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I have been taking my camera everywhere in case I see something good to add to my gallery. I saw this hydrant with these really great shadows. I painted the ground shadow to a single color so that it would become a single object and available to adjust the transparency. Rich
I have been taking my camera everywhere in case I see something good to add to my gallery. I saw this hydrant with these really great shadows. I painted the ground shadow to a single color so that it would become a single object and available to adjust the transparency. Rich
I modified the colors in a TIF file format, and traced several times. Then selected the top color of each, and pasted the attributes to the shadow. The shadows were set to 60% to show the effect. I was thinking that the tracing reduces colors, and it may be possible to use the object colors to create a color pallet. Just to take the guessing out of selecting the correct color. Rich
As an expirment, I traced an image with multiple colors. I made a box matrix for the colors. Then used the copy and paste attributes to fill in the box matrix with the image colors. Rich
I tried Xpal and was pleased with the ability to generate a set of pallete colors from an image. I did get a few more colors than I needed, and the color line seemed to extend forever in Xara X. I saved in PAL and EPS both. I opened the EPS version and got a color matrix. Looked like I could choose colors from the on screen matrix, and wouldn't have to look along a long string. I thought about exporting the traced matrix from my previous attempt, and reading it into Xpal to get a limited pallete. Or, editing the matrix I had just created. Anyway, it was great to be able to create a pallete of natural colors.
In addition, I looked at loading the PAL file into Autosketch since it shows a PAL extension. It didn't work. However, exporting the color martix to WMF and opening the file in AS did work. I had to go to the pallete selection where the colors had been added to the current drawing, and I just needed to save the pallete to a new name. The PAL file I created was not compatible with Xara X, however. Ric
I found that saving to an EPS file fom Xpal allowed opening the file in Xara X. I noticed that when the file was on screen, the colors were available on the color line, also. After ungrouping, when clicking on a color in the matrix, the color was also located on the color line. Then I drug the color from the color lineto the object. This was a much easier way to locate the color. Rich
There are two flavours of PAl format file. One is defined by Paint Shop Pro the other defined by Microsoft. XPal will read both types of file but always creates the PSP flavour. I am guessing that AS operates with the MS PAL format. This would explain why Autosketch will not read the XPal created file. I have not tried with Xara X to read MS format PAL files but this may explain why you cannot read the files created by AS.
Also, when you create a Palette with XPal you can give the individual colours descriptive names (just type the name into the box below the edit cell before adding it to the palette). This is not very useful if you are creating 256 colour palettes but is OK if you create a limited palette of, say, 10-12 entries. These names will appear in the colour line when you import the EPS file into Xara X. PSP PAL files does not support named colours so the information is lost when saving this type of file.
Brian
I found several PAL files in my Canvas directory. They must be unique. I couldn't read them into Xpal. Tried them in Corel Draw with no success. If I manually constructed a color map, I was able to convert to WMF and load the file into AS. Once loaded, the pallete was available. Generally, I go from Canvas WMF to Power Point and resave in WMF. PP WMFs are compatible in AS whereas Canvas WMFs aren't. Different flavors is my guess. I thought that performing a trace in Xara X may have given a pallete like loading a WMF into AS, but it was the intorduction of the EPS file. I did find that Streamline AI files could be read into Xara X, and it was easier to limit the number of traced colors. The trace I did in Xara X had a full pallete. I took the trace and exported to a JPG, and read it into Xpal. I may try this with some of the monocromatic files as well. Thanks for the response. Ric
I was able to use the mode command in PS Elements to set the index color level, and obtain a color map. PSE saved in its format and what it called a microsoft PAL. The PAL file was compatible directly with Xara X. I read the file into Xpal and save in the EPS format to see what would happen on screen. This was a better way to control the number of colors. Posterizing didn't work very well for me. Rich
I did notice that it was possible to ungroup and rearrrange the matix when the EPS version was loaded into Xara X. If a set of colors was copied and pasted into a new file, this new set was available on the color line, too. And still when the cells were on the page, clicking on one would identify the color on the color line. I was having difficulty keeping track when the colors were similar. This allows selected colors to be set aside for convinent use. So, once you have a color table, you can edit it in Xara X to pick and reduce the number of colors. And, make an on page matrix of the favorite colors. Rich
I painted an image in Picture Publisher. It always seems to push pixels at the edge of the brush. I vectorized the image and deleted the background. This created lots of objects along the image. I performed some masking functions to smooth the mask, and to reduce the size to capture those intermediate colors. Then traced the image again. I made the image background black so that there would not be edge colors when the image was inserted into the object. There were still a few edge objects, and these were deleted. In some cases, I may leave these and set them to similar colors to better blend the edges.
The background object from the traced image was removed, and a JPG file was inserted. Rich