September 2014 Video Tutorial -- Xara Photo Compositions Part 2

September 2014 Video Tutorial -- Xara Photo Compositions Part 2

Using Masking tools in Photo Compositions

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Earlier this month, you saw Part 1, on how to blend and alter multiple images to make dramatic compositions. This month, Gary tips in the Mask tools, the ones in Designer Pro 10, some in version 9, and some in version 8. Come see how you can create a spotlight effect on a pile of gems and not even get arrested for breaking and entering a jewelry store!

Read more...then show us how you use Xara's Masking Tools.

Thanks, Administrator. :)

I'd like to add that Part II is not really a continuation of Part I we posted earlier this month. I'd say it's an intermediate to advanced tutorial and you need to have the Mask tools in your version of Xara; to the best of my knowledge, they started appearing in the Pro version 8.

The good news is that you don't have to work through Part I to benefit from watching Part II.

But Robert Downey Jr. had a cameo in Part I.


I'm lying,

Gary

Part 1 of part 2 :rolleyes: I found there's a few ways to use the mask tools and one I like is to use the Rectangle Region Tool to cover the whole image then select the Mask painter tool, this applies the mask to the Rectangle then with the Mask painter tool + shift erase parts of the mask I want to work on.

Stygg

That was ambitious, stygg, and you did very well, very creative. It looks as though the clown's makeup artist is colorblind.


;)


-g

[QUOTE=Gare;514056]That was ambitious, stygg, and you did very well, very creative. It looks as though the clown's makeup artist is colorblind.



Thanks for the feedback Gary, I used this image to try most of the ways to use the new mask tools. These new mask tools are excellent. Moving on to Part 2 of Part 2 :D

Stygg

Part2 of Part2, the techniques shown in this part are excellent, especially the second mask base for the jewels.
The overall Part 2 jewels is really worth doing. I used slightly different effects for the fininishing highlights, I did each one individual. May not be spot on but learned a lot from this tut.

Stygg

I took the brightness of the spot light down on this one and moved the high light of the middle gem to the bottom of the gem, I thought it looked better :rolleyes:

Stygg

Isn't it wonderful how you can adjust this brightness, saturation and focus (and other stuff) in an isolated area of a photo? I used to have to use the Slice operation, close the hole I left using the Shape tool and hitting Backspace (does everyone know about this undoing of a Boolean operation?), and then adjusting and feathering the sliced (clipped) area. Masks can certainly save you steps and workarounds.

Stygg, you're doing great! I feel like tossing you another example image, when my own work (and grocery shopping) permits!

Let me see what I can do and your work is legend, man.

My Best,

Gary

Tried to makes something like your vid.tut. Gary, a bit over ambitious so I hope I've not ruined a great tut. It's one thing following the instructions in a ready made image and another making one of your own but I learnt a little extra attempting it. I forgot to take the red outline off the clipview rectangle :o

Stygg

I commend you for your ambition, stygg. We need to go back to shadows and perspective a little to pin the essence of the architecture of what you're doing to the extra, added spot light effect. Also, if you're going to use a spotlight, you need a lack of contrastr, so the spotlight adds contrast.

You're real close to a delightful composition, though.

Here: I did a piece that needs the spotlight. Look at the differences in my approach (I think there's a bitmap inside the spheres....I jusrt pulled one of a thousand shiny spheres out of my directories!); see how the perspective on the grid simplifies and help the audience orient themselves to the perspective.

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Want to take a whack at this, attached?

My Best,

Gary

Cheers for the file Gary, will have a look, a good look! then have a whack at it :D

Stygg

Those spheres are great Gary so please forgive my ignorance when I ask that the secret of doing this sort of image, is getting the correct perspective on the background grid ?

Stygg

There are no secrets, Stygg. For once I'm being serious.

The spheres I sort of drew (I pulled them out of an archive to spare me drawing new ones) are clearly resting on a ground plane, the ground plane just happens to extend upwards from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. In photography, this is called a sweep, the piece of paper or other material that makes a soft transition between horizontal and vertical orientation.

The advantage of curving a piece of paper for a background is that you get a gradual, perspective transition from ground to upwards. If you put a hard crease in the paper at the ground plane, the effect would be much less dramatic and look like product packaging photography or something.

When you draw anything that should suggest perspective, you need to draw from the front angle for example, but also preconceive what the side angle will look like. And then take some Tylenol.

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My Best,

Gary

Thanks for the feedback and the image Gary, you've answered what I meant by secret - right angle versus bend and bend is definitly the better.

Stygg

It's also a nice artistic blending of opposites, which as I (continually!) mention, creates a dynamic tension that holds the audience's attention.

