"Dan's 1st. Attempt At Adding People Onto Images..."

[Dan]

Hello everyone, could someone give me a couple of pointers on using Xara X or any other program to add people into images...

This one what I tried as practice, Tiger Woods '99 Playstation CD Cover. And I added the "King" Elvis on top as well as changed the name and for a bit more, an Gibson Les Paul Electric. in the hand...

Tell me if Xara is a good program for this stuff...

Dan [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_confused.gif[/img]

[Dan]

Hello everyone, could someone give me a couple of pointers on using Xara X or any other program to add people into images...

This one what I tried as practice, Tiger Woods '99 Playstation CD Cover. And I added the "King" Elvis on top as well as changed the name and for a bit more, an Gibson Les Paul Electric. in the hand...

Tell me if Xara is a good program for this stuff...

Dan [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_confused.gif[/img]

[BobInce]

Heh. Nice one!

One of the main problems with doing this type of work is lighting. One filthy-rich friend Mister Woods is clearly being lit from the right-hand side, and quite low down (it must have been late in the afternoon by the time he won whatever it is he's winning there). That doesn't match the King or his guitar, though his enormous head is cartoon-like enough that it doesn't really matter in that case.
As for stitching together bits of image, Xara's pretty good at that, with its bitmap handling and feathering. The extended transparency effects can also be used to recolour one photo to fit another. It's a shame there's no dynamic bitmap-style filter fills though, that might allow one to make a shape blur things behind it, eg. to match focus. Instead one is limited to the plug-in bitmap effects.

Some people would probably try to do effects like this in a bitmap editing package like Photoshop. But I find them very cumbersome compared to a good vector app like Xara.

[Dan]

Thanks for the advice on it. Now when i look at it, I can use your advice to top it up.

Thanks a bunch!

Also, the way i'am doing the cropping, adding 100's of point's and adding relevant curves to get the closest outline...

Is that the only way in Xara?

Dan... [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_cool.gif[/img]

[BobInce]

> adding 100s of points and adding relevant curves to get the closest outline

Are you using the freehand tool to get the first estimation of the shape? That speeds things up. Set the accuracy as appropriate and then start editing any places where your hand slipped.

It's probably best to do the 'Combine Shapes->Intersect' to get the cutout version fairly early on in the process. Otherwise, try setting the line width to zero so you can see exactly where it is.

In close-up mode, it is sometimes easier to position the line accurately when you turn on 'Never smooth bitmaps' in the Page Options window.

That's all I can think of for now. :-) Unfortunately the bitmap tracer is seldom any use for this sort of thing.