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 9. Dilation widens light areas and
narrows dark areas. Recommended use after Edge Detection or Isolate Points filters have been used. 10. Robert's Cross lightens the edges and appears to be another form of edge detection.
11-13. Sharpen, three levels increases the sharpness of a bitmap. A slider can be used to fine tune the degree of sharpness. 14-16. Blur, three levels softens an image. A slider can be used to
fine tune the amount of blurring in each strength. Too high a setting produces visible artifacts.
And that wraps up the Bitmap Effects section. As Xara Ltd.'s goal is keeping the file size of Xara X to a
manageable level, I think they could eliminate this entire section and make room for more desirable features.
Here is an image I created using some of the Bitmaps effects. But is it art? You'll have to tell me.
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The most ambitious section of the Bitmap Effects
menu is Special Effects. I should point out, in case some of you readers think your editor (old Gary what's-his-face) is being too critical, that this section has been around since Xara 1.0, and
probably long before that in pre-Xara days. At that time, having bitmap editing features in a vector drawing application was unheard of. And having what at the time was probably some state-of-the-art
bitmap editing features was quite a big deal. I am afraid these features strike me as redundant and outdated. But I will just report them as I see them and let you decide if there is sufficient reason to use
them. There are 16 special effects as you can see in the drop down list. I will cover each in the order of their appearance in the list.
The first of the 16 effects begins with Custom
, which lets you create your own filter by entering values in the tic-tac-toe like text entry boxes. According to the Help menu, the process, called Convolution, lets you
determine the brightness of adjoining pixels by entering values that add up to 1. It's an intriguing game and one which I suspect could produce some very interesting effects.
I've divided the image into 8 parts and
covered each filter on a 1/8 slice in two images. #2. Isolate Points. The Help menu is a bit vague about this effect as are the results. 3. Edge Detection (five
methods 3-7) and includes horizontal, vertical, 45 degrees and -45 degrees and overall edge detection. I suspect these filters are more successful when dealing with a bitmap with clearly defined areas
of dark and light. Basically these filters find the edges of distinct shapes. 
