Page 363 - Xara Designer Pro X17

Photo Handling 363

For both methods, pressing the Alt key while clicking or dragging will draw a straight line
section from the last point to the current position. Pressing T will toggle the magnetic
aspect off or on. With no Magnetic snap, then dragging acts exactly drawing with the
Freehand tool. Clicking with no magnet snap will just add a straight line segment to the
current point.
Following the photo edge

Sometimes you may want the outline to follow the edge of the photo. To do this, click just
outside the photo edge.

Finishing
When you get back close to where you started, click on the start point again to complete
a closed outline (the mouse pointer will change to show a + sign when you are over the
start point) .
Once you have a complete closed outline, you can now copy (Ctrl + C), cut (Ctrl + X) or
delete the selected part of the photo. You'll notice that as you perform the operation the
SELECTOR TOOL is automatically selected.

Feathering
Once you have cut out an object, you can usually improve the edges by applying a small
amount of feathering (on page 91) using the feather control on the top InfoBar.

Magnetic Lasso works well on images where there is a high contrast between the object
you want to cut out and its background. Also if you have an image with lots of fine detail -
like hair or fur for example then you will get a better result if you use the Background
Erase (on page 420) feature instead.

Photo cut out, cutout, magic lasso

Screenshots

In combination with a built-in screen capture feature you can easily capture and create
screen shots.You can either use the SCREEN CAPTURE UTILITY which is included in Xara
Designer Pro X or use the screenshot capability built into Windows.

Using Windows to capture screenshots
• Press the "Print screen" button on your keyboard. This places a screen capture of the
whole screen on the clipboard. Alternatively, select "Alt + Print screen" which will
capture just the current window.
• In Xara Designer Pro X select "Ctrl + V" to paste, and select "Bitmap" to have the
results pasted onto the page.

You can now crop, add text annotation, resize as required and save the results. It's best
to save this type of image as a PNG file.