corel photopaint tips

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Laurie McCanna's CorelDraw Tricks #4 Bringing Contrast Down - - Or Not Inducing Painful Migraines In Your Readers With the help of all of your Corel software, you've created the greatest background ever. It completely captures the essence of your subject matter (the Importance of the Grateful Dead, or the Timeless Philosophy of Being) but if you put text on top of this most excellent background, you will cause physical damage to your readers. What to do? You don't want to lose detail, so futzing with the contrast or color balance won't help. Filters to the Rescue Open your file in Corel PhotoPaint. From the Effects menu, choose Mapping/Smoked Glass, (in Corel 5), or Fancy/Glass( in Corel PhotoPaint 6 or 7).The Smoked Glass filter uses the foreground color you have selected, and overlays your image with the color in whatever percentage you select.

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Laurie McCanna's CorelDraw Tricks #4

Bringing Contrast Down - - Or Not Inducing Painful Migraines In Your Readers

With the help of all of your Corel software, you've created the greatest background ever. It completely captures the essence of your subject matter (the Importance of the Grateful Dead, or the Timeless Philosophy of Being) but if you put text on top of this most excellent background, you will cause physical damage to your readers.

What to do? You don't want to lose detail, so futzing with the contrast or color balance won't help.

Filters to the Rescue

Open your file in Corel PhotoPaint. From the Effects menu, choose Mapping/Smoked Glass, (in Corel 5), or Fancy/Glass( in Corel PhotoPaint 6 or 7).The Smoked Glass filter uses the foreground color you have selected, and overlays your image with the color in whatever percentage you select.

For this example, I had white selected as the background. The result was the background on this page.

As with all filters, your file needs to be in 24 bit mode in order to use the filter. To save your file as a gif, you'll need to choose Image/Convert To/256 Colors, and then the best method to reduce color for WWW work is Error Diffusion, and Optimized Palette.

Create The World in 60 Seconds

1. Open a new file, 100 by 100 pixels, in RGB color. Fill with aqua (right mouse click on the aqua color swatch on the palette). Apply Effects/2D/Whirlpool.

2. Apply Render/Lighting Effects. Select the Floodlight Style, and change the Brightness value to -45%.

And there you have it!

- |1st|2nd|3rd|LE1|LE2|4th|5th|6th|7th|8th|9th|10th|11th|12th|13th|14th|15th|Final| -

- Entire contents copyright ©1994-2000 by Dr. Thaddeus Ozone, all rights reserved. -- Today's date & time: Friday, October 10, 2003 09:24AM GMT -

- Page last updated: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 -

- | images loading | images loading | images loading | images loading | images loading | -

- Entire contents copyright ©1994-2000 by Dr. Thaddeus Ozone, all rights reserved. -- Today's date & time: Friday, October 10, 2003 09:24AM GMT -

- Page last updated: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 -

I'm going to assume you know some of the possibilities of the Lighting Effects filter, I'll explain how I use it here, but only very briefly. Let's start with a three layer document - a background of gray, a circle of slightly darker gray, and a circle of black, with the layer set to "screen". (It's on the layer palette itself, usually it just says "normal". Check it out!) The "screen" option makes the black invisible, but that's... OK. :-)

:::::: handson ::     :: next ::::::

The first thing we need to do is create a round ball. For this we will use the Lighting Effects filter, but before we fire that up we will need a mask for the 3D effects. I'll start with a circular channel, the same shape as the circle on the layers, cool? Working on that channel, let's select the round shape and fire up the "Blur/Gaussian Blur" filter.

OK! Blur that selection at 16 pixels, the first step. We follow this up with several more blurs, next at 8 pixels, then 4 pixels. Now DESELECT the shape, and do two more blurs, the first at 2 and the last at 1.

Better get used to this effect, I use this a LOT.

:::::: back ::     :: next ::::::

There we go! We now have a nice smooth mask for running the Lighting Effects filter on. The de-selected last two blurs? That was to eliminate any jagged edges on our mask. Now, leave the channel, and select the GREY CIRCLE on the RGB pallette.

Ready for Lighting Effects? Here we go, follow this link to check out the setting I used to get a nice spherical ball. You'll notice I have TWO light sources, those little specks, one yellow and one blue? The yellow one shows it's range, and this link shows you the dark blue light source, SHINING UP FROM BELOW. Very important detail here, this is how we get our interesting color variations.

:::::: back ::     :: next ::::::

And this is the result from Lighting effects. Kind of bland, and a little bit bumpy, hmm? That's OK, I expected this. The grayscale channel we used for the texture mask was limited to only 256 levels of gray, and we raised the surface by 50 units, leaving no room for a smooth transition.

