Working on a Mother's Day Card...

[Mark321]

I'm working on a Mother's Day card. Here's what I got so far (not through yet):



I'm gonna print it as a 13in x 19in image (full bleed).

I had to work at softening the image so that it would make an acceptable print. The original image had way too much contrast and saturation.

Enjoy!

Mark

*I think I changed my mind. I may print it without bleeding the image at all. I will probably leave a fairly large white border around the image. I think that would look better.

P.S...I'm sorry I posted this in the wrong area. I apologize. I wish I knew how to move this thread to the right area.

[Mark321]

I changed the "Happy Mother's Day" part from metal letters to just plain white letter. I thought it looked more elegant.



P.S...Thank you to whomever moved my thread to a more proper location.

P.S.S...I also added a line around the text (not shown) because the text was too light against a light background, making it illegible.

[Rik]

I can't read it.

So, the white lettering is a not a good idea, in my opinion.
Elegance doesn't work for me, if you can't actually read what it says!

[Mark321]

I can't read it.

So, the white lettering is a not a good idea, in my opinion.
Elegance doesn't work for me, if you can't actually read what it says!

agreed. That's why I put a thin line around the letters to make it easier to see. But I didn't post the one with the thin lines.

[Mark321]

Hopefully, this is better:

[Albacore]

Never a great lover of metallic text when sent to printers. It's Ok to print directly from Xara on a home laser or inkjet your text using complex fills in most situations gets rendered as a bitmap and depending on the background can leave thin non coloured areas around the bitmap. Always better to manually create a bitmap copy of the area and place it top the top of the stack in your layers gallery.

[Mark321]

Never a great lover of metallic text when sent to printers. It's Ok to print directly from Xara on a home laser or inkjet your text using complex fills in most situations gets rendered as a bitmap and depending on the background can leave thin non coloured areas around the bitmap. Always better to manually create a bitmap copy of the area and place it top the top of the stack in your layers gallery.

agreed. I like to take all my documents and vectorize them afterwards (bitmap tracer) so that there is no rasterization left to the image. Incidentally, the only bitmap tracer that can do a good job is Vector Magic. Every other bitmap tracer that I have come into contact with isn't very good. Vector Magic, on the other hand, is awesome.

By the way, if you'll notice that last image, I got rid of the metallic text, mainly because metallic text looks too masculine for a Mother's Day card, LOL!

Mark

[Albacore]

Mark I would, I am going to say, never vectorise a drawing and even using Vector Magic you loose detail. What I was meaning in post #6 was that when you export the drawing as a PDF all RGB effects get rendered by the PDF export filter as a bitmap. This is the bit that causes the problem leaving a fine white line around the converted area. This fault shows itself more when the background is a darker shade of a colour. The RGB effects that get rendered as a bitmap are things like bevels, shadows, very complex fills and transparencies. So looking at your card say if you put your pinkish background up and then placed in a vector tree gave it a flat transparency the whole area that was covered by the tree including you text would be rendered as a bitmap. Far better to use the layer gallery select your background and the vector tree which you knocked back using transparency, hold down "ctrl+shift+C to make a bitmap copy of that area. Then hide your background + the tree using the layer palette (not the bitmap copy) make a new layer import your roses - make another new layer and then type in your text. Always keep you text to the top most layer as this will improve the quality of the text when printed at a print shop.

[handrawn]

Mark - what albacore says is another reason why I stopped getting all hung up on vector as I said elsewhere - vectorising solid clolour is fine [usually] - but once you get into complex continuous tone stuff it just isn't worth it...