In this case the opposites creating contrast is the gentle slope of the seamless paper behind the spheres contrasting with the hard geometric squares making up the grid on the paper.

"Think twice, draw once."

—Probably me, who thinks a lot about a piece way before even opening a program or uncapping a pen... ;)

Does make a big difference the bend grid Gary but hope you don't mind had a little fun with this one.

Stygg

Quick post before work.

Xara is approaching photo/bitmap editing the same way as vectors and it makes it hader in my opinion to have full control how things work on bitmap side of things.

How would people accomplish something like this with Xara without traditional blending modes? Let's say I have a basic car and then if I wanted to light things up and give some additional touches.

Examples below in one huge mess as can not place pictures inline with this browser as there is no option for that.

Hi theoninen—

Xara Designer Pro is by definition a vector drawing program that has some, but not all animation, desktop publishing, and photo manipulation features. I stress photo manipulation because Xara has no true brush tool and therefore cannot enter the photo retouching arena, not really. I stand by its bitmap features professionally and personally because there are some things you can successfully accomplish in less this than using Photoshop.

So let's say Xara is very, very strong in the vector stroke and fill market, but not quite mature enough to pull off special stuff with bitmaps, although I'm still fairly proud to have totally retouched this photo without one ounce of Photoshop.

Xara does have traditional blending modes, theoninen, I think I've mentioned this three times now and shown a screen cap- of where they are. Stained Glass Transparency mode=Multiply mode in Photoshop, and Bleach equals Screen, both in function and mathematically.

Your inline attachments are going all over the place because you're not using the attachment feature in the Go Advanced> Manager Attachments>Add Files> and then once you've selected one or two via the Browse and then the Upload button, you have a thumbnail that takes a check mark in the corner, an Insert Inline button and then a Done button.


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So if your code in the editor doesn't have these open and close ATTACH declarations (yours doesn't), you're placing files in the body of the text in a novel, but unsatisfactory way.

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AS far as your very nice model of the car, why don't you do the lighting and shading in the program itself instead of coming up with shading masks and stuff?

Given these files I think I could get the look you're after in Xara within an hour. Sad to say, I have a new Xara Xone video to produce this week so it would not be me. If you give permission to the members here to download and work with your files, I'm sure stygg or someone could explain and solve your problem.

My Best,

Gary

Quote:

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Originally Posted by stygg2003

Does make a big difference the bend grid Gary but hope you don't mind had a little fun with this one.

Stygg

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Stygg, you want lizards with spheres, you knock yourself out.

Wait, strike that. I do not want you knocking yourself out. Chances are you'd wake up brighter than me.

...and that would be so wrong.


-g

No chance me ever waking up and being brighter than you Gary. :) Reading your comments @ theoninen, I downloaded his Png image, hope you don't mind theoninen, just to try the a few things. I agree with you Gary that you could redo this image in Xara pretty quick. Uploaded the colour change thats all, it took all of two mins. to change colour. Off to try Rik's excellent tips and tricks.

Stygg

I played around the file you posted at the time and tried those different transparency settings but still could not really get hang of it. Maybe it is just because never really have used those for things like that. (Or most likely I just suck....) Artworks has mix, Stained glass and Bleach transparency types but never really did anything with those.

The car model I used is nice but I can not take any credit for it as I only rendered it with alpha channel because it suited for the purpose. People are free to use it to play around as the model can be downloaded and used freely.

Software I used for the image is not actually for bitmap editing but more like combining and manipulating images that already exist. User interface is very simple but effective and even a child would not have any difficulties using it. There are no layers, just images you drop into canvas and those images can be manipulated with different masks and tools. Best of all it will also directly render Draw/Artworks vector images including automasking etc so will work great as suppporting application. Too bad there is nothing similar on PC as it actually is excellent and I still use it regularly, even if people have lot more poweful mobile phones than the system it runs on.

Blending operations, theoninen, are not the most intuitive things to use in Xara or any other program. They are actually math operations, and here's some of what I wrote in a Photoshop book :

Okay, first we need to accept the fact that these blending modes or whatever we care to call them are all based on the Transparency tool because you're getting an effect of blending when one shape of the overlaying shape is partially transparent, which includes the integer 0% transparent, which is especially obvious in Multiply mode. For convention, so I can attempt to explain this kah-kah, pleas accept the following:

• The base color is the original color in the image.


• The blend color is the color being applied with the painting or editing tool.

• The result color is the color resulting from the blend.

This is the way I've distinguished modes and effects in The Xara Offricial Guide, the CorelDRAW Official Guide, and in the Inside Adobe Photoshop series. These operations all use the same math, regardless of the software.

