CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide part 72 pptx

You have directions for transparency such as linear and radial, and also various operators styles of transparency available from the property bar to set how a partially transparent objec

become visible Everything under the lens is now part of a group of vector objects— you can pressCTRL+Unow to ungroup the objects and individually recolor them if you like

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Changing a Lens Viewpoint

The Viewpoint option offers the chance to move a lens object but also to retain the view of the objects the lens was originally over The Lens Viewpoint option lets you move a lens and

keep the view inside the lens constant—like freezing a lens—but this option keeps the effect dynamic When you check Viewpoint on the Lens docker, an Edit button appears You then

click-drag interactively to reposition the viewpoint of the lens effect either by using your

cursor (indicated onscreen by an X) or by entering numeric values in the X and Y page

position boxes

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The view seen through a lens object is dependent on object order on a layer—all objects layered below the lens object appear in the lens When the Viewpoint is repositioned, you may find that an object might not appear visible Arranging objects in back of the lens object causes them to be affected; arranging them in front of the lens object prevents the lens effect from changing them.

The default viewpoint position of a lens effect is always the center of your object, but

you can move it anywhere you like After moving it, click the Edit button and then the

Apply button on the Lens docker to set the new position The Viewpoint option does not use

the auto-apply lock feature

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Lens object with Invert applied

New viewpoint marker position Numeric entry boxes for

viewpoint page position Edit/End button

Remove Face is available for only a few types of lens effects and lets you specify whether other objects and the page background participate in the effect By default, whenever a lens effect is applied, the background—your page, which is usually white—is involved in the effect However, if the lens you are using alters colors—such as Custom color map—and you

don’t want your background to be changed within the view seen through the lens object,

choosing the Remove Face option leaves the background unaltered

Clearing Things Up with the Transparency Tool

Transparency is an effect CorelDRAW users have leveraged for many years to illustrate scenes that have a very photorealistic look The Transparency tool is quite different in use and in the effect you achieve than the Transparency lens You have directions for transparency such as linear and radial, and also various operators (styles of transparency) available from the property bar to set how a partially transparent object interacts with objects below it Any

“look” from stained glass to a bleached-out overexposure is possible to create using the different operators

One thing is good to keep in mind when working with transparency in a design: this is the way you blend colors between objects That’s it; your work doesn’t benefit from a totally

transparent object—there has to be some influence from the object to which you apply

transparency, and it’s usually color Therefore, an alternative way to think about transparency

is to think about color blending

One of the keys to accomplishing amazing artwork using the Transparency tool is the fill

that a semitransparent object has; in addition to uniform fills, fountain and pattern fills can also take on transparency You put fills and transparency together, and you’re talking seriously sophisticated compositions! Another key lies in how you approach a drawing in which you plan to feature partially transparent objects To illustrate a real-world object such as a piece

of jewelry, transparency plays a part—the gem in the jewelry, for example—but there will

certainly also be nontransparent objects in such a drawing, so don’t overindulge in transparency

when only certain parts of an illustration make the best use of this effect In the next illustration, you can see what is today a fairly common button for a web page; it suggests glass At left you can see a Wireframe view; not a lot of objects went into a fairly convincing drawing of a glass button Combining use of the Transparency tool with your own designer’s eye, you can illustrate gases, smoke, fog, mist, and steam; you can also add reflections and highlights to your work to add detail, interest…and a touch of glass

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Using the Transparency Tool and Property Bar

The transparency effects discussed next are applied using the Transparency tool located in

the toolbox grouped with other interactive tools, shown here:

Ill 22-5

When creating a transparency, you can set whether the fill and outline properties of objects are included in a transparency effect Choose All, Fill, or Outline using property bar options.

While the Transparency tool is chosen, the property bar displays all options to control

the transparency effect These options, as shown in Figure 22-7, are used together with any

interactive markers surrounding the target object

Often, the most rewarding way to discover and gain control over a feature in CorelDRAW

or any program is to dive straight in The following tutorial might seem a little challenging

because an explanation of the transparency options is provided on the fly, sort of like getting

directions while you’re driving, but you might want the power of transparencies at hand right

now, as we all do with valuable stuff! Follow along here to create a fairly realistic composition

of a child’s marble; transparency will take care of the shading and the highlights You can

check out the Marble.cdr document to see and take apart the components at any time

