Re: Layers???
In Photoshop you have channels and to work with them often is helpful when you are screen printing as you can directly edit what is on the specific color plate which the screen printer works with.
Often times an person will put their final work on a layer, make it 100% black. Because not everyone knows how to split and send channels or what they are doing working with spot color. Yes, I know, they are supposed to teach this in college. Shall we say, it is a complicated process when you are learning, you are working on colored masks in a way. But when theses are sent to a plate maker, the plate maker sees BLACK and the printer applies the colors you choose.
Suz, layers is not like the above in Xara.
Layers in Xara is as though you did your drawing by hand, then took a piece of clear acetate, and used a brush and ink and painted your lines of your illustration.
Then on the next layer of clear acetate, you applied a sheet or zipatone, (like contact paper with dots) This layer looks black but you are going to print it in blue.
Then you do the next layer, same thing, it also looks black, but you are assigning it to a flesh tone. Not CMYK because the screen printer can print any spot color we want.
Top layer, more acetate, but instead, now we are cutting rubylith, (transparent red which photographs black by a stat camera) and we get to peal off the excess. Bright red lips, call the layer.
This is the way it used to be done to make a sort of "Andy Warhol"-effect on a t-shirt. But who is around that knows how to do it by hand any more.
Did a mention, by hand you put registration marks and must lable each layer as for color.
If this is what you are doing, you'd need to be working in spot color and on layers and since it is easier to do this in Xara X1, that is what I'd use if I were to do it.
But if this is what you are after, you can still use Xara Xtreme and see color by making your layers black but by using what I like to call a "coloring layer" in between. It is a transparent layer which colors the pixels underneath it to where you see the color you want, usually can use Stained Glass or even Bleach depending upon the color. If it is interferring with other colors, then you make your shape specific to that color then your on-screen view is correct.
Every day's a new day, "draw" on what you've learned.
Sally M. Bode
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