Page 357 - Xara Designer Pro X17

Photo Handling 357

transparency. You can adjust this by just dragging either end of the arrow and you can
adjust the strength of the effect at each end using the transparency slider.

The final step is to blend the edges of the brightened area with the FEATHER (on page 91)
tool. This gives the final result as shown top right.

Note: The region or mask is an editable vector shape and you can edit the vector outline
to be as exact as you want. But using the Feather effect to blend the edge means you do
not have to be that exact.

Secondly, as with most tools in Designer Pro, these are non-destructive edits. Not only
can you adjust the effect (and the region it covers, or any enhance effects) at any time in
the future, but you can delete the effect to restore the original image.

Photo display quality

Xara Designer Pro X can display photos in one of five useful quality levels. The top two
settings smooth the screen pixels so avoiding visible pixels or rough sections along the
edges (anti-aliasing). Change the quality level using the QUALITY entry in the WINDOW
menu.

VERY HIGH Displays images using bicubic sampling. This displays images at the
QUALITY best quality, particularly for large hi-res images that are scaled down
(DEFAULT) or zoomed out a lot.
HIGH QUALITY Anti-aliasing on, but images are rendered faster and at lower quality.

FULL COLOR No anti-aliasing, thus showing individual pixels. This can be useful
when you're zoomed in and you need to clearly see the separate
image pixels. The downside is that images generally look poor
when reduced or enlarged resulting in clearly visible pixelation and
jagged "staircase" edges, especially if you rotate the image.
OUTLINE WITH Is particularly useful for seeing outlines of the various steps of a
BLEND STEPS blend. Blends are not supported in Xara Designer Pro X but
imported .xar files could contain blends.
OUTLINE Only object outlines are shown. This is useful for finding and
selecting objects that are difficult to see due to other objects in front
of or behind them.
There is an additional control that allows you to stop all image smoothing or anti-aliasing
on images that are scaled up or zoomed in. In other words, instead of a smoothed image,
you see all the pixels when zoomed in. Open the BITMAP GALLERY and right click on the
image and select "properties". In the dialog un-check the "Smooth when scaled up"