(mostly) Newbie Questions Designer Pro X10

[phurm]

I have just downloaded the trial version of Xara Designer Pro X10 to evaluate. I have 30 days left before the trial ends and need to determine if this software will work for my project. So far I definitely expect it will but need get more familiar.

I have true color scans of about 150 World War One photos that I need to process with the hopes of publishing them into a book.

I am working on developing the general processes to use but I know I will have questions as I go so I expect to be posting here but also hope not to overdo it!

Now my first few questions:

1 – Can someone point me to the correct support area to contact the Xara folks to determine how much it will cost to upgrade? I own Xara X1 so should not have to pay full price but with my limited budget I can’t afford a full new version or even the upgrade if it is too much. I don’t want to get all excited about the “new to me” photo processing features only to not be able to afford them.

2 – I need to crop the album pages to a common size. I was thinking to create a rectangle of the proper (standard) size and use that as a guide to overlay on the photo to use as a crop guide. How do I do that? Or at least, what is the best way to get some sort of standard size crop area to use on all the album pages?

3 – I’m just starting so haven’t researched this yet, but if someone can point me directly to tutorials about working on black and white photos it would be appreciated. This will cut down on time lost to looking for tutorials so I can spend my remaining evaluation time on actually learning the software.

In case you’re interested, below are some links that give more detail and examples on this project.

www.typicalfrenchkiddies.tumblr.com
www.typicalfrenchkiddies.com
www.facebook.com/typicalfrenchkiddies

Thanks in advance for any thoughts and help.

Paul
paulhurm@gmail.com

[gwpriester]

I do not think that X1 will qualify for a discount. That is a pretty ancient version.

Look at Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 10. It has the photo tools but not all the web features of Designer Pro X10. And it does not cost as much.

The simplest way to work with old photos is select the bitmap then open the Photo Tool > Brightness Levels Dialog tool and press Auto. This will automatically correct the photo. If the photo is washed out, I like to make a Clone duplicate and apply Stained Glass transparency to the clone. Then select both images and Create a Bitmap Copy, True Color and in your case, set the resolution to 150dpi.

[handrawn]

currently under intro offer at 159 US to upgrade

http://www.xara.com/us/designer-pro/upgrade/

look under 'Photo & Graphic Designer 10 or older ' - the 'more info' shows you the products listed, goes back to xara x

that said, Gary may be right in that the less expensive version will do - that is currently on intro offer for upgrade at 59 US:

http://www.xara.com/us/photo-graphic-designer/buy/

' [upgrade]From Photo & Graphic Designer / Xtreme - Older versions to Photo & Graphic Designer 10' halfway down the page

[Egg Bramhill]

2 – I need to crop the album pages to a common size. I was thinking to create a rectangle of the proper (standard) size and use that as a guide to overlay on the photo to use as a crop guide. How do I do that? Or at least, what is the best way to get some sort of standard size crop area to use on all the album pages?

From your links I can't tell at what resolutions your images have been created in, they are very small on these web sites.

Normally old photo's of this era tended to be either portrait or landscape of a regular size but it appears that your images are of many different dimensions.

So creating some standard crop size won't be easy.

Not impossible but requiring more work than if the photos were of regulat sizes.

[phurm]

I want to thank everyone for the replies so far. I have been away / without computer access thus the delay.

I was looking around a bit more and I wonder if I started this thread in an inappropriate forum. I had gone to the "XaraZone" one since I usually go to the XaraZone site first, but it appears that this forum should be for questions about that site rather than for my type of "how to" questions.

Should I move this thread to a different forum? If so, which is best? Should I somehow get a moderator to do the moving so that what has already been posted remains together and will flow better with future discussions?

Suggestions on the above appreciated.

I do have a reply and more info towards Egg's comments on the cropping issue but I will wait to see if this thread should be and/or gets moved.

Paul

[tonylondon]

2 – I need to crop the album pages to a common size. I was thinking to create a rectangle of the proper (standard) size and use that as a guide to overlay on the photo to use as a crop guide. How do I do that? Or at least, what is the best way to get some sort of standard size crop area to use on all the album pages?

You could produce one page and get it the way you want it, then duplicate the page and change the photo. If you use clip view you can adjust the area of the photo under the clip at any time as the rest of the photo remains in tact but hidden

[phurm]

To add info in reference to Egg's comments - I have reduced size photos on the sites you would have looked at so those places won't represent what I have as my masters.

My masters were scanned at 600 DPI, Full Color and saved as TIFFs. Those are what I would work from to create what would eventually go in the book.

I have scans of both the full page and then I also scanned each individual photo separately.

