Hello! I'm a hobbyist user who's been checking out the impressive Xara Xtreme, and I can't figure out how they did something in one of the demo movies, although I've learned a lot by trying, and I'm hoping someone can clue me in.

In the demo movie with the "catwoman" photo composition example, about 6:20 into the video at http://downloads.xara.com/products/x...ies/intro1.wmv, they use "live mask" to reveal the rest of the picture of the cat. I can't figure out how they did that. The closest I've come is use clipview to show a piece of a bitmap, then select the clipview, click the keyhole, and resize, but that is not what they're doing in the demo -- there is no keyhole in the demo, and the image is revealed in realtime as the size is changed, unlike my clipview where the image is revealed only after I release the mouse button.

The bigger picture of what I'm trying to do at the moment is photo composition like in the video -- being able to dynamically pick parts out of one image and overlay them smoothly into another, and being able to dynamically adjust the size, shape, rotation, feathering, etc., of the image would be really nice.

I also tried converting the bitmap to an editable shape, but resizing the shape scales the image, it doesn't reveal more of it.

Finally, congratulations to Xara for open-sourcing Xara Xtreme to get Linux support! Although I'm of course using it on Windows at the moment.