Where does a newbie start?

[Hellenic43]

Hey quin thanks loads and by the way since I currently have your attention I'd like to ask you a couple of questions. I can't seem to get the movie help files to work. Am I guessing correctly that's because I just have the trial version of Xara? Also I have been toying around with the program, stumbling is probably the better term and this program does appear to have some nice features. What I'd like to know is when I import my jpeg images into Xara for editing sometimes there's a lot of speckling around the image. I know that in Ulead photoimpact 8 I can go to effects and click on despeckle and get rid of a lot of the noise around my image. Is that possible with this software and can I also make my image appear more three dimensional. That would really impress my family and friends if I could make the image jump out of the card at them. Again thanks for the time and please call me Manny. Take care.

[jens g.r. benthien]

Manny,

to clean up bitmaps like the jpegs you are using, just install a Photoshop compatible plug-in - there are tons of it. One of the best is Intellehence from Extensis, but it is expensive. There are thousands of free plug-ins available - just google for them. For a start you might check http://www.xarazone.com -> shareware. Click the various text links on top or at the bottom of the page for more filters or plug-ins.

You might need the msvcrt10.dll in your Xara folder to get these plug-ins to work. You can download the *.dll from my server:

click here

Two examples for bitmap tweaking in Xara are below.

[jens g.r. benthien]

And # 2 - without any plug-ins. For the first one I've used Alien Skin filters for the lightning effect, and a gaussian blur filter for the sky.

[gwpriester]

Would have been a great image to include in the December Group Show, Jens. Too late now, though.

Don't forget John Horn's Xeus Bitmap Corrector which is available in the Xara Xone Shareware page. And this month's Guest Tutorial provides 5 tutorials for using Xeus.

John's plug-in lets you do a lot of bitmap editing and painting right in Xara. When you combine Xeus and Xara X1's XPE you have a pretty darn good set of bitmap editing tools.

Gary

[jens g.r. benthien]

Gary,

so I'm kind of 'off show'. Sorry, but the creation of the top pic took me 10 minutes, the second one was off the archives, and I didn't have it in my memory for the December show.

[Egg Bramhill]

Hello Mano and welcome to these forums.
Most people get confused between vector & raster (bitmap) image programs.
Basically it's very simple to convert a vector to a raster image. Most raster programs include vector drawing tools, which further leads to the confussion. However the reverse, raster to vector, is a very different kettle of fish.
I still haven't found a program that can do this effectively. The only true method I've found, and the one that almost 100% of us use here, is to import the raster then redraw it in a vector above the original.
Egg