Sharpness and Clarity

[ashwinjain]

The first image is a button at www.communityzero.com
The second image is what I did in xara x
The third image is the second image sharpened in photoshop

How come the first button looks better than the other two? How could they have done it? Can't I get the same sharpness and clarity in Xara X?

Q

[ashwinjain]

The first image is a button at www.communityzero.com
The second image is what I did in xara x
The third image is the second image sharpened in photoshop

How come the first button looks better than the other two? How could they have done it? Can't I get the same sharpness and clarity in Xara X?

Q

[Steve Newport]

The problem is Xara's antialiasing, it's very strong and I've had the same problem with it too, most of the time only with small text or details. Sorry, can't tell you how to fix it because I don't know either!

Steve Newport

[alkolka]

Duplicate the text (CNTRL+K) on top of itself. It causes a reduction in the apparent anit-aliasing.

[Trekart]

Small type is always troublesome to ant-alias correctly, and in most cases it is better to not anti-alias at all, as in the top button in your example.

I had a play around myself and produced the following 4 buttons.

The first is created in Xara as anyone might do. The second is the same image but with an unsharp mask applied.

Sometimes I find that exporting un-antialiased from Xara as a larger image, then re-sampling back to the correct dimensions can provide better results in some cases, which is what I did with the third button. Paintshop Pro seems to do a better job of resampling than Photoshop also.

To obtain your desired result however, it is most definately a case of using a bitmap editor for what it is good at.

To obtain the bottom button I exported it from Xara without the text and cleaned it up by (gasp) manually removing the anti-aliasing artefacts.

I then simply typed my desired text in a windows editor (the truetype engine does a nice clean job with small type). I captured the window into Paintshop Pro, copied it to the clipboard, pasted as a new layer onto my button backdrop, merged layers and removed the white areas surrounding the text by using the flood fill tool.

The result is perfectly clean text on a button.


Stu.

[Trekart]

If you are prepared to play around a bit further, by resizing the picture up, applying a slight blur then resampling back down, you can obtain what is a slightly less "clinical" appearance, but none the less a clean button [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Stu

[frits]

Hello Guys,

Why don't you turn the anti aliasing off? Don't you get the same result as the first image?

Regards,
Frits Hogewoning

[gwpriester]

These were all created within Xara X with no outside help.

When I tried to recreate the buttons same size, they looked like dog meat. So I created the button at 200% and then reduced it down to size.

I also experimented with creating the bitmap copy at 300 dpi and 192 dpi (twice 96 dpi). Not sure if it helped or not.

The bottom of the three buttons has the lowest amount of Xara's sharpness filter applied.

And this image posted here was exported at normal screen quality. You need the anti-aliasing when you create the bitmap, but not when you export it.

Gary

Gary Priester

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[Klaus Nordby]

For YEARS, I have told the folks at Xara that XX's exports are too soft and fuzzy and that we therfore need an unsharp-masking control (and oversampling) for file exports.

No reply, no fix, same old fuzzy images forever.

So we must waste our time by opening XX-made bitmaps in an image editor and do unsharp-masking there.

K
www.xaraxone.com/FeaturedArt/kn/
www.klausnordby.com/xara

[williama]

This image was created with Xara, and Notepad.

The text was typed in Notepad (as per Stuart's suggestion). You can change the font to whatever you like. Screen shot - Alt+Print Screen, paste into Xara.

Colour the bitmap in Xara using the line and fill colours. Slice out the bit containing the text, and add it to your image.

The lines, and the square are all Xara shapes. Just make sure that they are sized and placed in even pixels.