CorelDraw X4 Review Part 5 – PhotoPaint

Corel Draw Graphic Suite X4 Review Part 5

In my experience of dealing with all my customers most people tend to stay in CorelDraw and not venture out of the program. There are a number of reasons. Mostly they are comfortable with CorelDraw. CorelDraw is a very powerful program and for most of what I do CorelDraw is the program that I spend most of my time in. However there are some things that you cannot do in CorelDraw that you can do in PhotoPaint. If you remember my article on the cutout lab this tool is only available in PhotoPaint. Tools such as red eye removal, masking and certain vignette effects can only be done with the PhotoPaint program. Actually some of the tools such as those found in the bitmap section of CorelDraw are actually accessing the tool libraries that are in PhotoPaint.

In my experience there are certain techniques that need to be done in PhotoPaint and certain techniques that should be done in CorelDraw. For me any photo retouching should be done in PhotoPaint. Certain tools and screen presentations are far better in PhotoPaint than they are in CorelDraw. However if I want to create 100 plates comprised of 4 lines of text on each plate CorelDraw is the program to use.

The problem with PhotoPaint is that it receives such little attention that few people really know that much about it. This makes it hard to get people excited about using it. The other main problem and one that anyone experiences when they work with a photo editing program (even PhotoShop), is that the program can be very intimidating and this intimidation turns even the most enthusiastic user into one that dreads to even open up the program. Actually if I you want me to make a confession to you when it comes to photo editing and web graphics I tend to use Adobe PhotoShop and not Corel PhotoPaint. Why for two reasons the first is that I have been using PhotoShop since version 4. I know it so I keep using it. The second reason is that when it comes to help just go to Amazon and you can order myriads of books on PhotoShop. Go on line and type PhotoShop and you are presented with web site after web site of help. However PhotoPaint is an excellent program and for anyone starting out I tell them to learn PhotoPaint as it is a very powerful and once you get to using it easy program to work with. Note: Dan Margulis who is a Photoshop icon praised the program a couple of years ago in an article saying that PhotoPaint was a program that in a lot of ways kept up neck and neck with PhotoShop.

Okay I think you may be sold so now I can go over some of the new features that we have in the latest incarnation of PhotoPaint X4. Note: If you want to get some help in working in PhotoPaint there is an eBook available through the Corel web site. It is written by Nathan Segal and is based on PhotoPaint X3. I haven’t had the opportunity to read the book but considering there is so few articles written than as the saying goes “beggars cannot be choosey”.

So fire up your computer and startup your copy of PhotoPaint X4.

Improved User Interface

As we saw in our review of CorelDraw, PhotoPaint’s user interface has been updated to be more modern and organized with new menus, controls and icons. Figure 1 shows us the new interface in PhotoPaint X4.

Figure 1

Camera Raw File

One of the big growth areas is in the use of Digital cameras. I cannot think of anyone anymore that I know that still uses film. With the growth of digital cameras the growth of the higher end digital SLR has been growing leaps and bounds. No longer do you need to spend thousands of dollars on a Digital camera. For as little as 1000 dollars you can purchase an SLR camera. Complete with lens and body.
One of the features that a lot of the Digital SLR cameras provide is the ability to save files in what is referred to as “Camera Raw” format. This format tends to be proprietary to each camera so make sure that  if you want to use this format that your camera is supported within by PhotoPaint.  The beauty of camera raw is that you are being supplied with an image by the camera that is clean of any compression. This is why the format is referred to as “raw”. It is just like receiving a negative in film technology. The file can then be imported and then can be adjusted with a number of so called camera settings placed in a software program such as PhotoPaint.
If you know something about cameras or you happen to have read the camera manual than you know that you can adjust the camera to account for a number of white balance situations. With camera raw we can shoot in a neutral white balance mode and have a program such as PhotoPaint supply us with a number of preset white balance settings. This can take a lot of guess work out of picture taking and can eliminate the need for bracketing in some cases. PhotoPaint has now included a camera raw lab right in PhotoPaint.
What is Camera Raw? Here is a quote from the cambridgeincolour web site I have used for tutorials before …” The RAW file format is digital photography’s equivalent of a negative in film photography: it contains untouched, “raw” pixel information straight from the digital camera’s sensor.  The RAW file format has yet to undergo demosaicing (compression), and so it contains just one red, green, or blue value at each pixel location.  Digital cameras normally “develop” this RAW file by converting it into a full color JPEG or TIFF image file, and then store the converted file in your memory card.  Digital cameras have to make several interpretive decisions when they develop a RAW file, and so the RAW file format offers you more control over how the final JPEG or TIFF image is generated.  This section aims to illustrate the technical advantages of RAW files, and makes suggestions about when to use the RAW file format.” For a more detailed discussion on this topic go to “http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/RAW-file-format.htm”.

