Gary Bouton's Xara Stuff

[Gare]

@ IAmTheBlues and csehz—

Many years before Xara offered a Shadow tool, or a Feathering option to create soft shadows from shapes, the only viable way to do a soft floor shadow was with a blend. I sort of brought that technique with me from CorelDRAW when I adopted Xara.

I'm happy when people spot something they can understand and use in their own work; that's more than 50% of the reason I post my work.

The other 50% is I'm a hopeless egotist and like to see my name in print.

By the way, you can also modify ("tune") a shadow made from a blend using the bias and contrast sliders (there's no real name for them) on the Infobar when you've got a blend selected, to harden the edge and even out the distribution of tones.

Very few shadows we see in the real world are soft; it's just that as soon as someone learned how the Gaussian blur tool in Photoshop could be used to create diffuse shadows, everyone started doing it and forgot that objects in direct sunlight cast very hard shadows!



(I tried to create a scene in my modeling program that might be mistaken for the photo I took earlier), but the point is that these are not your "soft" diffuse shadows, and yet they comprise the majority of shadow types you see every day.

My Best,

Gary