For my current set of questions I am concerned about working with the full page scans, not individual photos.

I am still struggling with many aspects of this project. (and getting discouraged and wanting to give up but not quite ready to do that). I'm currently thinking to maintain the general feel you would get if you were looking through the original album. The book you would be holding would be bigger than the original though. On each page would be a full sized view of the original album page. The original hand written captions can be hard to read so I am thinking that the space around the page view would contain typed versions of the captions to make reading easier.

When I started the scanning process, I realized that the album would not lay flat on the scanner so I chose to undo the binding. The binding was two metal tubes about a quarter inch in diameter. Each page has two holes in it and was slipped over these tubes. With the covers in place, a string was run through the tubes and knotted to hold things sturdy.

When I scanned each page, I scanned the full piece of paper and usually a little extra space around the edges. My pages thus include a little over an inch of paper that would actually have been within the binding. These scans also show the two holes that slid over the tubes.

Since I am thinking about showing the full album page, I want that view to be as close as possible to looking through the original album. I want to get rid of the extra space that was within the binding and thus not show the holes where the tubes were. Essentially I would crop out anything from the crease where the page folded to include the binding area.

This is the underlying reason for wanting to have a standard size crop mask. I want to crop out the unneeded space where the holes show and thus have a standard size for the remainder of the page.

I hope this helps a bit and I will try to attach a sample photo page to illustrate the holes etc.

[handrawn]

are all your scans the same size and keyed in from the same edge[s] ?

[wizard509]

are all your scans the same size and keyed in from the same edge[s] ?

If they are, you could make a rectangle the size of the area you want to keep and either select both and intersect shapes or put your rectangle to the back and clipview. I don't know how many pages you have and the scans probably won't all be in exactly the same place so either of those could cause problems. Maybe what you should do is use guide lines for two of the sides (say bottom and right side)and another guide for the location you want to remove then it would be a relative simple matter to align the scan and the mask. Just saying, but in my opinion the idea should work ok.

[angelize]

Hello phurm,

First this post has been moved into the Xara Graphics Chat area. I think I did this a couple of days ago. A redirect was left in the original location

Now to your questions,

I would use the scans of the indivdual photos and recreate the album pages this is not that hard to do. You can then move your photos around on your pages, have more than one photo per page for small ones etc.

First you will need to go into options (right click on the page and select page options) check double page spread and I'm guessing here but it sounds like you may need to set up a custom page size. You want to set the page to be large enough to leave space (a gutter) at the edge where the double spreads meet for binding and you may need to set a bleed area.(note: my attached file does not have a bleed set up as this would need to be done to the printers specifications) Your printer ( I am assuming you are having this professionally printed) will be able to give you the measurements for the gutter and bleed etc. Set up guidelines to layout these areas

Once you have one double page spread laid out open the page and layer gallery and duplicate this page. Now you should have two double page spreads. the first one will be your front and back covers and the second one will be your first set of pages. Xara does not have the capability to automatically layout your pages in a book format(folios) so you will need to do this manually. I use a set of dummies to plan out my pages. This is just a set of sheets of plain paper folded to represent my booklet, I number them and use a pencil to mark out what is going where. As you build your album you will need to layout your pages in order for example a small 8 page newsletter printed double side on two sheets of paper would have the folios laid out like this
pg 8 pg 1
pg 2 pg 7

pg 6 pg 3
pg 4 p5 (this would be the center pages)

To recreate the album background bring one of your album pages into the program (drag and drop from an explorer window). Make sure that snap to objects is enabled, click the magnet icon on the toolbar. Select the rectangle tool. Click and drag starting from the top right corner of your page down to the bottom left to create a rectangle the size of your page (you should see the cursor change to a magnet when it snaps) With this rectangle selected use the eydropper tool to sample the darkest colour from the album background. select the fill tool and change the fill to fractal plasma. Click the center fill handle and use the eydropper tool to sample the lightest colour in the album background. You will most likely need to zoom in to get the colours. With the fill tool active click along the horizontal fill handle to bring up the fractal resolution and scale set the resolution high you will need to experiment a bit with this. I used 300 in my example but I don't have a high res scan to work with. Set the scale fairly high too again you will need to experiment with this.

Once you have your album pages set drop in the scanned photos and arrange them on the pages.

I have attached a quick example the guidelines are just dropped in to give you an idea how to set this up they haven't been measured and are not at all accurate. It also contains an example of a photo caption that is slightly distressed but still legible. I used a google font called home made apple and I gave it a fractal transparency and then grouped it with its self (just select it and hit ctrl+ g) then added a flat mix transparency to fade it slightly.