Live effects

Microsoft Expression Design lets you apply effects (or "filters") to any vector, text, or bitmapped object. These include common production effects (such as drop shadows, Gaussian blur, and Unsharp Mask ), as well as artistic effects (such as Film Grain, Bas Relief, Graphic Pen, and Note Paper). However, these effects are called "live effects" because they never degrade your original objects. Once you apply an effect to a vector or bitmapped image object, you can easily change the effect's settings, hide it, or remove it entirely. You can also stack more than one effect on an object and reorder the effects for different results.

Note that when you apply a live effect to a vector object, such as a path or text, Expression Design rasterizes the object (turns it into a bitmapped image) at the document resolution as defined in the Document Size dialog box. This rarely causes any difference in your final output, but you will notice a difference when increasing your view magnification (you'll see a rasterized version of the vector object) or if you export to a vector file format. If you hide or remove the live effect, the object returns to its vector form. At a high document resolution, the live effect might take longer to display.

Live effects are only visible within the document page, as defined in Document Size on the File menu.

Adding live effects to objects

To add a live effect to one or more selected vectors or bitmapped objects on your page, click on the Add Effect  drop-down list in the Effects section of the Properties panel, then select an effect from one of the submenus.

When a live effect is selected in the Effects section, you can control the look and feel of the effect by adjusting controls that appear at the bottom of the section. For more information about how to use these controls, see Panel widgets.

Note that if the effect is calculation intensive, you might see a progress-bar pattern overlaying the object(s) until the effect is finished drawing onscreen.

To add another live effect to the selected object, select again from the Add Effect  drop-down list. Each effect you add is compounded upon the last.

Hiding and removing live effects from objects

When you add a live effect to an object, Expression Design displays the name of that effect in the Effects section of the Properties panel.

Expression Design also adds an Effect icon ( ) next to the name of the object in the Layers panel.

You can hide a live effect (clear it temporarily) by clicking the Hide/Show Effect icon  in the Effects panel. Now the icon changes to . To show the effect again, click the icon again.

You can remove a live effect from one or more selected objects by clicking the live effect, and then clicking the Delete Effect button  in the Effects category of the Properties panel.

Reordering effects

If you have more than one effect applied to an object, you can reorder them by selecting one and clicking the Move Up button or Move Down  button in the Effects category of the Properties panel.