2. With the Object Pick tool, click the duplicate Santa in the document window to make sure you can see the object control handles. Then click-drag the top center handle so Santa mirrors his original horizontally with disproportionate scaling— exactly as you perform in CorelDRAW, going way past the object’s original bottom point, and releasing the mouse button when Santa’s original top point lies a little below his right skate blade. Ill 26-17 3. If necessary, with the Object Pick tool, move the duplicate down so both of Santa’s ankles are in about the same location in the composition. 4. Choose the Object Transparency tool from the effects tool group on the toolbox. 824 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Drag middle handle to scale disproportionately. Original bottom edge 5. Beginning at Santa’s ankle region, click-drag down to about the duplicate’s head area. By default, you’ve created a Linear style transparency, with opaque regions traveling to transparent regions from top to bottom, almost exactly the way you’d see a real reflection when viewed in perspective. Ill 26-18 6. Choose Effects | Blur | Motion Blur. This type of PHOTO-PAINT blur filter comes in handy in a variety of design situations because it can emphasize the direction of a blur, which can often lend a more photorealistic quality to blurry areas than Gaussian blur does. Set the Direction to about 34 degrees, adding much more horizontal blurring than vertical in this example. Then set the Distance to about 35 pixels—Distance is relative to the overall size of your images when doing editing outside of this tutorial. CHAPTER 26: PHOTO-PAINT Effects and Advanced Editing 825 26 Object Transparency tool Drag down. Black = Opaque; White = transparent Click the Sample Nearest Edge Pixel option so transparent areas outside of this object take the Motion Blur effect using the nontransparent object pixels toward its edge. Finally, click Preview and if the document looks good, click OK to apply the effect. Ill 26-19 7. You’ll have a little cleanup work to do with Object 1 in the document, because the ankle area is not only visible, but it’s also blurred now. With the Eraser tool, stroke over areas outside of Object 2’s leg area that are visible. 8. You can choose File | Save As, and choose the JPEG file format now so the completed composition can be shared as an email attachment. In the Gallery folder, in the ZIP file you downloaded, is the completed version of the preceding tutorials. Compare your version with the author’s, and then have a good laugh because you did much better than he did! 826 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Performing Subtle Image Edits Many times you won’t need to use the full power of PHOTO-PAINT to make a less-than- perfect image perfect. Your artistic judgment can combine the shades of gray in life with degrees of subtlety to “nudge” a picture to the sublime. Leyka_3856.cpt, shown in Figure 26-8, is a near prizewinner. Open this image in PHOTO-PAINT now, and look carefully at the photo before looking at Figure 26-8 to see what’s wrong with it. Most of what you’ll learn in this section has very little to do with PHOTO-PAINT and everything to do with your own ingenuity. How can the rain droplets in the photo be deemphasized, and how can that bright orange window sticker be removed from an otherwise charming family photo? The overall solution is to add the Motion Blur effect to the offending area; blurring image areas is not always the best, most aesthetically acceptable means of enhancing a photo, but it’s appropriate here for at least a couple of reasons: ● Leyka’s hair in this photo is blowing, and yet we see no open window, so we presume an open car window is behind the camera on the other side of the car. Therefore, if you blur the window behind Leyka with Motion Blur, not only are the raindrops blurred, but you’ve also added a sense of motion to the entire scene, and the blurred window helps explain why Leyka’s hair is wafting about. CHAPTER 26: PHOTO-PAINT Effects and Advanced Editing 827 26 FIGURE 26-8 Even when a background area is small, it can tarnish the entire photo. Window sticker detracts from scene. Water droplets make window look dirty. ● You establish a narrower simulated depth of field by selectively blurring a background element. Depth of field is extremely hard to fake, even with a third-party plug-in for such an effect, so you’re not actually creating depth of field that wasn’t originally done with the lens aperture, but rather suggesting it. You move the point of interest to the little girl when you remove visual interest from the background. You’ll work systematically in the sections to follow, and get some hands-on practice with the different tools in PHOTO-PAINT. And you’ll see that the approach covered here really is the key to first judging what