Using Filter Forge with Xara as a host

Does Photoshop has a similar "live" effect as well? If yes, can anyone confirm FF works correctly with live effects in Photoshop?

I can also confirm that other plugins will work fine with Xara as a live effect and as Xara is actually a vector illustration program that does a whole lot more, being able to take advantage of Filter Forge and Xara's live effects would be great.

With Xara you can apply most PS plugins to pretty much anything you can create, vector shapes, photos or 3D extrusions. You can set the dpi that the plug ins automatically render at in the program options and if you are working with vector shapes the Live effects will be completely scalable. That is if you have them set at 300dpi it won't matter if your shape is 100px and you resize it to 10,000px your plugin still renders at 300dpi

Currently the issue I have reported here means that the effects have to be locked in Xara. They are still very usable when locked, but no longer live and scalable.

I also have a suggestion for the Filter Forge Developers

One thing that is really intuitive when working with Xara is the fact that anything can be duplicated by right click and drag. Would it be possible to have a feature like this in filter forge where you could right click and drag to create a copy of a component?

Here is another error I encounter in both FF3 and 4 with Xara this one comes up if I cancel the application of the filter from within FF

It doesn't really matter if you update a plugin or a standalone version. Looks like you had a temporary Internet outage.

Hi everyone. There have been a new versions of Xara software released that support plugins So I am now testing with Designer Pro 9. The filters work very well however in addition to the errors I've already reported I've found that FF kicks up an error similar to the one in my first post in this thread when trying to apply the filter to a bevelled object. I've been able to work around that error by converting to a png with alpha before applying the filter but it is an extra step.

Hi GMM thanks for responding I do understand that you need to get FF4 finalized and released. I just thought as I find these issues I'd post them here and you guys would have a list.

Yes most other plug ins work well with Xara's live effects. Alien Skin plugins work very well except for the new Eye Candy 7 plugins. They broke something when they did the re write for the new Adobe programs. But version 6 of EC works nicely. Alien Skin how ever don't want to bother fixing the version 7 plugins for use with Xara they want to cater to PS. Akvis programs work fine. I don't have the topaz plug ins but I have seen others on the Xara forums say that they are good. I think I tried a demo of a onOne product and it worked fine but I didn't want to spend the money at the time.

I'm also working on a line of filters that work with Xara's vector selections. I'm bringing the vector image in as an external image and setting an alpha channel. I'm also for some of these Xara friendly filters distorting the edges based on the texture being applied, for example text with a hair texture that actually looks hairy and not just filled with a hair texture. I hope to have the first one ready for library submission soon it's a metallic surface filter similar to Eye Candy's Chrome filter. It was doing this that I ran into the issue with Xara's beveled objects causing the FF error.