We further need to go by a brightness convention, because the degree of transparency has an effect on the result color. So let's assume that all colors in the HSV domain of color components goes from 0 (black) to 255 (white).

Mix mode ("normal mode")

Edits or paints each pixel to make it the result color. This is the default mode.

Stained Glass mode ("multiply mode")

Looks at the color information and multiplies the base color by the blend color. The result color is always a darker color. Multiplying any color with black produces black. Multiplying any color with white leaves the color unchanged. When you're painting with a color other than black or white, successive strokes with a painting tool produce progressively darker colors. The effect is similar to drawing on the image with multiple magic markers.

Bleach mode ("screen mode")

Looks at each channel's color information and multiplies the inverse of the blend and base colors. The result color is always a lighter color. Screening with black leaves the color unchanged. Screening with white produces white. The effect is similar to projecting multiple photographic slides on top of each other.

Contrast mode:

Frankly, I've not seen a mode in other programs that compares to this Xara mode. In areas with little or no saturation, it appears to sharpen the underlying pixels. In lighter areas, it creates contrast by dumping a lot of saturation on the base color. This is conceivable Xara's version of a combination of color dodge and color burn.

Saturation Mode

Creates a result color with the luminance and hue of the base color and the saturation of the blend color. Painting with this mode in an area with no (0) saturation (gray) causes no change.

Darken
Looks at the color information and selects the base or blend color—whichever is darker—as the result color. Pixels lighter than the blend color are replaced, and pixels darker than the blend color do not change. This is a less intense effect than Stained glass mode.

Lighten Mode

Sort of a mild version of the Bleach mode. Looks at the color information in each channel and selects the base or blend color—whichever is lighter—as the result color. Pixels darker than the blend color are replaced, and pixels lighter than the blend color do not change.

Brightness mode

Now here is an interesting effect when you remember that Xara colors have brightness values from 0 to 255; 256 discrete quantized amounts in total. Brightness: if an underlying color is brighter than 128, the brightness is increased by the amount in the overlying color. If the base color is less than 128 on a scale of 0 to 255, the result color is darker, which means this is equivalent to an Overlay mode in other programs, not exactly a "Brightness" mode.

Luminosity

I tend not to use this mode because it doesn't produce anything attractive in my work. If you use a grey overlay on a photo of Xara Shape, the brighter the shade of grey on the overlying piece, the brighter the base color becomes. I guess you can use small pieces in isolated areas to brighten up a part of a photo that is too dull, however I feel the Levels command does a much better job of doing this sort of thing.

Hue Mode

This mode replaces the primary distinguishable color in the base layer but does not change the Brightness or Saturation. Instand recoloring.

By the way, I'm not a big subscriber to any different between HSV, HSB, or HSL. Lightness, Brightness, and Value all pertain to the amount of brightness is applied to the Hue and Saturation components, Alvy Smith invented the HSV color space, which is a heck of a lot easier than using RGB color mode to define a color, and RGB and HSV occupy the identical color spaces, so there's really no diff' in the terms.

Another note: aside form Stained Glass and Bleach, do not expect miracles with the shapes you draw in Xara—the rest of the blending modes are intended for photos on top of other photos....pixels in other words, not vectors. Which leads us to a very interesting final entry, which Xara should make more about:

Enhance mode

What you do is select a bitmap over a bitmap and then assign it the Enhance blend mode. Presto...the photo disappears! Okay, we're not done yet. With the transparent bitmap still selected, choose the Photo Enhance tool, and you can control the brightness, the contrast of the base underlying photo, and even the focus. Try feathering the object to make the changes in your overall photo more subtle.


Do I have to do an October Tips and Tricks section now?

:)

Gary

Quote:

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Originally Posted by stygg2003

No chance me ever waking up and being brighter than you Gary. :) Reading your comments @ theoninen, I downloaded his Png image, hope you don't mind theoninen, just to try the a few things. I agree with you Gary that you could redo this image in Xara pretty quick. Uploaded the colour change thats all, it took all of two mins. to change colour. Off to try Rik's excellent tips and tricks.

Stygg

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It just occured to me that this is a Smart Car, isn't it? I did an illustration of one about a year ago for my portfolio. The same guy who started the Swarch watch company started Smart Cars. Same philosophy: a short run one design, it's almost not mass production. There must be tens of thousands of different Swatches out there. By doing this, the buyer can emotionally "bond" with their purchase, and apparently this works, because Consumer Reports blasts the Smart Car for engineering and safety.

