Making your publication look slick and professional is as important as it's content, so Opus has many of the features of a graphic design package to make it easy to create stylish and polished projects whether you're a professional designer or not.
Drop Shadow
One of the most popular effects for designers, drop shadow allows you to lift objects from the page by giving them a slight shadow. Opus allows control of position, colour and blur simply by setting values on a dialog.
Flare
Add a glow to any object in any colour with control of width, blur and transparency. Flares are very useful for mouseover effects especially to highlight hotspot areas. But you can get creative too, a flare with no blur and no transparency provides a way to outline a group of objects with a toon style outline.
Blends
A range of blends let you create fade one object into another but also to create cutouts, frames or panels quickly. Categories include soft edges and corners as well as shapes such as speech bubbles and turn edges. You can add your own using the
Custom option or use animated gifs to provide animated blends.
Textures
You can also give any object one of a range of textures with the option to set the strength. This is ideal for creating subtle background textures such as paper or card, or more dramatic effects such as brushed steel, bricks and checkplate.
Render
If the output option you have chosen (Flash or HTML5 for example) does not support blends, textures or effects at runtime, or you can't combine blends and fade transitions on one object, then simply use the
Render function to create a PNG image with the blend and/or texture effect applied.