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Transparency tool

White fill, linear transparency, Normal mode

White filled group, uniform transparency, Add mode

Linear

fountain fill

Creating a Dimensional Drawing Through Transparency

1. Create a circle (choose the Ellipse tool and then holdCTRLwhile you drag) Give it

a bitmap pattern fill by first choosing the Interactive fill tool; choose Texture Fill from the Fill Type selector on the property bar, choose Samples from the Texture Library drop-down, and then choose the third (pinkish) pattern from the drop-down

on the property bar

2. PressCTRL+Cand thenCTRL+Vto put a duplicate of the circle directly above the original Click the black color well on the Color Palette to give this duplicate a uniform black fill

3. Choose the Transparency tool Choose Radial as the Transparency type from the property bar, and then choose If Darker from the Transparency operator list on the property bar

4. Click-drag the interactive marker, the black one that shows the start of the radial transparency, and move it just a little toward 10 o’clock Then click-drag the end marker (the white one) toward 4 o’clock until the shading of this semitransparent

FIGURE 22-7 Use the property bar to customize a transparency object

Transparency Type (identical to fill types)

Transparency Operation (merge modes)

Angle and Edge Pad Transparency

Midpoint

Freeze Transparency

Copy Transparency Properties

Clear Transparency

object lends to the underlying bitmap-filled object the appearance of light coming

into the scene from 10 o’clock This is a classic key lighting effect used by

photographers, so the composition should look a little photorealistic now Refer to

Figure 22-8, because you were promised directions while you’re driving, and this

figure is a roadmap!

5. Create a small white circle, about 1/10th the size of the circle Fill it with white and

then choose the Transparency tool

6. Set the transparency type to Radial for the circle, and leave the Transparency

Operator merge mode at the default of Normal

7. By default, the Radial type of transparency produces the opposite effect than the one

desired here: this object should serve as a highlight on the child’s marble; on the

Color Palette, drag the black color well onto the end marker of the interactive

transparency, and then drag white to the start marker

8. Drag the end marker to just inside the circle object; doing this ensures that the object

is 100% transparent at its edges, creating a perfect highlight object Put it at the

upper left of the marble drawing, and consider this a frenetic tutorial well done!

Setting Transparency Properties

If you have experience with CorelDRAW’s Interactive fill tool, you’re 99 percent of the way

to mastering the transparency fill types with the Transparency tool Because transparency

isn’t the same as an object’s fill, the following sections take you through some unique

properties You’ll find wonderful design potentials you can leverage by choosing your

transparency type according to what you need to design

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FIGURE 22-8 Use the Transparency tool to create shading for simple objects that you want to

look dimensional

Step 4

steps 1–4 Step 7 Finished marbleillustration

will feature a flat and even transparency value The way this semitransparent object blends with underlying objects is completely predictable For example, if you assign a red rectangle and then a blue rectangle with 50% (the default transparency amount) and overlap them, yep, you’ll see violet in the intersection

The Uniform transparency type has no control markers over the object as other types do.

Fountain Fill Transparencies

Transparent objects that use any of the fountain fill direction types are an exceptionally powerful tool for illustration, as you’ll see in a moment What governs the degree of

transparency at the start and end points are the control markers, not only their position

relative to the object underneath, but also the brightness value of the markers Fountain fill

transparencies are driven by any of 256 shades, from black to white Let’s use the Linear transparency type; if you understand this type, all the others (Radial, Conical, and so on) will become obvious When you click-drag using the Linear transparency on an object, the start marker is white, indicating full opacity, and the end marker is black, indicating no opacity at all

Here’s Trick No 1 in creating an elegant fountain fill transparency: you can change the degree of opacity at the start and end points by using two methods, or a combination of the two:

● Reposition the start and end markers If you position the markers way outside of the object, the transition between full and no opacity will be gradual, and the outermost parts of the transparent object will be neither completely opaque nor completely transparent

● Change the brightness; the markers can have any of 256 shades of black Let’s say you have the start and end markers exactly where you want them; you like the angle

of the fountain fill transparency But you don’t want the end (the black marker) to be

100 percent transparent You click-drag a deep shade of black from the Color Palette and then drop it onto the black end marker The end of the transparency then

becomes mostly but not 100 percent transparent

Trick No 2 is to choose the transparency object’s color to influence (usually to tint) the objects below the transparency object Figure 22-9 shows an example: black paragraph text

is on the bottom of the drawing page On top of it is a rectangle At left, the rectangle is filled with white, and a Linear fountain fill transparency is click-dragged from top to bottom The text appears to be coming out of a fog In the center, a 50% black fill is then applied to the rectangle, and a different visual effect is achieved—the paragraph text still looks like it’s in

a haze, but more of it is legible toward the top At right, black is the fill for the rectangle,

and now the top of the text is as illegible as in the white rectangle example, but a different

artistic sense of drama has been achieved You now know two different methods for shading

with transparency fills of the fountain type: change the control markers and change the color

of the transparency object

Property Bar Options for Transparency Effects

Some CorelDRAW users prefer the hands-on controls of interactive markers, while others

choose the precision offered by the property bar’s numeric entry fields and sliders; let’s look

at what is available on the property bar when the Transparency tool is chosen and a target

object is selected In Figure 22-7 you saw the Midpoint slider, and the Angle and Edge Pad

fields called out; here’s what they do

If no object is selected and you want to make any object partially transparent, the

