A totally worthless piece of software

[Charles Moir]

Richard, to make it clear XPE WILL support Photoshop plug-ins, including 32-bit ones we hope. This will be true of the stand-alone and integrated version in Xara X.

Later versions of Xara X will also do away with that old tiny Special Effects dialog.

And to answer your question Judi about file space, it's one of those confusing areas about JPEGs. But John is dead right. A JPEG is typically compressed about 10 times compared to the original photo - which is why it's so great. But load the picture into any photo editor and it expands to the full 20 Mbyte size in memory. Save it as a JPEG again and it's compressed back to 2Mbytes or thereabouts, so that's OK (but you really don't want to do that too often as your image will deteriorate.)

But load the file into other drawing or illustration programs that you might use to compose your graphics in, and then save the file as a native Illustrator file (or whatever program you're using) and you will see your file is now 20Mbytes large. Make 2 copies of the photo and save from Illustrator and your file is now 60Mbytes.

[Judi A]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>But load the file into other drawing or illustration programs that you might use to compose your graphics in, and then save the file as a native Illustrator file (or whatever program you're using) and you will see your file is now 20Mbytes large. Make 2 copies of the photo and save from Illustrator and your file is now 60Mbytes. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Okay I opened a 60kb jpg in Painter, checked the file size and it was now 869kb, did a "save as" .RIF and now it is 1.10mb However I don't see why I would want several varations of the picture in one file. Well I take that back I have done that in Xara, when using the bitmap editor, because I can compare the various versions side by side, where it would be more inconvient to do that in Painter.

[RAMWolff44]

Thanks so much Charles for the confirmations on the 32bit area, that's really nice to know!! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

The info on compressed and uncompressed image files is VERY good info to know too, I was not aware of much of this info, so thanks to John and Charles both!! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[roman]

Any chance there would be hand retouch tools like blur, sharpen, clone and similar which user could use to edit the pixel content of the image? Interactive color balance, levels and curves would be also nice.

[raynerj]

Dmagician,

don't try to make photoshop out of this app. Play with the lower right hand slider on the enhance toolbar. Slide it to the left for blur, to the right for sharpen. The other three sliders adjust the color, brightness and contrast. Clone you already have in xara itself...

[roman]

JohnR that question wasn't aimed at you but at Charles.

I've tested the XPE and know what it does. I just consider retouching of photos very important part of the creative process and if it would be possible to avoid basic bitmap processing of photographs completely, that would save us of necessity of running 2 applications (bitmat editor and vector editor) at the same time. Also there is not possibility of cutting and pasting of of e.g. complex vector outlined body (with e.g. shadow) into some bitmap editor, then retouching it and putting back to xara. IMO plugins aren't that important as retouch tools. Thinking of it, maybe there is some plugin for retouching, then forget my question and just gimme the link so I can test it ;-).

[jclements]

Dmagician,

I think you have brought up some interesting ideas.

Many PShop plug-ins required a mask (aka path aka selection) so I think that the use of a simple drawing tool like Xara has to draw a mask shape (and possibly be remembered in xml index like the crop tool is) would be kind of nice.

[RTK]

Dmagician,

If Xara were to implement your suggestion, it would for sure make XPE stick out of the crowd a bit. Xara X's Curve Tool and Feathering Feature would make creating masks very easy...

[roman]

Yes, that would be extremely powerful!!!

[AntonyF]

As the initial post of this thread seems to have been covered, and Charles has responded to Judi's concerns, I'm closing this thread.

But feel free to start any new dedicated topics for any specific issues raised in this thread.