Plugged-in?

Xara 2 added support for Adobe Photoshop (and compatible) plug-in filters. Many of you have already used this feature and so this section will only serve as a refresher. Others of you have a glazed look in your eyes and are saying, What in heck is he talking about?

Plug-in filters work with bitmap images and can apply various effects, including blurring, embossing (the appearance of a raised portion), distorting, such as making a square object appear round, and more.

Not all plug-in filters work with Xara 2 for a variety of reasons, so when in doubt, post a question in the Xara Conference before purchasing a plug-in filter to see if anybody has had any problems with the filter. I have used The Filter Factory, which is sold through i/us (about $20.00 USD) with success. In addition, there are several freeware and shareware applications in the new XaraXone Shareware section. We'll look at one of these filters and step through the process of downloading, installing and using the filters in Xara 2.

Downloading the Filter

Create a temporary folder on your hard drive and call it A Plug-in Temp

Select Sean Sedwards' Emboss Shareware filter from the download page for Sean's filters (follow the link from the Shareware Page and download the file into the new A Plug-in Temp folder. The file is self extracting and will extract its contents upon opening. Either double click on the file name or right click on the file name and select Open.

Extracting the Contents

As you can see the file has extracted (after a brief intervention by a black DOS dialog box) and there are three filters and a Emboss.DOC file that explains how the filters work, and where to send the $10 (USD) or £6 for the filters if you like the set and decide to keep it. If you don't like the filter set, remove it from your computer and that's that. That's the way shareware works. Anyway, highlight the three files with the 8bf file extensions (note the icon may be different, I did these screens on my older computer with Windows 95), right click and select Copy from the pop-up menu.

Transferring the Files

Locate the folder on your computer where Xara 2 is installed (normally C:/Program Files/Corel/Xara2) and open the Plug-ins folder. Double click on the Plug-ins folder icon, right click inside the right window and from the pop-up menu, select Paste. And as you can see the three emboss filters are there. (The other two folders are from the Filter Factory) Once the filters are installed, you can delete them from the A Plug-ins Temp folder. Keep the DOC file, however, as it contains important information.