Is Xara all I need?

[Giannis]

Thank you all for your inpuit and thoughts.

I've started using Paint.NET a little to do a few tasks. I could get started much easier with Paint.NET than I could with The GIMP or Serif PhotoPlus 6 (which are also free). One thing makes me consider purchasing Photoshop though - the vast amount of tutorials and books covering the application.

I recently finished reading SitePoint's The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, which was a very good read, and I'm now wanting to pick up The Photoshop Anthology. I've also downloaded quite a few video tutorials on graphics fot the web from various resources and almost all of them refer to Photoshop.

I'm going to see whether I can translate some of those tricks into XARA Xtreme and Paint.NET.

[RAMWolff44]

PhotoPlus X2 has just been released! As I stated it's a mix of Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop mixed together. I guess it now has projects options as well. Like contact sheet prints, burning backups and albums in the included AlbumPlus app. Here's the link: http://www.serif.com/photoplus/photoplusx2/ I was elegible for a nice upgrade price. I didn't beta test for this one so I gotta pay but I figure for $40.00 and some tools I could use, why not?

[Giannis]

I downloaded the free PhotoPlus 6 but I haven't tried it yet - I might do it later today. PhotoPlus 8 is $9.99 (US).

You wouldn't know whether Photoshop techniques can be applied in Photoplus?

[DGehman]

Giannis - You might ask your question in Serif forums. Serif's forums in many ways parallel this one (I've never seen more than super-mild bashing or flaming; a core of very knowledgeable users; Serif developers occasionally comment; etc.). http://www.serif.com/forum/default.asp

But... I doubt that the procedures are mirrored 1:1, Adobe:Serif...

Serif does have a good track record for providing a useful subset of professional features in its programs -- in terms of tools used 80% of the time, for example, PagePlus matches InDesign and beats Quark. In terms of usability/interface, PagePlus beats both by a mile (1.6 km for those of you who live where distances are measured logically). That said, Serif's vector program, DrawPlus, is not really competitive with Xara or AI.

Dave

[BONES]

Did you mean this list?
- batch process of images (like photographs)
n/a in XPro.
- convert native formats jpg/png
Xpro has problems with many (most) tiff and eps files, not even mentioning psd and ai.
- convert from CMYK to RGB (and other colour space conversions)
See above, opening CMYK files almost never works.
- make complex selections and cut out shapes
Yes, I agree that some crops & cuts are easier in XPro than any other program... but stuff like selection feathering, colour-based selections, painting on quickmask, growing & shrinking, adding, deleting, and even more importantly what you can do to the selected areas. And no, bitmap tracer is not a subsitute for magic wand.
- enchance low-quality images (noise removal, curves, sharpening)
Well as someone responsible for the visual appeal of a web page I sure as hell will do whatever is reasonably possible to all images I'm sent.
That said, I wouldn't do a web design with any other software than Xara. The absolute easy & comfort of use, named colours & objects and per-object export make it a wonderful tool. A Xara mock-up is just so easy to convert into CSS.

Have you ever tried using the bitmap tracer as a selection tool? You might be surprised at the results you can achieve. but you are talking very specifically about pixel-pushing, which hardly seems more than remotely relevant to web-work, which is what we're talking about.
The other side of is that all your issues seem to relate to print work, which further strengthens my belief that Xara is better suited to TV/film applications and should be developed further in that area [proper timeline-based animation].
If you had trouble working out what I was talking about, speak to Egg Barnhill, as he removed the quote from my post, for reasons unknown.

[pauland]

I used to imagine that Xara could be pushed towards animation and indeed recently they have moved in that direction and it's a popular move for many. As a flash user as well as Xara, I think that software such as Flash is just too intrenched for Xara to really much inroads in that direction, particularly for professional users. Xara animation really isn't suited to professional use and a lot of professional users use scripting in preference to straight timeline animation, if only to conserve file sizes.

Xara could emulate the basic timeline effects, but these days flash is animating filters and effects independently of the timeline with pipelines of effects and filters being applied to drawing objects.

I can't see anybody involved in TV/film applications using even an enhanced Xara in preference to Flash.

Paul

[Fred C]

Giannis,

Here's one more to try. It's very much like Photoshop, + it's free:

[URL="http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?en_version"]

-Fred

[Jon G]

Have you ever tried using the bitmap tracer as a selection tool? You might be surprised at the results you can achieve.

The bitmap tracer is quite complicated compared to the PS way, but yes, I see what you mean - thanks, haven't considered the traces as a colour selector. Might come handy one day.

but you are talking very specifically about pixel-pushing, which hardly seems more than remotely relevant to web-work, which is what we're talking about.

I was only talking about tasks that I need bitmap editing for. It of course depends on what kind of sites you do, I get sent a lot images from various sources and Xara just can't handle them. I've also done sites without opening a bitmap editor.

The other side of is that all your issues seem to relate to print work, which further strengthens my belief that Xara is better suited to TV/film applications and should be developed further in that area [proper timeline-based animation].

I do both print & web and I find the graphics part in both quite similar. Laying out a page involves the same processes in both, differences are in the output. Xara is just fine for print imo. I haven't done anything film/tv related besides end titles, but Xara competing with anybody in after effects industry or with Flash.... not in the near future. Not really even in DVD menu authoring.

If you had trouble working out what I was talking about, speak to Egg Barnhill, as he removed the quote from my post, for reasons unknown.

"Reason: Deleted unnecessary quote of the post above ~ Egg"

...overmoderation :-/ quite strange indeed.

[BONES]

Yes, but the thing with AfterFX is that it is basically rubbish. It only succeeds on the strength of plug-in support. It also suffers from being a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none application. As for Flash - it has the most unintuitive and clunky animation I have ever come across [apart from Director, which is the same]. Autodesk Combustion is the closest thing to the perfect vector animation tool I have found but compared to Xara, it's vector tools are primitive and slow. With timeline-based animation, Xara would be the paint/roto and motion graphics tool to rule them all.