Let’s put all this knowledge into practice in the next section. Performing a Trace You’re almost set to click OK and have PowerTRACE convert the Silver Spoon.jpg logo into a set of vector objects. The original logo’s text was cast in Motter Fem font; if you don’t own it, this is okay. Install Candid.ttf through the Start menu | Control Panel | Fonts before you begin the tutorial. Candid is not a complete typeface; it’s missing punctuation marks and numbers, and it was created after the Candy font by URW. It’s very close in look to Motter Fem, and Candy is a great packaging-design font you might seriously consider purchasing for your collection—Candid is an author-cobbled knockoff whose purpose is solely to get you through the techniques in the following steps. Reworking a Logo Using Vectors 1. In the PowerTRACE box, set the Detail all the way to the right; a lower setting would ignore details such as the “Catering” text because the text is made up of only a few pixels in character width. Set Smoothing at about 25%; the logo is already fairly smooth and will not benefit from the averaging PowerTRACE would make in defining paths. 2. Set the Corner Smoothness to the far left on the slider (no corner smoothing). You want cusp nodes and sharp corners rendered to keep the checkerboard pieces and serifs on the typefaces sharp. Then, check Remove Background, check “Merge adjacent objects of the same color,” and then look at the Trace Result Details Curves field just as a matter of practice. 3. Click the Colors tab and then set the Number Of Colors to 30—there really aren’t more colors than 30 in the image; more colors will create superfluous additional objects. These settings should yield less than 200 separate objects, so click OK. 4. Move the objects away from the bitmap original; you want to keep the original on the page for reference. Ungroup the group of objects ( CTRL+U), and then delete what’s left of the word “Silver”. This will leave a hole in the background in a few places. 5. With the Text tool, type Greasy, and then apply Candid from the Font selector drop- down on the property bar. 764 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide 6. Apply a white fill to the text, and then press ALT+ENTER to display the Object Properties box. Click the Outline tab and then set the outline to 8 points, and check Behind Fill; this makes the apparent outline width 4 points, but areas are filled in within the characters to give the text a bold look. 7. Choose the Envelope tool from the Blend group on the toolbox, and then perform the same steps as you did earlier with the musical notes in the Bach composition. Use the Envelope tool to massage the text to look arced like the original text. If your design looks like Figure 24-12 now, you’re in good shape with only a step or two to go. 8. Create rectangles that match the color of the missing checkerboard in the logo, rotate them to the same diamond-shaped orientation as the original logo, position them accordingly for your patchwork, and then send them to the back of the page by pressing SHIFT+PAGE DOWN. CHAPTER 24: Advanced Photography Techniques with CorelDRAW 765 24 FIGURE 24-12 Replace the text in the original design using a similar font choice. Delete unnecessary logo objects. Apply an envelope around new text to copy the style of original text. 9. With the Shape tool, edit the characters in the word “catering” to make them look more refined. At small image sizes, CorelDRAW does its best to render approximations of small text, but they still often need a little human intervention! Ill 24-13 10. You can embellish the revised logo by adding a drop shadow to the new owner’s name, as it appears in the original logo, and you can smooth out the posterized edges on the spoon by overlaying an object that uses a fountain fill of the same colors. But as you can see here, the new logo is pretty faithful to the original, and with the help of PowerTRACE it took ten steps. Think of how many steps and lost nights of sleep you’d have without an auto-tracing utility. To get superfluous objects out of a finished PowerTRACE very quickly, use Edit | Find And Replace | Find Objects, and set the criteria for the search to specific unwanted colors. Then you can delete all the selected objects at once. 766 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Create background replacement pieces. Clean up remaining text where necessary. PowerTRACE for Traditional Artists Lots of different types of users are attracted to CorelDRAW, and logo and other graphics designers are one category of visual communicators. CorelDRAW’s tracing feature will also appeal to artists who came to the digital world of illustration after years of work with physical pens, pencils, and inks. If you have a scanner, and have, for example, a pen-and-ink cartoon, PowerTRACE makes child’s play out of re-creating your cartoon as scalable vector art, to which you can apply color fills with a smoothness and