HowTo: Mosaic effect with Xara Xtreme

**remi** · 08 August 2006, 05:34 PM

This is a short tutorial with a tip how to create a mosaic effect with Xara Xtreme.

Regards,
Remi

**Egg Bramhill** · 08 August 2006, 10:28 PM

I like that effect Remi. I'll give a a try.

**gwpriester** · 08 August 2006, 11:14 PM

75% is Normal View Quality. Also Window > Quality > Normal.

Great tip, Remi

Gary

**HayTay** · 15 February 2009, 05:08 PM

I know this is an old thread, but I was trying to achieve the same pixelated effect in a tutorial I was going through recently. Needless to say I was having a bit of difficulty achieving it with XXP4 until I ran across this tip of Remi's and how it came about via this thread, Pixel Gradients.

While following Remi's tutorial and changing the 'View Quality Slider' to 'No Anti-aliasing' achieved the desired effect on the image, it also affected the display quality of everything else in the document. This was especially apparent with any text. In short, the text looked like 'crud' and was nearly illegible.

I tried several different approaches but always wound up with the same unacceptable result. In desperation I resorted to Xara Xtreme's help file where I discovered a nugget of information, 'Open the Bitmap Gallery and right click on the image and select "properties". In the dialog un-check the "Smooth when scaled up" option.' Eureka!!! Going from a smooth image to a highly pixelated version of the same can easily be achieved with this technique along with a bit of transparency applied to the result. The 'View Quality Slider' can be left in either the 'Anti-aliasing' or 'Very High Quality' position so that text and other document objects remain clear, crisp and legible (as you can see in the attached file) while the pixelation effect can be retained on only select items.

The 'Smooth when scaled up' feature is also available in XXP v3.2 but appears to be undocumented. It may be available in other versions of Xtreme, as well, but I have no way of checking on that at this time. Maybe this can be verified by those that have the entire collection of Xara Xtreme releases.

I hope this information is of help to someone else. Maybe Gary can devote a page to it in one of his upcoming workbooks. It's just a thought since this topic seems to come up periodically.

Cheers,
HayTay

**gwpriester** · 15 February 2009, 07:52 PM

Cool, Remi.

**Xhris** · 26 February 2009, 01:51 AM

Yes, great effect Remi. Flava of the month along with OOB images, hence a video.

Full screen HD version here (Recommended—click "watch in HD" and then select full screen for maximum resolution (i.e. the same resolution I recorded it in and as I saw it)).

Almost full screen version (which can be clicked to get to the above link, as can the video below)

**HayTay** · 26 February 2009, 02:41 AM

A belated thank you to Remi. This info was the building block that helped me adapt and complete a Photoshop tutorial (from Classic Photoshop Effects by Scott Kelby) using Xara Xtreme 4. Not bad for a thread over 2 years old.

Also deserving of thanks is Xhris for providing us with another of his amazing and informative videos. It is a great addition and definitive resource on the topic of Xtreme Pixelation.

Good work guys,
HayTay