We're going to use this to our advantage, because I also want the edges of any round object to get dark around the edges, even on the highlight area! This simulates the fact that a round thing continues curving away, BEHIND the area we can see! Toggle to the next screen to see the difference.

:::::: back ::     :: next ::::::

Cool, huh? Here's how we do it. Working on the grey circle layer, select the round shape. (Windows, hold the Control button and click the layer palette. Macintosh, use the Command button.) Choose "Select/Inverse", and you will have the background selected. Fill it with black. Choose "Select/Inverse" again, and blur the circle using Gaussian blur at 2 pixels. The surface smooths out, and a little bit of black leaks in! Now "Select/Inverse" once more, and delete that annoying black.

Try, please try, not to let your finger slip during this process! It can be a bitch when you realize you don't actually *have* that circular shape saved anywhere else, whatta bummer. (Note: That might be why I created that layer of black earlier on, hah!

:::::: back ::     :: next ::::::

Time for a big bold Lens Flare, found under the "Render" subheading. One of the things glass always seems to have is a powerful reflection, and if you have slightly bad eyes, or if you've ever looked at bright reflecty things with a camera, you get a flare. The same effect can be seen on foggy nights, go look at a streetlight, it's all around us.

I use a big flare on this one, burned into the black layer. The black layer has been set to "Screen" remember, so it's been invisible till now. Now when we put something bright on it, we find what it does. "Screen" will make black invisible, allowing everything else through, just like "Multiply" will eliminate white, allowing all the dark stuff through. Learn to use this, it shows up all the time.

:::::: back ::     :: next ::::::

And here's the results! Hmm, looks kinda ragged in this image, Lens Flare makes for such busy color variations, it hardly ever works as a GIF image. Check the next frame, where I've dropped it in as a JPEG and you'll start to see... Glass!

Really. Turn the page, it's there, waiting for you!

:::::: back ::     :: next ::::::

Ta-dah! There it is, glass! This is pretty much a typical "TV-screen gray" glass surface, you've probably seen it a lot. I added a minor 3D effect on the background to highlight the edges just a bit to show things off. We could stop here, many folks do, but you said you wanted GLOWING glass stuff, right? We're not done yet.

NOTE: Hmm, suppose this shape wasn't round, but was instead square, with rounded corners? This is that interface screen lots of you have asked me about, right here. You might want to take a break right now and go create one yourself, eh? :-)

OK, let's make this baby glow, all right? Working on the "gray disc" layer, let's just invert the thing, making what's light dark, and vice-versa. It's simple, just "control+i" for Windows, and "command+i" for Macintosh. Looks pretty weird, eh? How's this supposed to work for us?

First thing we need to do is darken up those edges, the edges kind of just vanished on us, but we can rescue them, and we need the dark at the top left, and the bright at the bottom right.

Create a new layer, I called this one "edge definition". Fill it with black, covering everything else. Now from the layer beneath it, select the circle shape, you know how to do that now, don't you? Fill that shape with white, and you have something that looks just like your first mask.

DON'T DESELECT! Working on the white bit, blur your middle by 2 pixels, and then again by one pixel. Invert the selection and delete that black again. (Is any of this sounding familiar? It should!)

OK, you start with an ugly white disk, with raggedy black edges. Set that new layer to "multiply", and boom! Instant edge definition. I sometimes want more than just one layer will give me, so I'll usually just duplicate. If that's too much, set the opacity on the copy down just a bit, you have infinite room for tweaking here. (OK, not infinite. 100x100=10,000 levels of tweaking. It's enough.)

We could stop here, assuming we wanted a pale blue marble, but I don't really want *that*, not my favorite colors.

I placed a layer of bright orange over the layer named "grey disc", (which is now pale blue!) and set it to "Multiply".

Say! Doesn't *that* look familiar! Yeppers, that's pretty much the same orange marble I've used a thousand times, minus some of the inevitable hand tweaking I end up doing.

What else can we make this thing into?

Set that same layer to "Color Burn" and we start to get some interesting effects.

Color Burn is one of those bizzare features, what the heck does it do anyway? Usually everything it does do is too extreme, but I always give it a try anyway, especially with candy-type effects like this one.

Let's try another...

OK, this time I'll set it to "hard light" and this is (mostly) the look I was after. Still, now it looks kind of silly smushed into that background like that, doesn't it? I think I'll change it in the next frame.

