January 2013 Video Tutorial - Working With Live Effects

[Gare]

Ah Gare,

She's got you, what more could she possibly want?

Answer: Shoes.
2nd Answer: more shoes.


-g

[stygg2003]

Thanks for the explanation Gary, yes it was at 96.dpi. Off to the shoe shop now

[Gare]

She likes Prada.

I reckon if every member chips in, we can buy her half of one shoe.

-g

[stygg2003]

Taking up what you mentioned in #9 would anyone like a monthly tut. on the finer points of working with bitmaps. Yes please and more of Live effects magic!

Stygg

[Gare]

Can do, Stygg, would be my pleasure.

I've written a book or two in the past on bitmap editing and filters.

-g

[angelize]

Answer: Shoes.
2nd Answer: more shoes.


-g

A woman can't have too many pairs of shoes!

And now back to live effects some of the distortion effects can be quite useful. for example the even waves filter can give you some nice wavy edge effects.

[handrawn]

with added [mehdi] vibrations - no shoes required...

[Gare]

This is a good example, Steve, of part of the treasure trove of effects that actually come with Xara—forget third party expenses for the moment.

And this sort of experimentation is what I was trying to convey this month; the Color from Gradient and the Painting filters are just the payoff.

Live Effects itself invites experimentation, and a lot of stuff under that tool button can produce work that would be entirely too tedious or impractical to do by hand.

A good exploration; three thumbs up.

-g

[angelize]

Here is a quick exploration of a combination of 2 different distortions that come with Xara and how you can use them to create a rough edged shape that you can convert back to a full vector shape by making a bit map copy (I find a 300 dp resolution on the effect and the bitmap copy works well) and using the bitmap tracer.

Xara will layer the different effects and allow you to come up with interesting results. But you do want to be careful about layering too many effects particularly some of the blur effects that take a little longer to render as too much of a good thing can slow the program to a crawl! In these cases locking effects will be a big help.

[Gare]

All good points, thanks Frances.

Oh, and as far as letting your machine do a grind while trying to update high res effects?

My strategy for a long time has been—when I'm absolutely certain I have the effect I want—I render a copy to the same resolution, Ctrl+Shift+C, in other words. Do NOT take this as an approved method in your own workflow until you have some experience with filters and you have a good understanding of bitmap resolution.

But I have to say that a few years ago when Gary P. hosted what became the traditional year's end gallery, I wanted to submit a candy cane illustration, with them peeking out of a snowbank. And I got the look I wanted via plug-ins, but at high resolution, I was working 20,000 leagues under the layer! So I quick made a bitmap copy, happy ending all ways around.



-g