Drop Shadows & Feathering objects

[Sark]

Feathering objects is one of the features shamefully lacking in Draw. Recently I thought I had discovered a good workaround for this.

Feathering creates a bitmap that can be blurred; this can be shape edited by an invisible controlling path. The effect is basically a Drop shadow with the shadow locked to an invisible path.

If you remove the outline and fill from an object in Draw, it is not possible to apply a Drop shadow. However, if you create a solid object with no outline and apply 100% transparency to the object, you can apply a Drop shadow. With the Drop shadow tool selected you click inside the transparent object, drag a short distance (don’t drag outside the object) and you now have a feathered shadow that mirrors the transparent objects shape. You will need to apply colour separately, but you can now use the Node editing tool for live shape editing of your feathered “object�.

Great, I thought, but whilst playing around with this I discovered a huge flaw (to add to the list) in Draws Drop shadow tool. I should point out I’m using Draw 9 on Win 2K, though I got similar results when I reinstalled Draw 11. Hopefully this is a Win 2K issue, but I doubt it.

First, I opened Task manager so I could see Memory usage. With only Draw open I was at 73MB approx.
I created a 200 X 200-pixel ellipse with a fill and applied a Drop shadow that was centred to the ellipse. Memory usage jumped to 79MB.
I changed the default feathering from 15 to 30, 89MB.
I dragged red from the colour swatch to the drop shadows colour well and Memory usage jumped to 96MB.
I then changed to blue, 102MB and back to red, 108MB.
Next I scaled the image with the Pick tool to approx twice its size, Memory usage is now at 130MB, scaled back down, 137MB, up again, 151MB, and down again, 157MB.

I now have a small, simple ellipse with a Drop shadow and it occupies a whopping 83MB of RAM.

Now I’m not saying you would carry out the editing that I used here, but it does represent the kind of general editing you might apply when playing around and drawing creatively. Also, when you node edit the object, Memory usage continues to jump considerably. Even more disturbing, if you delete the object with its Drop shadow, Memory usage remains unchanged. There is no form of Memory purge, unless you close Draw. I found I could quickly freeze my system (512MB RAM) playing around with a few Drop-shadowed objects.

OK, I soon realised this was related to the Undo levels setting in the Options dialogue. I reduced this to just 2. This stopped RAM from overloading but, I could still reach about 130MB to 150MB of Memory usage before Undo began wiping over the previous Undo memory. This also meant Undo was minimal.

If you are creating and editing more than a few Drop shadowed objects, either as normal Drop shadows or, using the workaround to feather transparent objects, it is certainly worth adjusting the Undo levels accordingly, even if it is only temporary.

Personally, I believe Draws Drop shadow tool is seriously flawed to be so memory hungry. I can create, blur and edit more sophisticated objects in Photoshop without requiring anywhere near as much RAM.

Sark

[Sark]

Feathering objects is one of the features shamefully lacking in Draw. Recently I thought I had discovered a good workaround for this.

Feathering creates a bitmap that can be blurred; this can be shape edited by an invisible controlling path. The effect is basically a Drop shadow with the shadow locked to an invisible path.

If you remove the outline and fill from an object in Draw, it is not possible to apply a Drop shadow. However, if you create a solid object with no outline and apply 100% transparency to the object, you can apply a Drop shadow. With the Drop shadow tool selected you click inside the transparent object, drag a short distance (don’t drag outside the object) and you now have a feathered shadow that mirrors the transparent objects shape. You will need to apply colour separately, but you can now use the Node editing tool for live shape editing of your feathered “object�.

Great, I thought, but whilst playing around with this I discovered a huge flaw (to add to the list) in Draws Drop shadow tool. I should point out I’m using Draw 9 on Win 2K, though I got similar results when I reinstalled Draw 11. Hopefully this is a Win 2K issue, but I doubt it.

First, I opened Task manager so I could see Memory usage. With only Draw open I was at 73MB approx.
I created a 200 X 200-pixel ellipse with a fill and applied a Drop shadow that was centred to the ellipse. Memory usage jumped to 79MB.
I changed the default feathering from 15 to 30, 89MB.
I dragged red from the colour swatch to the drop shadows colour well and Memory usage jumped to 96MB.
I then changed to blue, 102MB and back to red, 108MB.
Next I scaled the image with the Pick tool to approx twice its size, Memory usage is now at 130MB, scaled back down, 137MB, up again, 151MB, and down again, 157MB.

I now have a small, simple ellipse with a Drop shadow and it occupies a whopping 83MB of RAM.

Now I’m not saying you would carry out the editing that I used here, but it does represent the kind of general editing you might apply when playing around and drawing creatively. Also, when you node edit the object, Memory usage continues to jump considerably. Even more disturbing, if you delete the object with its Drop shadow, Memory usage remains unchanged. There is no form of Memory purge, unless you close Draw. I found I could quickly freeze my system (512MB RAM) playing around with a few Drop-shadowed objects.

OK, I soon realised this was related to the Undo levels setting in the Options dialogue. I reduced this to just 2. This stopped RAM from overloading but, I could still reach about 130MB to 150MB of Memory usage before Undo began wiping over the previous Undo memory. This also meant Undo was minimal.

If you are creating and editing more than a few Drop shadowed objects, either as normal Drop shadows or, using the workaround to feather transparent objects, it is certainly worth adjusting the Undo levels accordingly, even if it is only temporary.

Personally, I believe Draws Drop shadow tool is seriously flawed to be so memory hungry. I can create, blur and edit more sophisticated objects in Photoshop without requiring anywhere near as much RAM.

Sark

[Grafixman]

Working with bitmaps in Draw does eat up memory space. But I think it's understandable if you remember that you're probably working at 300 dpi and CMYK. But the main problem for me is Draw slows down noticeably with too many bitmaps in the file. Really bad and they should take care of it in future updates. As for purging the RAM, how about trying one of those RAM cleaner apps available ...? Just a thought.

[Sark]

Since posting, I’ve played around a little more and come to the conclusion that if you keep the Undo level down as suggested, using transparency and Drop shadows to create editable feathered objects is quite a practical and versatile approach.

When you return to working with vectors you can increase the Undo levels and further editing will not increase Memory usage, as it will write over the space in RAM used by the more memory hungry editing of the Drop shadowed objects.

Incidently, I was working at 72DPI. I'm not sure whever it makes a huge difference. As you say, Draw is very ineficient at handling bitmaps.

Also, if RAM reaches capacity the CPU starts using the HD for tempory memory (known as Scratch Disk). This is when the system can really slow down due to the slower data transfer of mechanical devices. The number of Undo levels can be a big factor in this.

Sark