Page 193 - Xara Web Designer Premium

Color Handling 193

Normal colors, Tints, Shades and Linked colors

Normal colors
These are the normal stand-alone colors you apply to objects.

Xara Web Designer Premium can also define colors that are linked to another color, that
is when the parent color changes the linked color will change as well. There are three
ways you can link a color to its parent TINTS, SHADES, and LINKED COLORS. These are
very powerful techniques that allow, for example, single-click re-coloring of complex
shaded drawings. Some of the example clipart uses this technique.

Tints
Tints are based on other colors (called the parent color) and are always a paler version
of the parent. They have two main uses:
• Where you have paler shades of a parent color and you may want to change the
parent color in future with the tints automatically updating.
• To extend the range of colors available from printing inks.

For example, a 25% red tint gives a pink color. Therefore using just a red ink you can
have both a pure red and a pink using only one ink. Similarly, if just using black-and-
white printing, it’s often useful to be able to use tints to create various shades of gray.

If you are printing with a limited range of colors (it’s usually cheaper to print one or two
color, instead of full or four color printing).

A tint can be based on any type of color, including another tint.
Any changes you make to the parent color also change tints based on it. For example,
you might define the color pink as 50% of a red parent color. Changing the parent color
to orange automatically changes pink to light orange.

Shades
These allow both lighter and darker colors to be created all based on a parent color.
Changing the color of the parent changes all associated shades. For example, a drawing
of a car might use shades for the highlight and shaded regions of the car body. A single
edit to the parent changes all the colors of the entire body but keeps the shading correct.
Setting up shades this way is more time consuming but it is a very powerful way of
altering colors.

For best results, the parent color should be a "pure" saturated color. When using the
HSV color mode, saturation and value should ideally be 100%. When viewed in the
COLOR EDITOR (on page 184) the cross should be in the top left-hand corner.