The Color Select/Erase Tool

If I had a dollar for every person who asked, how do I get rid of the background behind a bitmap image, I could have retired many years ago. Until now the answer has been to either draw a vector masking shape around the image to be retained and to use  Intersect Shapes, or Apply Clip View to add a vector mask, or to use Mehdi Eraser Classic in the Live Effects Tool. Well now there is an easier way. And a much more powerful way because you can not only drop out any background color, you can drop out a bunch of colors and they don’t even have to be related in hue. In the simplest example, we have a two color logo on a white background. Select the Photo Tool > Color Erase Tool, and click on the white background. A Color Marker appears which is a black circle with four resizing arrows. This color marker selects the color or colors you wish to erase or select. You have a choice of backgrounds as shown in the drop down list to reveal the amount of color erased. You can increase or decrease the Color Tolerance and Fade slider setting to expand or limit the range of colors. If your bitmap has a colored background or in the case of the example shown above left, a mottled background, you may need more than one Color Marker. I used three markers and added a drop shadow to show how effectively the mottled background has been removed. (A Color Marker is added every time you click a color. Markers can be edited separately and can be deleted.) The Color Select/Erase Tool can select a color or a range of colors as well as erase, hence the name of the tool. You can for example select the quail logo and press Make Soft Mask. This creates a mask that masks everything except the selection: the logo. In the example above, I Color Selected just the quail logo, created a Soft Mask, and used another all new addition to the Photo Tool fly out, Set Photo Hue to create a range of colored duplicates. You can modify the color (Hue) of a photo or bitmap graphic such as the logo bitmap by dragging the Hue  slider through the color spectrum. The Hue Strength slider as shown is all the way to the right or 100% saturation. In addition, you can use any of the Photo Tool > Enhance settings to modify the color which is how I achieved the muted gray green image on the right. The Color Select/Erase Tool works best when you have good color contrast such as the bright pink flowers shown above left and the medium deep green foliage behind. The Color Marker samples the pixels and averages the pixels to arrive at the overall color. The two examples shown on the left are a close up of the pink flower and you can see that the pink is actually made up of many different colored pixels that when viewed as a photo blend together. When you expand the size of the Color Marker circle, you average more color variations into your selection.

More Photo Tool Stuff

The Panorama Tool Now supports up to 8 images instead of the previous maximum of 6. Photo Replacement is now “smarter”. In previous versions, if you had three instances of the same photo on the page, and if you dropped a new photo onto one of those three duplicate images, all three would change to the new image. Now this only happens if the duplicate photos are part of a soft group. This is not a new feature but I just have to mention it in case some of you reading this review are not familiar with Magic Erase. Several versions ago, a Clone Tool was added to the Photo Tool fly out that lets you draw an area, then clone a section of the photo you are editing into this area. Well, in Designer Pro 7, and Photo & Graphic Designer 7, Magic Erase was added. You draw a freehand area and press Magic Erase and the selection is erased.  If you are not happy with the results, keep pressing the Magic Erase button and with each press a slightly different result occurs. And this is a non- destructive effect, actually a separate, deletable object, unless you select Flatten Photo Group from the Arrange menu. In version 8, however, there is a significant improvement to the Clone Tool as well as the Magic Erase feature. The Clone Tool has been improved so it now uses current result photo as the source, instead of the original photo (for manual and Magic Erase clone objects). This makes it more WYSIWYG in that when you’re cloning or copying (or Magix erasing) an area then it uses the current visible edited picture as the source, and not the unedited original image as previous versions did.

Clipart, Widgets, Buttons, Banners and Bullets, Templates Galore, Everything But the Kitchen Sink!

I could (and often do) spend hours looking at all the really excellent clip art that is included in Xara Designer Pro X and Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX 2013. There is something for everybody here and you can use the clip art and templates for printed documents or websites or presentations, you name it. There are more Widgets like the Cloud Zoom displaying the cactus than you can shake a stick at, though why anybody would shake a stick at a Widget, especially an expandable one, is beyond me.

Decisions, Decisions

With so many new and improved features, I’m surprised you have not already downloaded your Free trial copy. The only real question is, do you need Xara Designer Pro X, with all the bells and all the whistles, plus a bit more, or can you get by with Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX 2013? It’s a hard decision to be sure. Both contain excellent tools for creating illustrations, printed documents, editing photos, creating website graphics and creating sophisticated websites and presentations. If you consider yourself design challenged, not to worry, there are enough pre-designed objects and professionally designed templates (that you can use off the peg or modify to your heart’s content), that you will look like a professional with major design school education at that! Gary W. Priester First Published in The Xara Xone