CorelDRAW X5 The Official Guide part 81 pot

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

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

6. Apply a white fill to the text, and then pressALT+ENTERto 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

pressingSHIFT+PAGE DOWN

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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.

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.”

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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

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

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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

a picture, scan it, and then PowerTRACE it!

An Introduction

to PHOTO-PAINT

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Photography 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.

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 pressCTRL+Nor 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

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5"×72 dpi = 360 pixels 7"×72 dpi = 504 pixels