September 2014 Video Tutorial -- Xara Photo Compositions Part 1

[Gare]

More files for selective recoloring.

I did what theoninen suggested (for lazy people) and separated the foreground model from several different backgrounds, which are the real target of the exercise this month. Use your own image, but be sure to work through the selective color adjustment. It's a fairly significant feature in Photoshop since version 6 or so, and you own almost the same thing with Xara 10 (Thought: do you really want to work in a Creative Cloud?).

I also added a vector shadow you can experiment with.

September Bonus Files

For the moment they're in my Dropbox public area—I don't have access to MAGIX's server :(

The link is also on the Xara Xone page next to the asterisk halfway down the page.



-g

[Gare]

I you'd like a second go at color selection and alterations, I did an alternative image:



Just see how well you can select a sphere and edit its color. The single most important feature in Photoshop...and continues to be...is its selection tools. You can do selections manually, but color contrast, by geometry and by color similarity. I believe we can do much the same stuff with the same accuracy in Xara with a little practice. So here's a practice image.

My Best,

Gary

[stygg2003]

Gary here is the xar.file you asked me to post in #20

Stygg

[Gare]

I screwed up and left out a step, Stygg, my apologies.

You need to make a bitmap copy with Alph of your cutout of the pawn. If you just blur the cutout, the blur will not extend beyond the shape you're confining it to:



Goofily yours,

Gary

[stygg2003]

Thanks for quick reply Gary, it works fine now.

Stygg

[stygg2003]

Is this what you wanted us to come up with Gary from your post in #22 ? I missed changing the red reflection to orange

Stygg

[theinonen]

I call this one finished now as not much more I could do and this is as beautiful she will ever get.

Added colour to face so she will not look too much like a corpse + some added lighting and most importantly darkened the other side of the face to give some illusion of depth. Finally just moved every slider I could find in Xara to tweak everything to please my own eyes.

[stygg2003]

Nice final finish theinonon, does make a difference the tweaking you have done and besides it stops that niggleing feeling you get when you feel it's not finished. In my last post I had changed three spheres and one thing I missed was the colour change of now the yellow-orange sphere's reflection in the silver one, it niggled at me so had to change it

Stygg

[wizard509]

Gary I didn't really do much to this but this is the figure on one is textured to look like it is on canvas, the other two on different backgrounds.

[stygg2003]

I like the 3rd one Larry, nice backdrop. I've only done one, using 3D bumpmap, made this black and white.

Stygg