I could help you out after you helped me out, Egg. Only 4 replies into this thread and we've already learned something.

[Egg Bramhill]

Yes it's a feature a lot of people steer clear of but it's fantastic once you've got the hang of it. Attached is a xar with a named colour and and shades thereof.

[slavelle]

Using the copy buffer to hold a temporary copy is brilliant - thanks for sharing.

[HayTay]

You're welcome, slavelle. Every once in a while I have a fleeting moment of inspiration.

[handrawn]

Good on You Harry - great example of using the clipboard for storage

I even went so far as to suggest in Dear Xara that we have multiple clipboards in xtreme - this was played down, it was looked at mainly from a MS Word point of view I think - but here you are providing an example of what I had in mind.