Part 1 & 3, CorelDRAW 10 and R.A.V.E: Fr. Jacob Myers and Bill Pamplin

Part 2: Gregory Gross with Introduction by Fr. Jacob Myers

CorelDRAW 10 is a best of 2001 Winner! "You gotta try this out, you will just love it!"

January 1, 2000

Receiving the new CorelDRAW 10 Graphics Suite in the holiday season is one really great gift. It is always exciting to see how a great and established piece of software improves itself, and this is no exception.  CorelDRAW has been giving the user such regular upgrades since its inception in 1992. Value has been one of the biggest factors in defining Corel, and to it we must add performance and compatibility. By value one must understand that Corel pioneered the graphics suite, always giving a huge amount of included programs, fonts, and clipart for a quite reasonable price...and in almost every upgrade we have seen the Suites "second in command", PHOTO-PAINT improve itself and keep competitive with Photoshop for a lot less money. Yet, we would have to say that the graphics designer of today is looking for different things in a graphics suite than it was even 5 or 7 years ago. When Corel first included large amounts of Fonts and Clipart in its package, such items were scarce and expensive. Today fonts, clipart and useful utilities are everywhere and easy to come by. As the sophistication of software needed to enhance the designing abilities of graphic artists has improved, the need for already completed clipart and fonts has lessened. We have learned to get by with fewer fonts as we enhance design around them. And with Web development being such an important part of graphics design in general, one often finds that for a Suite like CorelDRAW, performance has come to outweigh even value (i.e.: the myriad of included extras). 

1) CORELDRAW 10

To so many computer based graphics artists, it is already the quintessential vector-illustration and page layout application of the decade, especially on the PC side of things. The improvements to CorelDraw 10's user interface mean increased usability and customizability for both the novice user and the graphics and print professional. CorelDraw 10 demonstrates a major improvement with Color Management tools and results for both proofing and final print output, whether by separation or digital prepress. The Status Bar and Property Bar now include more information regarding objects selected, whether they be individual objects, text or bitmap imports. Graphic objects may be manipulated with the cursor, or by using the Property Bar or the Transformation Docker. Menu commands now have an icon associated with them that makes it easier to recognize icons on the toolbars, toolboxes, and property bars. 

Page Sorter View

CorelDRAW 10's "Page Sorter View" allows for quick and easy re ordering of document pages prior to publication.  An additional feature is the ability to rename page names within the bottom Page Access Bar with a simple Right Click.  Page inserts, deletes and orientation issues can also be addressed with a right click. As you can see below, you can have different page types in one document.

Text as you like it

It is very interesting to note that the single Corel text tool very nimbly switches between one of four text options. Those options are, artistic text, paragraph text, text on a curve or line, text within an object oval or perfect shape as below. It will take some experimentation to observe this change in the appearance of the text pointer tool. When the tool is prepared to place text on a line or curve, the cross hair letter "A" changes to a keybar letter "A" above a curve. And when it is prepared to place text within a graphic object, the T bar remains but the "A" above the curve change to "AB" within a box. It means that you can place your text within any one of 4 options with a single click as opposed to going through the menu sequence. The box below demonstrates how easy Corel makes it to enter text into a defined area:

Publish to PDF

Corel 10 has continued to refine its PDF output, creating smaller file sizes and an improved rendering time. As you can see in the choices one has below in creating a PDF file including the ability to add crop marks, calibration bars, and even the ability to imbed color profiles and key information about the file you are creating. 

Refinements to the Drawing Tools

Basic to CorelDRAW are its drawing and fill tools. There are many enhancements to its previous versions. For example, with respect to drawing tools enhancements, CorelDRAW 10 features an automatic pan around the workspace, a feature not previously seen. This feature alone makes object creation less problematic than earlier versions. Also, previous improvements to the Beizer tool and the property bar have been brought forward and improved for CorelDRAW 10. We were very happy that the Knife and Eraser tools have been enhanced, allowing users to uses the tools on bitmap images as well as vector images. 

An interesting feature for CorelDRAW 10 is the "easier to find" Interactive Fill Tool (appearing just below the Fill Tool in the Tool Box). To realize the usefulness of this tool we drew a rectangle or ellipse and filled it with any texture fill from the Texture Fill Dialogue Box. Then we activated the Interactive Fill Tool with the texture fill object selected. What we saw was four control handles appearing over our texture fill. The central one allows you to relocate the Center of the texture fill, the uppermost and side allow for resizing and skewing and the corner control handle allows for rotation. All these features are much easier to manipulate than the figures within the Texture Fill Dialogue Box.

In closing, we can honestly say that at First Glance, the Corel Graphics Suite 10 incorporates some the most significant and user enhancing color accurate output features seen in any Corel upgrade since Corel 5. Designing times are enhanced--speed of file saving and retrieval are significantly improved, and according to print professionals we spoke with, a major improvement in color calibration time has been realized. Corel 10 is definitely a must have for all Windows platform Illustrators, Service/Print Bureaus, and Web Masters. However, if you are just getting into computer graphics and illustration, there is no better place to begin than with Corel Graphics Suite 10.