Transparency tool is a selection tool in addition to controlling the interactive markers.

With the tool selected, click once to select the object to which you want to apply

transparency, and then click-drag to add and set the control markers.

● Midpoint slider This slider controls where the 50% point in a transparency is

located It does not indicate where an object is 50% transparency, but instead sets a

relative 50% break point, because as mentioned earlier, you can set the start and end

markers to any brightness value you like

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FIGURE 22-9 Use the marker positions, the marker brightness values, and the color of a

transparency object to create interesting effects

Linear Transparency

Start control

marker (white)

Midpoint

End control

marker (black)

White transparent object 50% blacktransparent object Black transparent object Black text

underneath

transition Setting 90º runs a Linear fountain fill from transparent at top to opaque at bottom, and the angle measurement decreases as you travel clockwise

● Edge Pad Increase or decrease the “speed,” the contrast of the fountain transparency The highest value is 49, at which the transition is so abrupt you could shave yourself with the edge between the start and end opacity amounts

By default, when you hold CTRL and drag a control marker for a fountain type transparency, you constrain the angle you’re setting in 15-degree increments You can also straighten a crooked fountain transparency you’ve manually defined by CTRL +click-dragging.

Here is a practical example of a Linear transparency used in an illustration to imitate the

“glass icon” reflective look In this illustration, the folder design has been copied and then mirrored horizontally Then the Linear transparency is applied to the duplicate group of objects, from almost 100% opaque where it meets the original, to 100% transparent at the bottom Transparency is good not only for simulating glass but also for simulating reflective objects

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Additional Fountain Transparency Types

You also have Radial, Conical, and Square fountain transparency types at hand when you design

something you need to look more dimensional The Radial type transparency effect is fantastic

for making spectacular highlights—brilliant but soft-edged highlights you commonly see when

sunlight hits a highly polished metal or smooth plastic object A Conical transparency is good to

use when you need a pie wedge–shaped area, and this, too, is good for simulating highlights and

reflections The Square transparency type might not prove useful on a day-to-day basis, but it’s

very easy to create soft-edged highlights to use as windowpanes and other right-angle geometric

areas you want to visually emphasize

Before covering the bitmap type fills—listed below the fountain transparency types

on the property bar drop-down list—let’s take a detour in this documentation to explain

transparency operations Also called “merge modes” and “blend modes,” operations have

an additional effect on all objects that have a transparency effect Operations can get you

out of a design predicament when a transparent object doesn’t seamlessly blend with objects

below it

Using Transparency Operations (Merge Modes)

The property bar has a list of modes for you to set how your transparency colors interact with

the colors of underlying objects These options further the visual complexity of semitransparent

objects, and their use is for professional-level illustration work For example, a red plastic

drinking glass on a yellow tablecloth will show some orange through it due to the nature of colors

that mix as light passes through the glass However, the shadow cast by the nontransparent areas

of the glass will not be the same shade of orange as the light we see through the glass, because

light in the real world is subtractive, and the shadow in such a scene would be a deep, muddy

orange, almost brown But you don’t have to calculate light properties or material properties

when you illustrate if you understand what the transparency operations do and then choose the

operation appropriate for your illustration

The following definitions of merge modes describe the effect you can expect Let’s say

source is the top object that takes the transparency effect, the target is one or more objects

below the transparency object that are overlapped by the transparency object, and the result

is the color you see in your drawing in the overlapping areas

● Normal Normal merge mode is the default whenever a new transparency effect is

applied to an object Choosing Normal at 50% opacity usually produces predictable

color blends between the source and target objects; for example, a pure yellow

object at 50% Normal opacity over a pure red object yields orange as a result in

overlapping areas Similarly and in traditional physical painting, a white source

object produces a tint result over a pure color object (a pastel color), while a black

source object produces a shade of the target object’s color (if you’re shopping for

house paints, the salesperson will love this jargon)

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