OK, a basic dropshadow effect, and this effect is mostly done, I can live with this one. There's more we can do with this, (There's ALWAYS more! :-), but we're approaching a good stopping point.

Next time we'll discuss the matching curved highlights and shadows, I used them on the next and final image, it came out pretty cool IMHO. As always, feedback is appreciated, drop me a note or leave a message in my forum, answers can be found for you!

That looks like it! Want to play with the photoshop file I used for this example? It includes some of the additional effects I hinted at last frame. You can download it from here, enjoy!

This is a tip that is only for users of Photoshop3 or Photoshop4. The filter "Lighting Effects" is a freebie that came with this program, and in my opinion is practically worth the whole purchase price all by itself. You can find it under the "Render" subheading. What it is is a primitive ray-tracing

algorithm. You can select different light sources, and combine them with texture channels to warp your image. Before you can unleash the power of this filter, you'll need to save some texture channels to play with. Just select the image you want to make 3d and save it as a new channel. Depending on how you use it, pure white is the highest point on the image, and black the lowest. Here's a sample of the window you'll see when you fire it up.

OK, let's look at the window. On the left you're seeing a low-res thumbnail of what your modifications are doing. You'll also notice the points at the outside of the ellipse, as well as the white point in the center. You can click on these and move them around to alter your light source. Widen it, and your image will get brighter. Grab the white spot in the middle and you can move the whole light around. Click on the white square at the upper right, and you'll get a menu to alter the color of the light source, and that little dot will change to match. If it's taking too long to wait between modifications, turn off the "Preview" button and make your modifications first.At the top under "Style", you'll find a handful of preset effects to use. You can also save your own settings when you find one you like. This on is "*bkg.bump#4", a custom setting of my own. Next is "Light Type", in this case a spotlight. You can adjust the brightness and spread here, or choose other types of lighting. There are dozens to choose from, but you'll probably want to choose one and use it exclusively throughout a site, so that everything will have a cohesive look. Make sure you decide where your light source is coming from, I generally choose top/left.

After this is "Properties". The first 2 options affect the material itself, NOT the lighting. Shiny+Plastic will give you an effect like shiny metal (no, it's not logical, but that's how it is). These are the 2 options you'll probably spend the most time tweaking.The next 2 refer to photographic aspects of how the image is processed. Use these if your image is turning out too dark or light. You can "over" or "under" expose the film (sic) or raise and lower the ambient lighting.The last section is the most fun. "Texture Channel" allows us to specify an image that will warp the surface of the image. Combined with our lighting effects, we're going to get some interesting 3D effects! The default setting is "none". You can specify one of the RGB channels, or a saved channel of your own. If you choose a value for your "Height" that's *too* high, you'll get some rather strange artifacts creeping into your edges. Generally you'll never go over 50 units. Here's some examples, which I'll describe as I go along...

Here's the most basic use of this filter. I typed in some blue type on it's own

layer, and saved it to channel #4. Then I fired up the LightFX filter, and chose #4 as my texture filter, white as high, with a Height of 12.

The whole thing floats over the brown BKG, and in this case I added some drop-shadow effects for emphasis.

Here's one of the ways to create those 3D buttons you've all been asking

about! Channel #4 is on the left, and the finished piece on the right. This

started out as nothing but a blank sheet of brown. Here I specified a height of 50. If you look at the channel closely, you'll see that it's nothing but a

straight gradient from black to white, 10 pixels wide.

Here all I did was take a blank, black channel, and spray it with my

airbrush tool a little bit. I chose white as high, and an offset of 20 units. I

could just as easily made them deppressions by not choosing white as

"high".

Ever wonder how to get a stone effect? Here's one way. Make your

channel a medium grey, and run the "Cloud" filter or the "Difference

Clouds" filter on it. Once you've got a nice mottled look to the channel, run

the LightFX filter on the main image. I chose an offset of 50 units here, to compensate for the subtlety of the channel.

Again I used a grey channel, ran the "noise" filter to speckle it up a bit,

and then ran the "Wind" filter on it, using the stagger setting. I then

blurred it a little bit to soften the edges. Again I used an offset of 50

units.

The Bulkhead Project

Here's what we're going to create in this lesson.

Here's the five elements we'll use to make it.

"fire.jpeg"

480x480, 49k.

"bulkheadbkg.gif"

180x180, 9k.

45% Grey

RGB=115,115,115

100% black

RGB=0,0,0

The Mask

332x96, 2k.

