Feature Request: LivePaint / Paint Bucket tool

[MEB]

Sorry, I'm just so fed up with Photoshop, I see little 'must have' additions to it since version 7 and I think it is generally overpriced.

Yep Join Illustrator to that bag (overpriced plus overrated).

[Soquili]

I hope this won't be too off topic here.

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight...ompelling.aspx

Microsoft has their Customer Technology Preview (CTP) of SilverLight available.

Checkout the 5th bullet item on the above link.

Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application.

The browser plug-in is said to work with all web browsers.

[remi]

It's far away from my original Feature Request, but it's interesting. Therefore I would say, let's discuss this in a new thread in the Webdesign forum.

=> The MS Silverlight thread

Remi

[handrawn]

Returning to topic:

from the inkscape site: http://www.inkscape.org/
[New Inkscape Features April 15, 2007]

A new Paint Bucket tool allows you to click in any area bounded on all sides and fill it with color. So now you can scan in a pencil sketch, import the bitmap into Inkscape, and quickly fill its cells with vector paint, letting you completely skip the bitmap tracing step.

Inskcape 0.46 is 'beta' and it 'needs watching' one hand on the save keys.
But - this works, this is wonderful, all the character and spontaneity of a pencil line with vector fill. This may be a minority sport in these parts, but the difference it makes to my work flow is enormous.
Just scan and go - no bitmap tracing, no shape editor tool required.
This is tremendous - its like the time I was first able to scan pencil direct without inking first; revolutionary.

Ok You guessed I like it, I approve.


Xara please note.

[Nostaw]

That's great news! Download in progress.

[handrawn]

Nostaw

let us know how you get on

046 is the development version and some of the features go up and down in the nightly builds, as you may well already know.
I am using build Inkscape0704192139.7z - I have not yet tried the latest.

[MarkMyWords]

Sounds good, I'll check this out, I haven't looked at Inkscape for a while - it can be a bugger to download and get working with some builds.

[Nostaw]

I downloaded earlier Inkscape0704250216.7z. First thing i tried is the paint bucket tool on a clients draft artwork i scanned in today. Sadly (BUT not surprisingly), it couldn't cope with it at all, since it was drawn with a pencil and the contours of the drawing are not really sharp plus have gaps. I know these are bad factors to begin with doing any type of tracing.

However, since the drawn image contained closed shapes, it didn't 'detect' those (and wasn't expected), because when zooming into the image on pixel level, it did contain gaps even though they were not visible when woked in 100% view. However, fixing these issues in Photoshop by blurring the image and then adjusting curves to thicken the outlines helped alot to get a better result.. This was just a test, as I redrew the artwork previously in xara but wanted to see how the paint bucket tool coped with it. This shouldn't sound like a complaint, I was just testing the paint bucket tool the hard way `v` It wasn't crashing once during my testing.


The paint bucket tool is fun to work with and works great on real sketches with clean dark outlines, how they should be(!). It can be slow sometimes depending on the size of the area to fill.

I find the draw freeline tool still great in Inkscape, the calligraphy lines are a dream (draw fast and lines get thinner), it's great for any organic handdrawn look. Inkscape remembers the centre of each shape, I wish i could enter the center's X/Y position manually, you can only move it by mouse. Overall, I find Inkscape a great addition to Xara.

[remi]

Perhaps, the features discussed in this thread are in the new version of Xara Xtreme (MAGIX Xtreme)?

Remi

[MarkMyWords]

It would be nice to think that Xara had a surprise of new features ready for us all so soon after Pro was released, but I think the Magix product, if it is different from Xtreme, may well just have extras included in the package.

Well, Inkscape has shown that a simple floodfill tool is quite viable, but is the demand big enough for Xara to start work on their own version yet?