Quote Originally Posted by Gare View Post
Gaussian blurring a channel to produce the "in-between" regions that make a displacement map more pronounced is not a "one size fits all" step. If you want to do this so your work stands a chance of winning an award (!), you need something like Nik's filters> Morning Blues, or ShaderMap Pro to not so much blur areas as add some smearing on top of the image detail.
some people either don't want or can't afford to use a.n.other program, they'd rather see if it can be done using only xara and that was the purpose of the exercise in "dissent", to see if i could create a displacemnt map just using xara's bitmap tools
i'd say it worked, i used the same technique on my original flag, mainly because i didn't like the displacement map provided which looked more like a dress or a curtain than a flag
with bitmap copying, feathering and others we have plenty of tools to create such images, it just needs a fairly good eye and a working knowledge of how to create one in the first place
thats why i looked for a tutorial and happened on the photoshop one but i certainly wasn't going to do it in photoshop, i just want to know how, the rest, how to do it in xara, i'll figure out for myself