Hello, this is Cristi. In today's quick tutorial for Xara Designer Pro
X I'm going to show you a little hidden function to do with photo editing in Xara, and namely
generating a colour palette from a photo in Xara. Xara is really mostly a vector program
but it has a limited set of photo editing tools. And one of these tools is generating a palette, so
if I'm going to show an example, I'm going to import this photo into Xara, just drag it on top
of Xara, let's zoom in a bit here, and you see, if I want to use the colour scheme from this photo,
I can probably use the colour picker to select some of the colours in here and save them. Or
maybe apply them to a few fake swatches. So if I make a few fake swatches here,
I'm just going to duplicate these just really quickly, usually a nice colour
scheme has about 5 colours that you want to use. So, you know, you could go around and select one
of them and then take the colour picker here and kind of place it around the image. That is easy
to do and that is of course a manual process. But what if you don't know exactly what are the
ratios or the predominant colours in this theme? I can see it's kind of yellowy, yellow,
kind of brown, kind of orange, so it looks like an autumn or sunset. But I want to extract the most
predominant colours in this photo. Very easy to do,
let me just make this black again here. So check this out: select the photo in Xara.
You don't need to do anything, just go to this photo menu here and go all the way to the end
where it says Palette from photo. And watch the bar at the bottom here, the colour swatches,
the colour toolbar. Watch this one as I click that button here on the palette from photo.
Now you see, it took a second, all of the predominant colour in my photo are down here.
So now, I can just select my swatches and click on this one maybe, select the next one, try one
of them, click this one, go here, check this light blue and maybe this darker gray. So there you go:
I've generated a colour scheme from a photo. So this is very nice because you see here
most of the colours in the photo. If you are not happy with this grey maybe, or one of the colours,
maybe you can choose a lighter one. Maybe I'm not happy with this one, let me choose this
darker bit. So as soon as you do this, you realise oh yeah, actually you know what, there's more
different types of blue or grey in my photo. Or I'm not happy with this brown orange,
I want the darker bit. So there you go. This is very nice.
Let's try another example, just before we close. I'm going to go to a new document and import a
different photo here. And just to save time I'm going to go and copy my swatches from
this other document here, paste them all here, make them all black and move them to the side.
So watch this, very easy, select the photo. Now we know it's mostly purple and blue.
Let's see what the colours are when we extract them using this tool.
Make sure your photo is selected, obviously, go to the photo menu and
one click like that. Watch the bottom here, all of the colours have been extracted. So now,
I can go and choose which colours I want to keep maybe, I want to use in my project, this
blue is nice, this pinky kind of colour and maybe the lighter one or the very, very dark one.
So there you go. Now these colours are exactly extracted proportionally from my photo
and you can use them in your designs or you can use them to match existing designs,
and create a colour scheme from a photo you have. This is very nice, very quick and easy to do.
Thank you for watching, I hope you like my tutorials, I have more tutorials on the photo
functions in Xara Designer Pro, although as I said, it's not a photo editor per se, it cannot
really compare to Photoshop or Affinity Photo or any of the other software for photo editing,
but you can still do some basic photo editing in Xara Designer Pro.
So over the next few videos I'm going to be covering more of these functions. We're going
to look at all the adjustments and the levels and even in the special effects.
So thank you for watching, make sure you subscribe to my channel and see you next time.