needs to be done, and then choosing the PHOTO- PAINT that gets you to the finish line. Cloning Away the Background Window Sticker You want to remove the orange-on-white window sticker before blurring the overall window area, because if it remains, you’ll end up with an orange streak that calls almost as much attention to it as in its current state. This is a job for the Clone tool (press C); the interesting thing about the next steps is that you don’t have to be terrifically accurate with your Clone tool stroking work. Your goal is to remove the colors you see in the sticker—no one is going to be able to see “mistakes” in the final motion-burred area as long as you remove and replace the orange sticker with the fairly blue tones of the droplets on the window. Consider geometry and color as two separate issues when working in PHOTO-PAINT; this program has features to address geometry without affecting color, and vice versa. Here’s how to use the Clone tool to remove the sticker. Replacing Color with the Clone Tool 1. Zoom into the area of the orange-and-white window sticker. 2. Choose the Clone tool from the group of image repair tools on the toolbox; click- hold to reveal the flyout group, the eighth from the top where the Object Pick tool begins the tools. 3. On the property bar, choose Large Soft Clone from the Brush Type drop-down list. This brush has a good size for the job ahead of you, and a nice feathered edge, but it also is partially transparent, and you need a 100% opaque brush. 4. Set the Transparency to 0. 5. Right-click way above the orange sticker, on the water droplets on the window to set a traveling source point for the Clone tool. 6. Stroke over the orange area, until all of it is replaced with water droplets. Note that you can inadvertently create a “hall of mirrors” effect, an unwanted one, if your source brush travels into an area you’ve just cloned over. Avoid this resampling when you arrive at an area that’s already been cloned. Right-click on or near the 828 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide original area you sampled to reset the traveling sample area, and then finish up the work. Ill 26-20 Masking an Area with the Brush Mask Tool Because you can select an area while protecting other image areas from editing, you’re presented with a seemingly contrary pair of terms to describe editable and non-editable image areas when you use the Brush Mask tool with Mask Overlay turned on. The Brush Mask is a terrific and intuitive way to select feathered areas of an image so no hard edges are visible, and that’s what you’ll do with the car window in the following steps. But first, to be totally clear on what is selected in an image and what’s not: ● When you stroke with the Brush Mask tool in its default mode, everything inside the marquee (the “marching ants” you see in the document) is subject to change—selected. CHAPTER 26: PHOTO-PAINT Effects and Advanced Editing 829 26 Set Transparency to 0. Source brush (right-click to set) Clone brush applies sampled area ● When you turn on Mask | Mask Overlay, you get a lot more intuitive visual feedback than the animated marquee. You see a tint over the image that indicates protected, masked areas, the exact inverse of what you selected. You’re painting a mask, and not a selection area. Although Mask Overlay was originally designed as a preview and touchup view of your work, you can also work in this mode from start to finish when defining an area you want to retouch in a photo. If you keep in mind that when you stroke in Mask Overlay you’re protecting areas, you might just come to love using the Brush Mask tool in this special tint view mode. Here is how to select the car window area and copy it as a new object that you’ll soon edit to make the audience focus on Leyka and not on the backlit raindrops. Stroking to Define an Image Area for Editing 1. Choose the Brush Mask tool (press B or click-hold the mask tool group to reveal the flyout), and let’s try selecting an area in standard marquee mode just to make a coarse selection you’ll refine later in Overlay mode. 2. Choose the 100-pixel-diameter feathered nib—not the hard-edge guy—from the Nib Shape flyout list. At the edge of where you’ll stroke, the amount of selection will be 100% at the center of the nib, decreasing to 0% selection (or 100% masking) at the outside of the nib selection edge. This choice of brush nib results in a feathered selection edge, making retouching work invisible when blended against other objects and masked areas. 3. Start at the inside edge of the window, and then click-drag up, down, and across to define all four sides of the window. When you get to Leyka’s wafting hair, click-drag to straddle the edge, leaving some of the marquee inside her hair. Release the mouse button, but do not continue. 