Designer: "Paste as new image" and crop questions

[gwideman]

My apologies, and slapping myself on the head.

Yeah, I see now that I was thrown off track thinking that PHOTO appearing before Graphic implied primarily bitmap. And there are some elements in XPDG that look suspiciously like Photoimpact feature, like the Photo optimize advanced dialog and bitmap save dialogs. Nonetheless, as you say, most of the product is really a lighter version of Xara Extreme (is that now Designer Pro? I can't keep track).

What happened was that I was trying to google what was the current-day descendant of Ulead Photoimpact, which landed me at CNET looking at Corel Photoimpact X3, where I saw a comment recommending "Magix Graphics Designer", and thinking that I remembered in the past a package from Magix that had bundled several things included what appeared to be rebranded Photoimpact, which prompted the possibility that perhaps "Magix Graphics Designer" was the current day version of PI. Then searching for Magix Graphics Designer caused google to cough up "Xara Graphics Designer", and upon visiting xara I don't see exactly that, but rather "Xara PHOTO and Graphics Designer"... and obviously (?) the PHOTO part means it must have extensive bitmap features... could this be the holy grail?

Sigh. OK, total red herring. Sorry for the distraction. I will now return to finding the correct type of screwdriver.

-- Graham

[mwenz]

No worries.

Perhaps I am missing how/what you do with the screen shots. Can you do a screen shot of inside either P&GD of a typical layout, or inside of Photoimpact (assuming you have it installed)? A picture is worth, well, you know.

From what I am understanding--and it sounds like what I do--the process above should be quick and easy. There is *no* sampling. And if artifacts are important in your work, don't use PNG. A pasted screen grab, cropped or not, annotated as is necessary can simply be group selected and exported out with no other processing to the elements. Really.

Heck, I'll go buy the thing so I can do an apples to apples movie if it'll help. But before that, a screen shot would be helpful.

Take care, Mike

[mwenz]

I like the sense of humor.

Want to know more of the sordid story of Corel? Corel was in a purchasing frenzy back in the 1990s. They not only got a hold of some of Ulead's stuff, but also Xara's. It was known for a time as CorelXARA, which in turn, once it was taken back away from Corel, as...wait for it...Xara XTreme...then onto Designer Pro and Photo & Graphic Designer.

What a world.

But anyway, I'm off for a bit of snooze. I'll pop back into the forum in the morning.

Take care, Mike

[gwideman]

Hi Mike,
I have a bunch of different ways to do variations of typical tasks, depending on which software is going to facilitate the job best, or introduce the least trouble. For example, if a lot of boxes with arrows annotations are needed, then I stick the segment of screen cap into Visio. And other packages are more suited to other effects. The very handy thing about Photoimpact was that over the years I learned I could depend on it not changing the bitmap unless I did specific operations. So if what I am documenting is defects in a user interface, say a mistakenly set pixel, or poor antialiasing, I can depend on Photoimpact not resampling or antialiasing away the exact feature I need to preserve.

Anyhow, I've now resolved that XPGD is not the tool for that particular job. Even if I wanted to conduct the appropriate steps, I still end up at the dialog that includes antialiasing. Even if one of the choices is supposed to be "do no antialiasing", what I saw in the sample output window portion of that window shows me that it actually does change the bitmap. (And as you note, to even expect a faithful bitmap, one has to choose a format that doesn't do lossy compression. So obviously not JPG. However, PNG is lossless in my understanding, and seems to be fine.)

By way of completeness, here's what I learned now that I've gone on to find what appears to be the latest version of Photoimpact, Photoimpact X3 sold by Corel. I installed the free trial version. (There's also a "PhotoImpact Pro 13" from novadevelopment, not sure if that differs from Corel's).

1. Photoimpact X3 About box says PhotoImpact 13.00.0000.0 and its executables and dlls are dated Dec 2007.

2. Within five seconds of opening it on Win 7, it froze as I was adjusting the toolbars. I decided I didn't need to adjust the toolbars, so after I killed it and restarted it I was actually able to accomplish some work (including quick cropping of bitmaps and all the operations I expect to do in PI) without further problems.

So, I suspect since it was released before Win 7 there may be some rough spots, but for me it's worth giving it an extended try.

-- Graham

[gwideman]

Oh, I think we are aware of the episodes of sordidness and extravagance of which you speak. -- Graham

[handrawn]

have you tried setting the xara view quality to 'full colour' before you take the capture? - and leaving it on that setting for export

in theory at least this should turn off xara's screen anti-aliasing, and if there is non present non should be exported whatever the export setting ['maintain' or 'minimise']

not saying it will work for sure as I am not 100% clear on your objective[s], and I don't screen capture with the program, but you might like to try it

[handrawn]

one further possible tweak:

when you have captured - right click on the captured bitmap in the gallery and select properties - then untick 'smooth when scaled up'