January 2013 Video Tutorial - Working With Live Effects

[Barbara B]

Working With Live Effects is this month's Xara Xone tutorial on XaraXone.com


One of the most under-used tools on the Xara Toolbar for hardcore illustrators is the Live Effects button. But once you’ve tapped into bitmap effects such as distortions, color filtering, and even third party plug-ins you can buy, you’ll wonder how you did without Live Effects! It’s the easier road from artistic problem to solution, and this month, Gary takes you on a tour of some of the creative possibilities for filters in design work.

Plug in, turn on, get your fill of filters! And the show us your work, of course.

[angelize]

I found this tutorial quite interesting, I learned something about the colour with gradient live effect.

Here is my attempt at the tutorial (I couldn't resist doing it in red!)

[stygg2003]

I found this tutorial quite interesting, I learned something about the colour with gradient live effect.

Here is my attempt at the tutorial (I couldn't resist doing it in red!)

Well done Francis. I've not got round to doing this yet, still working on your Valentine Card which is really neat.

Stygg

[angelize]

The tutorial got me playing around with the colour with gradient effect and it's an interesting way to recolour seamless tiling bitmaps, and a black and white gradient can be used to turn a full colour image vector or bitmap into a greyscale image.

[Gare]

Although I emphasized the Color with Gradient filter this month, the "Big Point" I might not have successfully made is that there are a LOT of native filters, and you can more easily do certain things with them to finish a composition than slaving over shapes for hours on end.

Example? A fairly common effect you see on the web is an object reflecting into the ground plane. The reflection is blurry and it fades to nothing toward the bottom of the composition.

Okay, you can do this sometimes using the Photo tool and the sharpen/blur feature on the Infobar, but it is limited in its blurriness, while the Gaussian Blur Live Effect can blur a chosen selection so dramatically it impair your vision!

Then you use the Transparency tool in linear mode to finish the effect. I've attached the file if anyone would like to do something similar. You just "can't get there from here" sometimes without a filter.



My Best,

Gary
(This is what happens when you fail to budget an example into a tutorial's time frame...)

[stygg2003]

That is a really neat effect Gary, I will try this on some image when I've done the Jan. tut. Only just finished the tut. by Francis, not enough hours in a day

Stygg

[Gare]

Thanks, Stygg—

Let me see if I can't do a mini-tutorial, an extension of this month's tute. I ran out of time before I ran out of ideas, and the Live Effects feature itself is worthy of more if not continued exploration.

-g

[stygg2003]

Finally got round to working with filters and never knew you could do all you did Gary with the Be-pop image. The one question I have is, the finished image, mine, looks a bit jaggy, is this normal or did I miss something out

Stygg

[Gare]

You missed something and my apologies for not getting the transcript up sooner; I'm still typing it.

Live Effects are essentially bitmap filters, but Xara tricks them into working with vector shapes because Xara creates and updates a bitmap version on the fly to display onscreen and to export to bitmap file format.

Now, a bitmap (would anyone like a monthly tutorial on the finer points of how to work with bitmaps?) is resolution-dependent, a fancy way of saying "all the image information this image will ever have is right here." However, because the Live Effect you applied to the Green Girl is a vector shape underneath the bitmap filter effect, Xara gives you an option you eventually want to lock into when you export your work to bitmap format (such as PNG and JPEG). When the Live Effect tool is your current tool and a Live Effect-ed shape is selected, up on the Infobar you can choose from a number of different resolutions. The lowest of the default settings is 96, or screen resolution.

And I'll betcha that's what is chosen and why your image is displaying pixellation, the visibility of the color placeholders that make up a bitmap.



Crank it up to 300 and you should see a more refined finished composition, Stygg. You have View Quality set to max in the document, too, right? Sometimes that slider works its way to the left all on its own, I swear.

Anyhow, I did cover it for 2.3 seconds in the video and the transcript should serve everyone well when I get it done and Barbara posts it.

It's her birthday on Saturday, by the way.

Please don't get her anything expensive, okay?

My Best,

Gary

[Karateed]

Ah Gare,

She's got you, what more could she possibly want? and thanks for the explanation.....