Designer Pro X pastes images as jpeg?

[Acorn]

Hi Soeno

I believe this was an intended change made in version 12 and can be controlled by the following registry key

key name: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Xara\XtremePro x64\16\Options\Filters ( alter the version number to match your version)
Value name: OptimiseJpegFromPng

With the program closes, right click on the value name and select modify. Change the value data from 1 to 0 and click on OK.

Bhavesh, just tried the Registry change - no difference to v16 action, still a rectangular blob with no transparency.

Why ever "optimise" a PNG that may have transparency into a JPEG with none?

Acorn

[handrawn]

that rings a bell -I am sure the key is actually Clipboard/PasteAlpha

in ver 11 if set to 1 it pastes with alpha, if set to 0 it pastes without

but in ver 15.1 it makes no difference both settings paste without alpha

and interestingly if you save as PNG from the snip tool it has no alpha [even though it pastes with alpha into xara ver 11] it does not paste into affinity photo or photoshop with alpha ....

[handrawn]

... for the record it does not appear to work in ver 12 either

of course, if the MS changes to snip tool [and clipboard?] mean that only rectangular snips are available in the new tool, then alpha will not be an option anyways....

[Acorn]

... for the record it does not appear to work in ver 12 either
of course, if the MS changes to snip tool [and clipboard?] mean that only rectangular snips are available in the new tool, then alpha will not be an option anyways....

Thanks, reset my Registry back and tried Clipboard/PasteAlpha in v16 - no change!

Acorn

[haakoo]

Neither work for me too.

The strangest thing is that if you set the external editor in utilities>options>photo editing to paint.net or even affinity photo,the transparency is honored.
Nowadays I set paint.net to my photo editor for ps-plugins(as some don't work great in xara) and copy paste selections back and forth to xara and affinity.

[ss-kalm]

I agree with Acorn. If that was an intended change, can someone explain the rationalization behind it? It really seems like a backward step to me. If we want a png, we generally do so specifically for the transparency.

[soeno]

Yes, this seems like odd behavior - I *think* if my memory serves correctly, native windows bitmaps don't support alpha transparency on the clipboard, but the PNG format does (and of course the windows clipboard can hold multiple formats of the data at the same time). So I'm not too bothered by the lack of alpha; it's more a problem that I screenshot CSS changes on websites to build side-by-side comparison boards, but unfortunately the jpeg compression causes artefacts; not that it stops me using it like that, it's just that the end result isn't as high quality as I would like (or I expect, tbh, Xara has always been excellent at producing great looking graphics).

[handrawn]

you can save it from the snip tool as a PNG and then import it into xara - that will not have alpha but it might help with the artifacts, although that depends on what is causing them..

[Acorn]

Yes, this seems like odd behavior - I *think* if my memory serves correctly, native windows bitmaps don't support alpha transparency on the clipboard, but the PNG format does (and of course the windows clipboard can hold multiple formats of the data at the same time). So I'm not too bothered by the lack of alpha; it's more a problem that I screenshot CSS changes on websites to build side-by-side comparison boards, but unfortunately the jpeg compression causes artefacts; not that it stops me using it like that, it's just that the end result isn't as high quality as I would like (or I expect, tbh, Xara has always been excellent at producing great looking graphics).

I successfully can alpha-snip through the Clipboard directly into XWDPv11 - Snipper Clipper.web.

Acorn

[soeno]

I basically think Xara is picking up the 24bit bitmap from the Snipping Tool and for some reason it converting it to jpeg for some reason; of course alpha-transparent snips (which would be 32bit on the clipboard) will be detected as a different clipboard data type (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/win...pboard-formats) and therefore remains uncompressed/converted to PNG. Seems a weird assumption to think that any 24bit bitmap pastes into Xara should ever be converted to jpeg, but it's likely just to be silly bug; I'm guessing the import from file and import from clipboard go through a unified function and someone's just overlooked the latter workflow.