Teach Yourself
CorelDRAW 8 in 24 Hours
For the first eleven hours of this book, you've put in some hard work learning how CorelDRAW works. You've explored the process of generating curves, editing curve nodes, and working with bitmap images within CorelDRAW. Congratulations! Now it's show time!
Starting with this hour, you begin to explore some of the fun effects available in CorelDRAW. This is where you get to play with the almost magical array of special effects such as fisheye lenses, magnifying lenses, and filling objects with other objects. These effects are built into CorelDRAW's Lens and PowerClip tools.
In this hour, you learn to create lenses such as the one in Figure 12.1. Lenses can apply many different effects; the one in Figure 12.1 has a magnifying effect attached to it.
You will also explore using PowerClips to insert bitmap fills into objects. In Figure 12.2, I've taken a fill and "injected" it into some artistic text.
In this hour, you will also explore the Interactive Transparency tool, which enables you to assign varying degrees of transparency to different parts of a single object. In Figure 12.3, I'm tweaking the transparency assigned to the lens covering some of my artistic text.
Looking at artistic text through a lens effect.
Filling artistic text with a bitmap PowerClip.
Interactive Transparency enables you to assign varying degrees of transparency to an object.
So, if you're ready to have some fun, read on!
CorelDRAW's lens effect works just like a glass lens. But just like a glass lens can have many different effects, so can a CorelDRAW lens. For example, a glass lens can be dark like sunglasses, magnify, like my glasses, or even warp an image. In the same way, lenses in CorelDRAW 8 can have different attributes (effects).
Applying a lens effect to an object (often a circle) allows that object to act as a lens--darkening, magnifying, or in some other way distorting any object it is placed on top of.
Lens effects are used in connection with an object below the lens. That object can be artistic text, a drawn object, or even a bitmap object in the Drawing window. The only objects not affected by placing lenses over them are objects that have extrude, contour, or blend effects applied to them.
The key thing to keep in mind is that lens effects do not change the appearance of the object to which they are applied. A circle with a magnify lens effect applied to it does not change its own appearance. The effect takes place when that circle is moved over another object.
You can group objects that have lens effects applied. For example, to create the magnifying glass in Figure 12.1, I attached a line to the circle with a lens effect applied to it and grouped them. The lens effect will not apply to the line because there's no open area inside the line to act as a lens.
The Lens rollup offers 12 different lenses. Those lens effects are No Lens, Brighten, Color Add, Color Limit, Custom Color Map, Fish Eye, Heat Map, Invert, Magnify, Tinted Grayscale, Transparency, and Wireframe.
I've illustrated all twelve of these effects (eleven, if you don't count "No Lens") in Figure 12.4.
Many lenses come with these options: Frozen, Viewpoint, and/or Remove Face. A frozen lens applies the effect of the lens permanently (more or less), in that you can move or delete the lens and the distortion remains. Clicking on the Viewpoint check box produces an Edit button, which in turn lets you move the center of the lens effect through x- and y-axis spin boxes.
The Remove Face check box is available for lenses that distort colors. This option enables you to turn off the section of a lens that doesn't cover any other objects.
Each of the lens effects has its own distortion affect.
Different lenses have different effects, but the process for applying them is basically the same. First, create an object over which you will place your lens. Then, create another object to be used as a lens. Often lenses are composed of circles, but you can use any closed curve (a rectangle, polygon, or closed curve you drew yourself).
Finally, select the object that is to act as the lens, and choose Effects | Lens from the menu bar. Select a type of lens from the drop-down list, edit the lens options, and then click on the Apply button to apply your effect to your lens. Move the lens over your object to create the lens effect.
You can adjust most lenses; for example, you can change the amount of magnification of the Magnify lens.
Just A Minute: You can apply more than one lens at a time to an object. Or you can use many lenses in an illustration. However, you'll quickly notice that the calculations CorelDRAW has to perform to achieve these awesome effects are an awesome drain on your computer memory. You might want to switch to Wireframe mode while you edit other parts of your illustration to speed CorelDRAW up a bit. However, you'll have to switch back to Normal view to see your lens effects on your screen.
PowerClips place a selected object inside another object. The object that is inserted into another object is placed in what CorelDRAW calls a container. The source for the container can be a closed path, a shape, or artistic text (but not paragraph text).
PowerClips do not change the size of either the container object or the target object. So if you copy a large object into a small one, it will get cropped to fit the size of the target object. If you copy a small object into a large object, it will not fill the target object completely.
You apply a PowerClip by first creating the container object. Fill that object. Edit it. Touch it up, keeping in mind that you're about to use it to fill another object. Then create the object into which you will inject the PowerClip.
With both the container and target objects created, select the container object with the Pick tool. Choose Effects | PowerClip | Place Inside Container. As soon as you do, a large black arrow appears on your screen. Point that arrow at the target for the PowerClip and click. The container object gets injected into the target object.
By making my container object (the igloo) wider than the text, I'm ensuring that the entire text object will be filled when I use the igloo as a container.
You can edit the contents of a PowerClip by clicking on the (combined) object and selecting Effects | PowerClip | Edit Contents. After you edit the PowerClip container contents, choose Effects | PowerClip | Finish Editing This Level to place the container object back into the target object.
The last effect you learn this hour is interactive transparency. This effect works a bit like lens effects in that it is applied to one object that is then placed on top of another object. What's unique about the Interactive Transparency tool is that you can define a graded degree of transparency within the "lens" object.
Interactive transparency is assigned by using the Interactive Transparency tool on the toolbox.
In Figure 12.8, I used the Graph Paper tool (on the Polygon flyout) to create an object that I placed over artistic text. I applied a dark fill to the Graph Paper and used interactive transparency to assign almost complete transparency to the left side of the Graph Paper, and much less transparency to the right side of the object.
After you load an image into a PowerClip container, just point and click to insert that image into another object. On top the Lion is about to be "injected" into the text. The bottom image shows the resulting image.
Any closed object can have interactive transparency assigned to it.
The light square in the Interactive Transparency line indicates the more transparent end of the spectrum.
After you assign interactive transparency to an object, you can edit the shift-point by clicking on the Interactive Transparency tool in the toolbox and adjusting the shift-point. You can also move either end of the Interactive Transparency line to adjust the direction of the applied transparency. In Figure 12.10, I'm moving the end points to redefine the direction of the transparency gradient.
After you apply interactive transparency, you can select the Interactive Transparency tool and move either endpoint to edit the direction of the transparency gradient.
CorelDRAW 8 comes loaded with special effects that you can apply to objects. In this hour, you examined three effects that are applied by combining two different objects. Both Lenses and Interactive Transparency involve one object acting as a lens and being placed over another object.
PowerClips use more than one object to achieve their effect as well. A first object is loaded into a Container and then "injected" into a second object.
You can use this object as a lens.
You cannot mix lens effects with interactive transparency, but you can change your lens from one to the other.
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