Increasingly, image editing applcaitions seem to be adopting at least a subset of the Photoshop set of transparency / overlay types as a standard.

In some cases this is probably just a name change, i..e.-

Mix == Normal
Dodge == Bleach (?)
Burn == Stained Glass (?)

but there are other transparency types (Hard Light, Soft Light etc.) for which I don't think Xara has equivalents. When it gets down to rendering transparency Xara is compositing pixels just like an image editing app, there doesn't seem to be any reason why Xara coudn't implement a wider set of compositing modes. The option to use PS-compatible names or Xara names (the Xara names are probably more meaningful to non-PS users in some cases) would be a nice touch.


I can also see value in adding layer transparency and layer-level overlay modes. I'm not talking here about starting to break down Xara's object-oriented approach to drawing and going the way of Photoshop's "everything needs it's own layer" style.

However there are times when you do need everything on one layer to have a particular transparency style (transparent overlays for sketching/tracing for example), and it's slightly more convoluted to have to select the layer, group the contents, and then set everything ON the layer to a common value of opacity and overlay mode.

There are some crcumstances where the aboev simply wouldn't work (e.g. if the objects on the layer are already combined using transparency, but you need the whole resulting layer to have a distinct tranparency type of its own).

What do people think, can value in this?

Regards: colin_e