precision that enhance your cartoons and can elevate them to the status of Fine Art. Seriously! Cartoon sneaker drawing.png is a fairly high-resolution scan to get you started with a specific workflow you can adopt to use with scans of your own drawings. One important issue is removing pencil or other marks on the physical paper before you scan; use a kneaded eraser, and even if the paper doesn’t come completely clean, the following steps show you a novel way to use PowerTRACE to remove stray marks. Here’s how to create a digital cartoon suitable for exporting as either vector or bitmap art to any size you need; this is a perk you don’t have when working with only physical tools. Digi-tooning 1. In a new document, landscape orientation, click the Import button on the standard toolbar, and then choose Cartoon sneaker drawing.png. Place it by click-dragging the loaded cursor so it fills the page. 2. Click Trace Bitmap, and then choose Outline Trace | Line Art. You’ll receive an attention box that the bitmap size is too large, and that if you choose not to resize the bitmap, the trace process might be on the slow side. This is your artistic call: if you want the pen strokes to look extremely faithful to the author’s original cartoon, click Keep Original Size. If you’re in a hurry, click Reduce Bitmap. 3. In the PowerTRACE window, choose a medium amount of Detail, about 25% Smoothing, no Corner Smoothing, check Remove Background, and check “Merge adjacent objects of the same color.” CHAPTER 24: Advanced Photography Techniques with CorelDRAW 767 24 4. Click the Colors tab. Set the number of colors to 2. Doing this will generate almost entirely black objects with the exception of one or two areas that are totally enclosed, which should produce a white fill inside a black object. Click OK, and you’ll see that the pencil marks which are not entirely a black color disappear from the trace. Ill 24-14 5. Delete the bitmap; you’ll need to move the grouped objects first. 6. Choose Tools | Object Manager. Create a new layer and then drag its title on the list to below Layer 1. You can rename these layers “Coloring” and “Trace” by clicking to select the name, and then click a second time to open the title for editing—type anything you like in the field. Lock the tracing layer. 7. With any Pen tool you’re most comfortable with for creating free-form shapes, create objects that represent the different areas of the cartoon you’d like to color in. For example, the treads of the sneaker would look good in several different shades of 768 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide warm gray. The solution would be to use the Mesh fill on this object you draw—see Chapter 15 for thorough documentation of object fills. The top of the sneaker could be an interesting Linear fountain fill, traversing from deep orange at bottom to a bright yellow at top. Another great thing about coloring your work digitally is that you never have to decide on a final color. Ill 24-15 8. You continue this process until you’ve “colored inside the lines” and filled as much of the drawing as you see artistically fit. Figure 24-13 shows a logo mockup for a children’s footwear store. Clearly the drawing has an organic sense about it, the opposite of the sterile and flawless “computer art” we see occasionally, and yet this is CorelDRAW computer art, with a little ingenuity added to make a symbiosis between the physical and traditional elements. You can take a look at how this drawing was completed if you open Sneaky kids finished.cdr. CHAPTER 24: Advanced Photography Techniques with CorelDRAW 769 24 Linear fountain fill Mesh fill This chapter has shown you how to work with bitmaps in almost the same way as you work with vector art in CorelDRAW. Both vectors and bitmaps can happily coexist in a single document. You can shuffle and rearrange objects as if they were made of the same digital materials, and you do need bitmaps in your work when you’re trying to convey any sense of photorealism. Your next stop, in Chapter 25, is to get some hands-on education with PHOTO-PAINT and working directly on bitmap photographs and illustrations. You’ll see shortly that editing bitmaps and drawing with vectors can be a seamless creative process when you put the power of the Corel Graphics Suite to its best use. 770 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 24-13 The best way to execute a hand-drawn look with CorelDRAW is to hand-draw a picture, scan it, and then PowerTRACE it! CHAPTER 25 An Introduction to PHOTO-PAINT 771 P hotography tells a different story than the vector graphics you create in CorelDRAW; while vector drawings can look crisp, powerful, and brilliant in coloring, photographs typically tell more of a human story, with soft tones, an intricate latticework of highlights and shadows, and all the photorealistic qualities that portray the world as we’re accustomed to seeing it. Understandably, the tools you use to edit a digital photo