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Hi everyone. I hope someone can help me. I recently got Xara Photo and Graphics Designer 2013 and my main thing at the moment is to make photos look like paintings or pastels etc. I cannot find where to do this. I have left and right clicked on almost everything and cannot locate the drop down menu or whatever there is to do this. I hope someone can help me. I cannot locate any info in the "help" section either. Thanks in advance for any, any help given to me.
Select the image.
Then the Photo tool and pick the Live Effects tools (FX) icon.
Click New > Art filter > Painting.
Acorn
Thank you so much. I was going crazy trying to find it! You're a lifesaver!Quote:
Originally Posted by Acorn
Welcome to TalkGraphics the_naj
There are lots of other cool filters in the FX menu. Experiment with all of them and see what they do.
You could call me insane, but I've used xara to "hand paint" converting a photograph into a "painted illustration" without using an FX tools. I've done this a half dozen times, sometimes with remarkable results. The first file below is the Xara file I created, with the second as a thumbnail of the original. As you can see the horses legs weren't in the original, I had to add those.
The process involves zooming in and creating vector shapes with every color in the texture of the photo, apply heavy edge feathering and transparency layers stacked on top of other created shapes, in a process that took me probably five hours to create the final work.
Attachment 104436 Attachment 104437
that's an impressive piece of work :)
Gameprinter, I admire your dedication.
I hacked up this try in 30 minutes using XDP10X's Bitmap Tracer, with a few hand tweaks.
Again no FX Tools with a result that uses a palette knife rather than a sable brush.
It's just to show even a tyro can get something out of Xara:
Attachment 104480
Acorn
Not bad, Acorn.
When I created my illustration, the purpose was for art needed for a game publication - Way of the Samurai (PFRPG). Traditionally the art used in such publications are either public domain art (in which case I was extensively using period ukiyo-e Japanese wood-block print art) or paintings by commissioned artists. Since I was trying to keep costs down, rather than commission an artist, I intended to the work myself. While I'm a fine cartographer, I'm only a "so so" illustrator. I didn't want too seem to obviously digital in my artwork and it seems to me that relying on the bitmap tracer or FX tools gives the impression of using such a tool, and not being truly illustrative. So I opted to do work the way I chose, and got what I considered to fit best. I found the mounted samurai photo online (it was 6000 pixels wide, so had very good resolution to work with). Using photos from the internet for publications is essentially stealing art - I didn't want risk using unpaid artwork in a publication. Besides photos are not the optimal form of artwork in game supplements.
Gameprinter, thank you for your background to what you had to deliver.
If I had that brief, I would have used feathered ellipses throughout.
It is the nearest approach to creating an image using an Iterated Function System (IFS) methodology, one where shapes are self-similar and used to describe images that are fractal in nature. In other words, nature.
Acorn