2) PHOTO PAINT 10

Introduction by Fr. Jacob Myers

Review by Gregory Gross

Introduction

Gregory Gross is a Photo Paint expert. In Atlanta, he teaches Photo Paint and runs the user group for it. In his review below he has lifted the veil on a program that to many has been a difficult program to understand. As a teacher, he knows what he is talking about and leads the reader to understanding. His insight is phenomenal. For myself, as one who has used CorelDRAW for years, when my Suite reviews have included Photo Paint, I have merely given a tacit acknowledgement to its existence, generally thanking Corel for how nice it was to include a Paint program with such a Premier Program like CorelDRAW. But not this time folks. Below is a thorough review of Photo Paint, what makes the program tickits History, Mystery, and yes, oftentimes, Majesty. Please enjoy:

  Review

Photo Paint has remained the consistent partner to DRAW in the Corel suite of graphic applications. In various releases Corel has included many elements to the suite that have come and gone through the years. Corel Ventura (page layout) and Corel Dream (3d modeling) were major, full blown apps which at one time or other were included in the package. Who can remember all the utilities and mini-apps: Corel Depth, Corel Move, Corel Mosaic, Corel Chart, Corel Show, the list goes on. But Photo Paint has always been there, and it has become integral to the suite. From its humble beginnings in Version 3 as Corels implementation of a mid-level bitmap editing program called Photo Finish, to the full fledged bitmap editor it is today, Photo Paint has grown from being a valuable addition to the package to an invaluable piece of the Corel rock.

Photo Paint made its first great strides in Version 5.  Out of nowhere the program jumped from the crowd of entry level bitmap editors and headed clearly into the direction of becoming a professional product. Version 5 offered the ability to work on separate layers (called objects in Corel), blend layers in various modes for image composting, save masked information in alpha channels, apply transparency masks to individual layers (objects); and to its everlasting credit, in Photo Paint you were never forced to enter text into a dialog box. You could work with text directly in the image ,and on its own separate layer. These were heady features at the time.

It was also Version 5 that introduced Corels texture generator, which they built into the fill feature of both DRAW and Photo Paint. Most Corel users know the texture generator from DRAW, since DRAW and Photo Paint share the same fill interface; but it is decidedly a pixel-pusher feature better accessed from Photo Paint. To this day it is the best texture generator Ive ever seen. I cannot identify it offhand, but I believe it is sold on the market as a stand alone product, at least on the Mac platform, but Corel has cemented it solidly into the Photo Paint fill tool flyout. Surface mapping is a common function of pixel art, and surface mapping doesnt get any better than Corels texture generator. There are seven libraries of texture presets, including everything from zebra skin to oatmeal to lightning. Each library contains dozens of textures. Each texture offers thousand upon thousands upon thousands of variations, at the click of a button. Better yet, every element of every preset is editable, from lighting to surface mapping, to volume to color to you name it. Finally, if you modify any of the thousands of textures to your liking, you can save it in the library. It is an incredible tool. The artistic side of me does not require that I create a rust or granite surface texture from scratch. In fact I tire of creating endless layers of clouds and difference clouds and blending them and setting white points and black points to create texture. If I need to create text with a rusty surface, Photo Paints texture generator gives me exactly the tool I need to create rust. Two warnings, though: One, dont be afraid to experiment. Dont confine yourself to the presets as are. Change the colors, the volume, the lighting to your hearts content. Two, ignore the names. The textures are much like the Kai presets in that a lot of them have goofy or confining names. Dont limit yourself by thinking the oatmeal preset is for creating oatmeal. I found oatmeal, when edited, makes great shredded wood on a broken golf tee. With a little imagination and some experimentation, you can create an astounding array of surface textures with the Photo Paint texture generator. Since version 5, my days of buying Artbeats CDs or creating textures from scratch have been over. Id keep Photo Paint in my toolbox for the texture generator alone, but it offers a lot more.

It was also upon the version 5 release that the Corel community started turning their attention to the program. I was called on to head up a Photo Paint portion of the monthly meeting of the Corel User Group in Atlanta at the time. Most Corel users were introducing themselves to pixel editing, and they found the program perplexing. Small wonder. It was version 5 that created the beginnings of one of the most exasperating, unique, wonderful, horrible, clunky, overwhelming, overstuffed, bewildering application interfaces in the history of computer graphics. The combined voice of the Corel User Group screamed out, We cant figure this thing out. Help! The trend continues.

By versions 7 and 8 Photo Paint had grown up so completely that it was being sold by Corel as a stand alone product, although it remained part of the suite as well. For a few years Corel held to a frustrating practice of introducing a new version with the upgrades, then putting a better version of the new version on the market (with the word PLUS attached) as a stand alone product. If you wanted the CorelDRAW vector drawing application upgrade, you had to buy the upgrade, but if you wanted the best version of the new version of Photo Paint, you had to also purchase the stand alone package. Thankfully, that maddening behavior was abandoned. Now, when you buy the suite, you get the best Photo Paint  with the package. Thanks, Corel. We know youre trigger-happy when it comes to upgrades, but that was ridiculous.

However it came packaged, Photo