First, you need a 4 layer document in Photoshop. Make sure you're in RGB mode. -Layer one has the flame image in it, use this one, it's the best picture of fire I own, and I use it a *lot*. Keep this large size version of it, and then shrink it down and paste it into other images. This version is 480x480 pixels, a handy size. -Layer 2 is filled with black. -Layer 3 has the dark grey in it, RGB code 115,115,115. -Layer 4 has the grey background from my homepage in it. Open the background, "select all", and go to "edit/define pattern". Now go back to layer 4, and choose "edit/fill", and select "pattern" at 100%. It will tile that background into the layer.

We'll also need a new channel for our mask. Click on the little triangle, and select "New Channel". Select all, and paste the "mask" file into it. By default it will name the channel "#4". You can also double-click on the thumbnail image of the channel, and rename it, like I have here.

Here's what your main pallettes will look like if you've done everything correctly. You can substitute a different image for the mask, or the background, the technique is pretty much the same.

OK, we're ready to go. Working on the Channels pallette, drag the Mask channel onto the dotted circle at the bottom. This loads that selection. Go back to the Layers pallette again, and delete that shape from the top 3 layers, (2,3, & 4). Now you can see the fire showing through the grey background.

Back to the Channels pallette, and drag "The Mask" onto the little rectangle with the corner folded over. This duplicates the channel, naming it "The Mask copy". We'll want this to be a black image on a white background, so go to the menu and choose "image/adjust/invert", or "command+I". Drag this image onto the dotted circle, so the white is selected. Now we do 2 "gaussian blurs", first at 4 pixels, and then at 2 pixels. De-select the white, and give it a final blur of only 1 pixel. This is the channel we'll use for our texture channel in the "Lighting Effects" filter.

Here's how everything should appear now, with a detail of "The Mask copy"...

Back to the layers pallette, and let's choose the top layer, #4. With nothing selected, go to the filters menu and select "lighting effects". When that fires up, (could take a few seconds), we're ready to go. I used 2 spotlights for this image. In the "styles" menu, choose "crossing". Click on the small white circle at the center of that ellipse, and move it to the side. This is one spotlight. The straight line is pointing towards the source of the light. Click on one of the outside dots, and turn the light so it's coming from your top left. Click on the other white dot, and now that spotlight is activated. We want to point this one from the bottom right, but we don't want it to shine white light. Unlike the real world, we can also shine darkness out of these spotlights. Cool, huh? Click on the white square in the "light type" window, and a color pallette will pop up. Let's choose a very dark purple, almost black. Say OK, and now we'll see how it looks. OK, let's make this thing 3D now. Go to the bottom menu, "texture channel", and select your blurred channel, it should be "channel 5". Select the check box, "white is high", and choose a height of about 16. Don't go overboard, that thumbnail drawing of what's going to happen is not super-accurate. If you have the height *too* high, you'll get some bizzare effects at the edges. Play with the settings in the "Properties" menu, the bottom two will control your brightness, "exposure" by just making things lighter or darker, and "ambience" by shing an overall light of the color in the square over the entire image. The top two settings, "Gloss" and "Material", will affect the final result the most. You can choose "shiny" and "plastic" at 100%, and your image will throw off a bright reflection, just like hard plastic.

For this image, I selected "matte" and "metal" at 50% each, because I didn't want any highlights mucking up the transition between the image and the background. Here's the Lighting Effects window with the selections I used. Note the White spotlight is shining down from the left. The black spotlight is not selected, but it is shining *up* from the right.

All right! We're almost there! Looks pretty good, but no-way is it going to merge with that background now. We want this image to melt into that grey layer, that color "#737373" is the average of the background colors. Let's load the original, un-blurred channel now. Working on the top layer, let's go to the "select" menu, and choose "modify/expand". Expand the selection by 4 pixels. Now, in the same menu, select "feather" at a setting of 2 pixels. Same menu again, and choose "Inverse". Now we've selected everything

outside are text. DELETE all this, and the grey layer underneath show through.

This is almost it. All that's left is the shadow, layer #2. Click on the "move" tool, the 2 crossed arrows. Don't bother selecting anything, just use the arrow keys to move the black 3 pixels down, and 3 pixels to the right. Use the filter "gaussian blur" at 3 pixels.

The optional last step is to load that un-blrred selection one more time, inverse it, and paste more black in on top of the blurred black. De-select and run a gaussian blur of only *.5* pixels, and the rough edges of our type get even smoother. Done. Change the mode from RGB to Indexed Color, and export it as a transparent GIF89a with that grey (115,115,115) selected as transparent, and you can now paste it into a web page, it will seam flawlessly with the "bulkheadbkg.gif" background.