Scripting info

[sallybode]

I am finding other uses for drop shadows. Since they can be separated from the objects, and colored whatever you like (do this before separation) afterward they can be stretched and manipulated in wonderful ways and extra fine tuning applied with lenses.

I use separated shadows, mostly colored white to add a more realistic ambience to wood. If I have no time to go back and retouch an area I screwed up on in photoshop, I can quickly make a separated drop shadow the right size and shape and fix my imperfect imported bitmap.

Plus the effect is additive, by skewing and duplicating words by hand with a white glow shadow, you can build these up for a very interesting effect.

Changing the effects from normal to outside to inside to middle can help you get the special effect you are looking for. On Metalic type a separated drop shadow can impart a nice soft gleam or glow. There are a few more steps granted than the great feathering tool Xara has, but I can now do almost anything with this technique that I could do with Xara. It is that powerful.

[Grafixman]

Great ideas for other uses of dropshadows in Draw. Once separated, they really are just feathered bitmaps. Really not the same as Xara's feathered vectors. But with careful use within the limitations of bitmaps(avoiding rotations and scaling up), they are pretty handy.
One thing I don't like is the feathering method. Specially on corners. Not really a smooth transition. One thing I find useful is to switch between Photopaint and Draw. You have more control on the feathering in PP, though switching back and forth could get tedious...

[Sark]

The advantage of keeping shadows attached is that you can control them with paths. More importantly, the default bitmap resolution in Draw can be set to 72dpi and only increased to 300dpi when printing, or exporting.

The default 300dpi bitmap setting for Draw has a huge impact on performance when you have more than a few bitmaps in your image.

Sark

[sallybode]

Just because you can detach a shadow, doesn't mean most of my shadows are detached. Sark, is right, it eats more memory.

But once detached, you have lots of flexibility as to how to edit it, including the same cropping tools that DRAW has the corner edit handles and you can right click and add any more you need to do what you need to do.

And since these kinds of edits allow your text and vectors to remain crisp, just editing what you need in PhotoPaint and producing from DRAW, give a good dependable result.

Of late, I found it handy to work with Paint and turn my bitmaps transparent using the eliminate white or eliminate black plugin filter.

I beefed up the contrast after getting rid of the white and was then able to keep my layers in a more logical order so to show my customer. It printed very well. I have no idea if it works with spot color yet. As I was only using it for the black channel.

Another way to achieve soft highlights of a circular nature is to change your white and black values on the circular transparency setting so that instead of the center being transparent, the edges are. Default makes the edges opaque.

Coloring bitmaps that are line art that I had to do recently, with transparency set to multiply, it drops the color easily in between the lines and you get really black lines and a nice rich color. Play with all the modes. Note, not all may work with a Raster Image Processor. So if you do work for print, you might be in for some surprises. Add will recolor black. There are many uses for the Simplify command should you need to get rid of a color behind when you are coloring artwork. The Add command was not recognized by my RIP. I did not try it once it was made into a .pdf as we farmed that job out. But the Add in transparency did not show properly in my color prood from our HP proofer.