By Cyndie Shaffstall

ShadowCaster QuarkXPress 7

An eye-catching design often calls for cutting-edge effects — effects that are usually difficult to achieve in a fast and efficient manner. Effects such as bevels, glows, and shadows can bring those dull, boring designs to life, but why stop there? Add transparency and blend modes to any design and create something special.

ShadowCaster 3.3 for QuarkXPress 7 is the key to that something special. No other XTensions module can add this much impact to a design. Its intuitive interface and interactive preview make it fun to create great designs in QuarkXPress. So when a job calls for the best-looking, high-quality pages, make sure ShadowCaster 3.3 is in your arsenal.

Adding effects to a QuarkXPress page is often a daunting task at best — until now. ShadowCaster 3.3 adds six types of effects to QuarkXPress 7. These effects are drop shadows, inner shadows, outer glows, inner glows, bevels, and embosses. An effect can be applied to any QuarkXPress item, including type and pictures. Each effect allows control over opacity, blur, intensity, color, and blend modes. Effects can be combined with one another yielding unlimited possibilities. So go ahead, add that bevel to the headline, put a shadow on that picture, make those rules glow!

ShadowCaster 3.3 combines QuarkXPres 7 layouts with transparency. Offering a tool with such power it will make layouts come to life. Offering 14 blend modes and opacity controls to every QuarkXPress item, ShadowCaster 3.3 makes that translucent headline or screened-back image an easy option.

Download Now: ShadowCaster for QuarkXPress 7 is absolutely free!

A little history

Back in the old days — before transparency was incorporated into page layout — designers would employ a number of different workarounds for creating effects such as shadows, glows, and bevels.

The most common technique was to pre-compose a region of the page in Photoshop and import it as an image. Another approach was to import an item's shadow as a gray or 1-bit image and set it to overprint. None of these workarounds were ideal because of their static nature — if the layout changed you would have to manually update the effect.

ALAP sees the light

This workflow was identified by A Lowly Apprentice Productions (ALAP) as a problem they could alleviate by creating an XTensions module that automates the process of pre-composing page items. It does this by rendering boxes and combining them in a raster-compositing engine that offers transparency blending, in addition to effects such as shadows and glows. The XTensions module is called ShadowCaster and was a top seller for ALAP until they were acquired by Quark in 2005.

Quark comes to the party

Automating a workaround isn't typically the best solution for this sort of problem, so for QuarkXPress 7, Quark undertook a major refactoring effort in the QuarkXPress graphics engine to natively support transparency. Drop shadows dynamically update based on layout geometry, and final rendering is deferred until output, where transparency relationships are deconstructed using discrete vector shapes, and spot colors are supported in rasterized compositing.

While the new solution is preferred in most workflows, some workflows require a different approach that allows users to manually edit the shadow before output. Still others require additional effects, such as glow or bevel, that aren't yet available directly in QuarkXPress.

ShadowCaster returns as a technology preview for a limited engagement

So take a look at ShadowCaster 3.3. Eventually Quark will adopt some of these concepts into the transparency offering of QuarkXPress. Keep in mind, this is not a formal release of the software, so it's non-warranted.

The provided documentation is from the old ALAP version and may not be 100% correct, and it's available only for the Mac version of QuarkXPress. Also keep in mind, there are no guarantees that this XTensions module will be available for versions of QuarkXPress past 7.

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©2008 Quark, Inc. Reprinted with permission.