4. Click the Additive Mode button on the property bar. By default, the Normal Mode brush style is always chosen, and if you were to continue stroking after releasing the mouse button, you’d lose your first defining stroke. In Additive mode, you fill in whatever you’ve missed in the interior of your selection. 5. Choose Mask | Mask Overlay. Remember: the tinted areas are non-editable, and the area you see without the tinted overlay is selected—you are simply not seeing the selection marquee in Overlay mode. 6. Use the Additive mode to add image areas to be selected, and use Subtractive mode to mask (apply tint) to areas you don’t want selected. You are unmasking in Additive mode, and masking in Subtractive mode. Choose a different diameter Nip Shape at any time to really make a good selection that’s soft along the edges; 50 pixels is a 830 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide good alternative brush diameter for stroking along the edges of Leyka’s hair. The brighter areas directly in front of the window should be exposed to editing— selected—while her golden locks closest to her right cheek should be masked— protected from editing. Ill 26-21 7. When you think you’re ready to make a perfect copy object from your selection, right-click and choose Object: Copy Selection from the context pop-up menu. 8. Press CTRL+S to save your work up to this point, and keep the file open. Don’t click the Object Pick tool on the document now, because you’ll inadvertently move the new object in the picture. Because Object 1 (its default name) is directly over the original area, it’s not obvious that you have a Background and an object on top of it. Press CTRL+F7—a good keyboard shortcut to commit to memory—to view the Objects docker list of document elements. You can see in Figure 26-9 that if you just hover and don’t click over the active object, a tooltip tells you that your cursor is over an object, and the Objects docker confirms this. Now it’s on to visually deemphasizing the object by blurring it. CHAPTER 26: PHOTO-PAINT Effects and Advanced Editing 831 26 Brush Mask tool Subtractive mode Additive mode Normal mode Feather Creative Blurring It’s easy and usually embarrassing to take a blurry photo, but in this example, the degradation of the window area in the background will improve the overall picture. By applying Motion Blur to the object, you’ll remove detail, improve the hue of the object to complement Leyka, and add a little motion to the outside view from the auto, suggesting that the auto is indeed in motion. Here are the short and simple steps to finishing the editing of this photograph. Using Motion Blur 1. With Object 1 chosen as the editable object in the Objects docker, choose Effects | Blur | Motion Blur. 832 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 26-9 Use tooltips or the Objects docker to see whether there’s a duplicate directly over the Background. 2. Drag the Direction icon to a value of nearly 0 degrees, or type 0 in the num box. You have some leeway here with Distance; depending on your own artistic taste, you can drag the Distance slider anywhere between 65 and 140 pixels. Try previewing at 65 first; drag the slider and then click Preview. Try some more powerful distance settings, and when you’re pleased with the effect, click OK to apply the blur. See Figure 26-10. 3. The Motion blur will leave a gap between Object 1 and the Background at high distance settings. If you detect a gap, choose the Object Pick tool, and then drag a corner control handle on Object 1, scale it up a little, and then use the Object Pick tool to adjust its position, as shown in Figure 26-11. 4. Save a copy to JPEG file format so you can email the finished piece. The tutorial in this section demonstrated one of the most powerful tools when using PHOTO-PAINT: your ingenuity! There’s a lot of wonderful stuff under the hood in PHOTO- PAINT, and to get the best results, adopt a personal workflow: first, you detect a problem, then you invent a solution, and finally, you choose the appropriate tool. CHAPTER 26: PHOTO-PAINT Effects and Advanced Editing 833 26 FIGURE 26-10 Set the Direction to match the horizontal angle of the object, the direction in which the car is traveling. . | Motion Blur. 832 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 26-9 Use tooltips or the Objects docker to see whether there’s a duplicate directly over the Background. 2. Drag the Direction icon to. Right-click on or near the 828 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide original area you sampled to reset the traveling sample area, and then finish up the work. Ill 26-20 Masking an Area with the Brush Mask. along the edges; 50 pixels is a 830 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide good alternative brush diameter for stroking along the edges of Leyka’s hair. The brighter areas directly in front of the window