To bring a Camera Raw file into Corel PhotoPaint you need to go to the IMPORT command located in the FILE menu. Go to the directory that contains your file or files and select them and click on the import button as per figure 2.

Figure 2

Once the image has been imported into PhotoPaint you will be presented with a dialogue box called the “Camera Raw Lab”. Figure 3 shows us this dialogue box. You will notice from the title bar that this camera raw file is from a Canon 10D camera.

Figure 3

If I want to simulate a type of lighting situation all I need to do is to select the “White Balance” pull down menu as per figure 4. Figure 4 shows us that I have selected the Fluorescent setting. You can see that florescent lightening tends to throw a blue colour cast onto an image – which is a quick way of making an image look “cold”. This is a quick way to simulate different lighting situations within a single file.

Figure 4

Figure 5 shows us a close up shot of the white balance settings. You can see that there are a number of settings that you can choose from.

Figure 5

Another inherent problem is so called “noise” (noise tends to show up in an image as so called tray pixels that tend to have little or no colour) that is introduced to the photo via the camera’s sensor. PhotoPaint has included a setting for adjusting noise for both Luminance and Color.

Figure 6

Another setting that can be found in the lab is a tab that lists the actual image settings that image was shot with. For example figure 7 indicates to us that this particular image was shot with a Canon EOS 10D. The camera’s shutter speed is 1/807 s. It has an aperture setting of F10.0. The ISO setting is 100. Also the  creation date, focal length and flash are also listed.

Figure 7

If you go back to Figure 3 you will notice that we can also adjust the Colour Temperature (make the image look more cool or warm), Tint, Saturation, Exposure, Brightness and Shadow. There is also a histogram that provides us with a spatial concentration of the color pixels in our image.
You can also create a snapshot of each change you make. This allows you to compare your change or changes to previous changes that may also be saved as snapshots.
Once you are done with your adjustments all you need to do is to click on the “Ok” button and you are done.

Straighten Image Lab

One of the common issues that we see a lot of in our daily production lives is the need to “straighten” images. That is images that look more like the leaning tower of piza. Nothing can be more distracting than an image that is not straight. You can take your chances in CorelDraw and guess at the angle of rotation that is needed or you can use a new tool that is included in the new version of PhotoPaint. This new tool is the Straighten Image Lab. This tool can be found under the “ADJUST” menu. Figure 8 shows an image that is definitely not straight.

Figure 8

To straighten this image we need to select the Straighten image lab. Figure 9 shows the lab activated with the image in it. You will notice that there is a grid that is superimposed over the image. There are basically two controls in the lab.

Figure 9

The first tool is the “rotate image” slider. Move the slider to the left rotates our image counter clockwise while moving it to the right rotates is clockwise. As you rotate the image you can eyeball the image to the grid. Figure 10 shows the image straightened. The gray area represents the amount of rotation that has occurred.

Figure 10

The other tool that is available is the “grid slider”. This slider allows us to increase the frequency of the grid or decrease it.

Figure 11

Note: if you want to move your image to a grid you need to zoom in on the image and than using the “hand” (hot key is h) tool you move the image closer to a grid line. Figure 12 show the image zoomed in on.
If you notice in Figure 11 right above the grid slider is a command to crop the image. This saves a step. Remember that rotating and image requires cropping. Once you are done you can than click the “Ok” button.

Figure 12

If you need to zoom in on a image or move the image at the top of the lab there is a menu bar which gives you access to these features – blue box in figure 13.  Figure 13 shows you two other commands which are in the highlighted red box. These tools will rotate the image at 90 degree increments.

Figure 13

Using the new straighten lab can make fixing a skewed image quite easy.  If you are using X4 I suggest you give it a try.

Note: Remember that PhotoPaint can be accessed even when the image is in CorelDraw. All you need to do is to right click on the image in Draw and a menu will appear. Select the “Edit Bitmap” command as per figure 13. This will open up your image in Corel PhotoPaint. Once you are done with your adjustments you can click on the “save” command.

Figure 14

Well that concludes our review of the new main features in PhotoPaint. It may be apparent from this review that CorelDraw certainly gets the bulk of the new features. In some ways PhotoPaint seems like a distant and poor cousin. Probably the main problem is that more people use CorelDraw than PhotoPaint. This has created problems in that PhotoPaint has fallen behind notable competitors such as Adobe PhotoShop. The new CS3 version has widened the gap considerably.  However for standard colour corrections, masking, red eye removal, cloning Corel PhotoPaint is a worthy program and one that I use and continue to use.