Xara Xchanges (2) Gel

[ivan louette]

Only playing for the fun with the standalone app of Auto FX Dream Suite, Gel series!

That's pretty simple to export a sample text or any drawing from Xara X as a transparent .png file and open it in Dream Suite afterwards.
To keep room enough around your objects, place a 100% transparent quadrangle on top of them and select all. That will help if you use some very excentred shadows in your Dream Suite.The wavy linear texture I have used for some objects was made of a blend between two lines in Xara X. I have exported it as a .png file too and placed this file in the bump map texture folder inside Dream Suite folder which is inside the Photoshop plugins one.

Enjoy,
ivan

[ivan louette]

Only playing for the fun with the standalone app of Auto FX Dream Suite, Gel series!

That's pretty simple to export a sample text or any drawing from Xara X as a transparent .png file and open it in Dream Suite afterwards.
To keep room enough around your objects, place a 100% transparent quadrangle on top of them and select all. That will help if you use some very excentred shadows in your Dream Suite.The wavy linear texture I have used for some objects was made of a blend between two lines in Xara X. I have exported it as a .png file too and placed this file in the bump map texture folder inside Dream Suite folder which is inside the Photoshop plugins one.

Enjoy,
ivan

[gwpriester]

that you could mask an image like that, Ivan. I'll have to try it out immediately.

Gary

Gary Priester

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XaraXone

[gwpriester]

I never realized you could do that. If you create a TrueColor + Alpha bitmap copy in Xara and then launch one of the DreamSuite products, Xara converts the image to 24-bit and strips out the alpha channel transparency.

But if you export the image as a PNG with alpha transparency, then launch a DreamSuite product, and open the image in DreamSuite, it works!

I'm off to see what else this works with.

Be back soon.

Gary

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[Christine Farrelly]

AutoFX are currently looking into why the option to load a mask is not working when Dreamsuite is used as a Plugin. It could be really useful if this could be made to work properly in Xara, at the moment although it appears to work while in Dreamsuite it fails to return anything to the host application. I have tried it with Xarax, Photopaint, Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro all with the same result.

Christine

[jclements]

Of someone doing some screen captures to illustrate the process of using Xara and Dreamsuite? For those of use who don't have Dreamsuite it hard to follow the textual explanation.

Thanks, John

[ivan louette]

Here are the four gel settings buttons ; browse between them to try all the possibilities. But first follow the minitut I will post in my next messages.

[ivan louette]

In Dreamsuite, the intensity of the effect is based on the presence and the level of transparency of the pixels in your image. Thus, you will have to create a drawing with transparent objects in Xara X and export it to a transparent .png file.

1. Draw your elements in Xara X and apply some transparency shapes, surround them by a 100% transparent larger quadrangle and export the whole to a transparent .png file ;

2. import this .png file to DreamSuite Gel series and apply "gel" without any presets ;

3. in DreamSuite, remove the background image and remove shadow (like on this sample) or not (remove it if you want create a shadow in Xara X afterwards) ; then play with the different settings, export your image to a transparent .png file and reopen it in Xara X.

Some results in my next message.

[ivan louette]

Here are the results.

4. Here a texture is added in DreamSuite, then the .png image is imported in Xara X where a shadow and a yellow hue are added ;

5. here the whole comes from DreamSuite (including the shadow) , I have played with the light color and some other things ;

6. idem with another color and another texture, but I have added an environment map (that's a reflexion of a photograph, which often gives a more natural look to your image).

Enjoy,
ivan