Colouring bitmaps

[Frankenstein]

Hi,

This is probably "stupid question of the week" but..

In the past I've used Fireworks to produce the images that I want, but I'm trying out Xara Photo and Graphic Designer (10).

In Fireworks I can scan and import a line drawing ( I still like to start like that!) then simply use the paint bucket tool to fill different areas with the colours of my choice (as long as there are no breaks in the line surrounding that area).

How do I do that with the Xara software? (sorry if it is painfully obvious!)

Thanks!

[gwpriester]

P&GD is not a bitmap editing application. It is basically a vector drawing application.

The new version of Photo and Graphic Designer has a transparency filter called Color that can change the color under a color filled vector shapes to that color.

There are several other transparency modes that can alter colors.

My attachments shows a green rectangle with various transparencies over a dark textured bitmap.

[Frankenstein]

Thanks..looks like it's back to the..erm..drawing board for me...

[siran]

Could you describe in a little more detail what exactly the workflow is and what kind of bitmap the result of your scan is?
The first thing that comes to my mind is to try a bitmap trace and color the resulting shapes, but there are many members here with a lot of more experience in that.

[stygg2003]

Hi,

This is probably "stupid question of the week" but..

In the past I've used Fireworks to produce the images that I want, but I'm trying out Xara Photo and Graphic Designer (10).

In Fireworks I can scan and import a line drawing ( I still like to start like that!) then simply use the paint bucket tool to fill different areas with the colours of my choice (as long as there are no breaks in the line surrounding that area).

How do I do that with the Xara software? (sorry if it is painfully obvious!)

Thanks!

Even if there is breaks in your line drawing in Xara you can select the line and make a rectangle with the colour of your choice then select both and Join Shapes, the line then has a fill, select the two again and select break shapes. I've posted a xara file that you can pull apart, pull those two big pouches to one side of coyote's and you'll see what I mean, I think this is what your trying to do, but I have been known to be wrong

Stygg

[Frankenstein]

Thank you all for your replies

I may be (probably am!) doing something fundamentally wrong - but if I scan in a line drawing (as a JPEG for example) then import it into Xara I can't select anything except the whole scanned image (i.e. a rectangle representing the piece of paper that I'd drawn on). Any attempt at colouring just colours the whole document. Do I basically have to draw directly into Xara but in small sections? I've tried drawing a simple figure directly with a drawing pad, but then Xara sees it as one object and colours everything at once.

Am I making any kind of sense?

[gwpriester]

JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP etc. are bitmaps. Bitmaps are made up a grid of very tiny squares called pixels. The attached image looks very smooth but if we blow it up large and turn off anti-aliasing ( a process that creates in-between pixels), you can see that the photo is really individual solid color squares.

Vector objects, are defined by their outlines and can scale up or downwards with no loss of detail and sharpness.

My second attachment demonstrates this difference.

Xara products are basically vector oriented programs. And while it is possible to do a small amount of bitmap editing, the main focus is on vector objects.

This make any sense?

[Frankenstein]

Thanks Gary - yes it makes sense.

I wanted to try and produce vector illustrations in the style I favour (such as my avatar of Frankenstein's monster) so I'll have to adjust my approach...

I'll persevere!

Roger

[RKissane]

Take a look at ZEBtoons tutorial. He goes over how he takes a sketch and scans it in and coverts it to vector.

http://www.zebtoonz.com/drawing.htm

This should give you a good start.

Ray

[Frankenstein]

Brilliant - Thank you Ray!