Automatically cutting around image & making background transparent (using XPGD6)

[molucca]

Space Bar??? I was drawing along the shape. It worked reasonable well. I don't have much hand control. Magic wand and erasing have a tolorance.

Looks good as well as you can see. Like the ringer on a phone, sounds good, but it doesn't mean anything. There still may be pixels you don't see.

They can become a problem in other applications. I might draw an object for separation and get a clear backgoround and then fix any minor places.

Rich

[rpc9943]

interesting. I didn't mean to sound like it was ineffective, perhaps the cartoon pictures with white background simply have unseen jpeg artifacting. It isn't working too well on my end, perhaps it's the pictures im trying to use it with.

This is one of the last frustrating things about xara, that it has no auto select. I could eliminate backgrounds in seconds using (yuck) photoshop, whereas it would take 2-25 minutes to trace manually the outlines of an object in xara.

RonC

[zaphodeist]

Xara is not a raster application, it's a vector application which can work with bitmaps in 'vector space' (imported bitmaps are vector shapes with bitmap fills, never the original bitmap). Covoxer's suggestion of the Trace Mode tool (magic 'snapping to high contrast areas' lasso) is much better than Photoshops 'tolerances' for similar pixel values. But it's what people are comfortable with I guess

You can always assign PS as your bitmap editor

[rpc9943]

i realize that xara is a vector software. Have I said things to indicate that I think it is raster-based? I'm not getting it.

[instinctive.de]

The problem with all the confusion concerning raster/vector in regard to Xara is that Xara themselves don't really know if it is a vector or raster app Think "Photo document". Really, Xara tries to be both, which can be confusing, and the UI is deliberately designed to hide the difference in many ways.

(Now for something constructive: Doesn't somebody know about a "Magic Wand PS Plugin"? A plugin where you could simply click around with a magic wand like in PS or Gimp, and the plugin then returns the selected areas replaced with transparency? Pretty much a "Mehdi Eraser on steroids"

[haakoo]

I used to use this http://www.photo-freeware.net/deep-paint.php
it's freeware and has the ability to exchange live bitmap files between the two apps and works with xtreme
Don't know if it works with dp6 or 7

Hans

[haakoo]

Seems it doesn't work as a ps plugin anymore but if you apply deeppaint as the bitmapeditor in dp7 (so dp6 should work too) it does work
Oh I know it's old but has great features and a magicwand
FYI two of it's developers also created kai's powertools and are the creators of the painting program ArtRage

Hans

[instinctive.de]

I wonder why Xara hasn't yet put a magic wand into the Photo Tool... they've already put a lot of other bitmap-editor-like features there Just like the "Enhance" stuff modifies the bitmap data itself, a Magic wand could just do the same and modify the alpha channel...

[haakoo]

Was a bit to hasty or it hadn't registered yet.
it works as a plugin still.

Hans

[rpc9943]

is that copy legit?

RonC