Tough darts. It's a cool, distinctive looking little buggy! A lot cooler than the new Volkswagen which they totally destroyed as an icon to make it more attractive to young men, they say.

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-g

Just how smart is that car? Do you get in and tell it where you want to go? ;))

EDIT: Or would it tell me where to go?

I think it's called a Smart Car because it looks smart. I love the way it looks and I'm a sucker for the gen 2 Volkswagen, but they get the lowest ratings in Consumer Reports. Eveything from Death Traps in the event of a collision to "they can just leave you in it and bury you".

I got a Prius last year, and its front end collapse in a head-on is remarkably rated. Easy on gas mileage, no one seems to be able to fault it, which makes up for years and years of complaints about the Camry!


-g

If I had one would I look smart too? Sorry I hijacked your thread with my nonsense.

Larry, look at my avatar or here.

.

Do you really think I care that you're drifting my boat?


-g

In reply to your closing line in #22 Gary, yes please, if your not busy doing your shopping in your smart car :D

Stygg

Being a little bit latecomer with this tutorial but has been completed, thanks Gare nice techniques and really was worth to pick the mask topic

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Yes Gare I noticed your avatar, and thought of putting glasses on mine just for a joke. I cannot see the video however all I get is a black rectangle, I'll have to see what I did to cause that.

Whatever was the problem I fixed it and viewed the video.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wizard509

Whatever was the problem I fixed it and viewed the video.

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Larry you really are a wizard, you did'nt know what the problem was but you fixed it! now that is magic :D

Stygg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wizard509

Yes Gare I noticed your avatar, and thought of putting glasses on mine just for a joke. I cannot see the video however all I get is a black rectangle, I'll have to see what I did to cause that.

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It depends on your browser, Larry. Or you don't have the bandwidth at the moment because of internet traffic in your neck of the woods.
I uploaded it as an MP4 to YouTube, but sometimes it creates a FLV (Flash) copy that doesn't embed properly here at tg. It works for my...not that it's a great piece of work!... but here's the direct link the YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5StYVw2hho4

Copy and past into the address line of your browser,

-g

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gare

It depends on your browser, Larry. Or you don't have the bandwidth at the moment because of internet traffic in your neck of the woods.
I uploaded it as an MP4 to YouTube, but sometimes it creates a FLV (Flash) copy that doesn't embed properly here at tg. It works for my...not that it's a great piece of work!... but here's the direct link the YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5StYVw2hho4

Copy and past into the address line of your browser,

-g

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*Ignore all of the above. I failed to read page four here before posting. Be kind and reuse the pixels I wasted.

Just still with the example of Theionen's car, trying to reproduce similiar color in Xara I find it rather hard to mix that out only with a Hue slider and Strength

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So okay that the Hue can be changed in general but could be some method maybe how to enter a concrete Hue like a number and doing that precisely?

@ csehz—

Love your Extrude Burger. I never thought of that possibility when I was presented with Dimensions and the Revolve function. Mind you, the output of Dimensions is all vector, but what you did with a dynamic bitmap version of vector shapes is quite....um, tasty!

I'd offer a different approach to changing the hue of the SmartCar or any other object that has a predominant Hue...you might still have to mask off or apply a Slice object to areas you want kept original, but if you use the FX filter under New Color Filer>Hue, you can do this is a fraction of the time you can do the transformation using selective masking and where we've already been in this thread.

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But if anyone wants a little more info on the Photo Tools>Set Photo Hue, let's see here: the HSB cvolor model is based on Hue, Saturation, and Brightness, right? What's missing from the Set Photo Hue feature is Brightness, and you can make the change of color much more pronounced if you first set the Hue, and the Strength (Saturation), and then use the Photo Tools' Brightness, and especially the Contrast sliders to dial in the values that set the new color to exactly what you want.

My Best,

Gary

Gare thanks for the Hue tip as live effect, by that hopefully reached somewhat closer to the color and to the original atmosphere with Xara ellipses/transparencies

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Hi csehz, you might also find besides the tips Gary has given, that using the photo saturation and temperature sliders gives some good results. In jpg.2 I used just the photo hue tool, then exported it, then using the same openened image, I applied the sat. and temp. sliders and altered the brightness to get a silver finish in jpg.1 I've got one all black, it looks pretty cool, miniture BMW :D

Stygg

Thanks Stygg, so like a good amateur approach in the graphic cooking added a little bit from each slider yet :D

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by csehz

Thanks Stygg, so like a good amateur approach in the graphic cooking added a little bit from each slider yet :D

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Ha ha! love that reply csehz, just like me try it and see what you get :D Here's that black car or as Robin would have said "Holy smarty-oly Batman" :D

Stygg