or other bitmap image are different from those you use to edit paths in CorelDRAW. And this is where PHOTO- PAINT enters the creative scene. This chapter introduces you to the fundamentals of bitmap images; how you measure bitmaps, how to crop them to suit a specific output need, and ultimately how to make your original photo look better than it came off the camera. Download and extract all the files from the Chapter25.zip archive to follow the tutorials in this chapter. The Building Block of Digital Photos: The Pixel The term “pixel” is funny-sounding, and we use it occasionally in a humorous context, but seldom is an explanation or definition of a pixel provided in a way that is useful when you need to alter a digital photograph. A pixel—an abbreviation for picture element—is the smallest recognizable unit of color in a digital photograph. It is not a linear unit of measurement, a pixel doesn’t have to be square in proportions, and it’s not restricted to having any specific color. Now that what a pixel isn’t has been covered, read on to learn what a pixel is and how understanding its properties will help you work with PHOTO-PAINT’s tools and features to make photo- retouching go as quickly as your CorelDRAW work. Pixels and Resolution A pixel is a unit of color; as such, it has no fixed size we can measure the same way as you’d measure the length of a 2-by-4 (which is usually 2"×4"). If you were to discuss a pixel with a friend or coworker, it would be hard to do without any context, because these units of color cannot exist unless they’re within a background, usually called the paper or the canvas. The paper in PHOTO-PAINT is an imaginary grid into which you assign units of colors with the Paint tool or the Fill tool. When you open a digital photograph, the “paper” in PHOTO- PAINT is predefined by the presets of the digital camera and software. The resolution of your photographs is then fixed by that combination, but can be changed later. The term “bitmap” was derived from the imaginary grid on an image’s canvas— a map—and the amount of color information placed on this map was expressed as a bit of digital information. Usually, more than one bit of information is held by a pixel; more often a pixel holds a byte of information (8×a single bit), but somehow the term “bitmap” stuck as one of the names for pixel-based images. 772 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide Resolution is expressed as a fraction, a ratio: pixels per inch expresses image resolution in the same way that miles per hour expresses speed. We often call this resolution dpi (dots per inch) due to the visual similarity of dots of ink on a printed page and the pixels of color we see on a monitor. Bitmap images are also called resolution-dependent images because once a photo has been taken or a paper size defined for a PHOTO-PAINT painting, you cannot change the resolution without distorting the visual content of the picture. Here’s an example that shows the use of resolution when you press CTRL+N or choose File | New. 1. In the Create a New Image dialog, you’re offered a Preset Destination of PHOTO- PAINT’s default size, which as you can see here is 5 inches in Width by 7 inches in Height. However, the print size is not a complete description of how large the image will be in other important measurements, such as pixels. How many pixels will be created per inch? Pixels are the units of color for the document, so without knowing the resolution, the size of the paper is as meaningful as how many grapefruits per inch will fit on the page! Fortunately, below the Height and Width fields, you’re offered the Resolution, set to the default of 72 dpi. 2. Aha! Now the number of pixels in the new document can be Discovered. This can be important for website work, because we always presume a fixed screen resolution with the audience, and therefore images are always measured in the absolute number of pixels in width and height for graphics. In this example, 504 pixels wide might make a good logo on the top page of a website; the majority of people who visit websites run a screen resolution of 1024×768 or higher, so this default paper size is about half the width of an audience’s monitor. Ill 25-1 CHAPTER 25: An Introduction to PHOTO-PAINT 773 25 5"×72 dpi = 360 pixels 7"×72 dpi = 504 pixels . Corel Graphics Suite to its best use. 770 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide FIGURE 2 4-1 3 The best way to execute a hand-drawn look with CorelDRAW is to hand-draw a picture, scan it, and then PowerTRACE. pencils, and inks. If you have a scanner, and have, for example, a pen-and-ink cartoon, PowerTRACE makes child’s play out of re-creating your cartoon as scalable vector art, to which you can apply. the Text tool, type Greasy, and then apply Candid from the Font selector drop- down on the property bar. 764 CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide 6. Apply a white fill to the text, and then press ALT+ENTER