Working with CorelDraw’s Colour Palette for Lasers

Working with CorelDraw’s Colour Palette for Lasers

Working with CorelDraw’s Colour Palette

One of the more overlooked features in CorelDraw is the use of Colour Palettes. Typically when we install CorelDraw, the program loads its default palette. If you look to the right of your screen you will see the colour palette – it is the bar that holds all the little squares of colour.

Let us look at the colour palette.

1. The first thing that I will get you to do is to open up the colour palette browser. This is found in WINDOW|COLOUR PALETTES|COLOUR PALETTE BROWSER – see Figure 1.

2. Figure 2 shows the main controls for the colour palette. It is located near the bottom of the screen in the right corner.

3. In Figure 2 you will see I have marked some items with coloured boxes. The arrow in the red box allows us to scroll down to view more colours. There is an arrow at the top which allows us to move up. The arrow in the blue box allows us to expand out the colour palette so that we can see all the colours. The green box shows us the outline colour (green colour) and the fill colour (red). If you want to change the fill or the outline you can double click on the coloured box so that the colour dialogue box comes up. Note: If you want to change the fill colour of an item you can change it by left clicking on the fill in the colour palette. If you right click on an image it changes the outline colour.
4. In Figure 1 you will see that there is an “open” button in version 11 this is the “open” icon at the top of the browser – see figure 3. Clicking on this open button brings up a dialogue box that allows us to load a palette.

5. Although the default Corel colour palette sometimes seems like all we need Corel gives us both a number of pre configured colour palettes and also gives us the ability to create our own colour palettes.

Pre Configured Colour Palettes

To make it easy for us Corel has come up with a number of pre configured colour palettes that we can load into Corel.

6. Once the colour browser is open you will see that we have a number of pre configured colour palettes to use – see figure 4.

7. As you can see from Figure 4 you will see that a check box is active for the CorelDraw Palette. As this is the only box checked than the CorelDraw palette is the only palette open.
8. If you would like to open up another colour palette than all you need to do is check one of the palettes and it will open up along side the other palettes. Note: It is very easy as with fonts to get colour palette happy. If you open up to many palettes than you will lose screen space real quick. Figure 5 shows us a second palette open along side our original. Here I have opened up the eye palette. This palette is a common set of colours that you would normally use if you were drawing someone’s eyes. To close a colour palette just click on the palette in the browser and the check mark disappears.

9. Now this leads me into why we need to understand the colour palette. Basically what the colour palette allows us to do is to organize our colours into groups. For example let us say that we want to work with 5 colours for our laser engraver. Well why would you want to have a couple hundred of them on the screen? All this does is cause us more work as we have to pause every time we need to select a colour. Why not create a palette for the 5 colours that we want to work with.
10. Figure 6 shows a custom palette that I created for this exercise. I called it Laser Colour and placed it in its own folder called Mikes Custom palettes.

How do I create a Custom Palette?

Creating a custom palette is quite easy. Once you do it once or twice you will find that creating a custom palette is the best way to go.

1. First open CorelDraw and start a blank document.
2. Next go to and open up the colour palette browser. See Figure 1.
3. Now we need to create a custom palette so if you are running Corel 9 than go back to the “Window” menu “Colour Palettes” and select the palette editor – see Figure 6. For those that are running Version 10 and 11 the palette editor is available in the colour palette browser – see Figure 7.

4. Figure 9 shows the palette editor that comes up. NOTE: I recommend that you close the CYMK palette and open up the RGB palette.

5. Now click on the New Palette button – red box in Figure 9.
6. Give your palette a name. Click OK
7. Figure 10 shows the editor that comes up.

8. Click on “Add Colour”
9. Figure 11 shows you the dialogue box that comes up

10. If you look at Figure 11 you will see that I have outlined a few things. Change your colour model to RGB – even though we are printing to a CMYK device (Epson Printer) or the laser which is an RGB device it needs to receive its colour information in RGB. So you might as well work in it. You will place your colour information via the “Components” setting.
11. To make this exercise simple I will just recreate 5 standard colours.
12. In our component field type in R:0, G:0, B:0 this gives us black. Click on the “Add to Palette” button. Figure 12 shows us what happens as the black is added to our new custom palette. You will notice that the black colour has been added to your new palette (red box).
13. Now add the following colours to your palette.
- Yellow R:255, G:255 B:0
- Blue R:0, G:0, B:255
- Red R:255, G:0, B:0
- Green R:0, G:255, B0

14. Figure 14 shows the finished palette. The five colours that we created are listed in the new palette that we created. See Figure 13.

15. Note: if you would like to move colours around than just click on the colour and drag it to its new location – see figure 14.

16. You will notice that the palette (.pal) file will be added to the palette browser.
17. Figure 15 (red box) shows the new palette loaded.

Well there you are you have just created your own palette. However you may be wondering why you would want to create a custom palette. Let us list a couple of reasons where you would want to use it.

- If you are using Corel for laser engraving than you probably will only need 7 or 8 colours. Cut down the colour palette so that it is easier to select a colour. This also eliminates errors that could occur if you were to select the wrong colour.
- Having a custom palette for sublimation I believe is a must. You can pick the colours that you feel look the best and have only those ones available. I would also encourage you to create a slimmed down palette so that when you are offering colours to a customer that you avoid the “information overload” which usually means that the customer is going to take an hour of your time standing there trying to decide on which colours to use. Limit them the same way you do with your font selection. If they insist that they want specific colours than charge accordingly.

Colour Management

One of the things that CorelDraw activates when you install the program is a default colour management system. This colour management setup is designed more for a pre press setup than for someone such as us that are using inkjet printers or laser engravers. For example the default colour palette is CMYK and really should be RGB. Also CorelDraw uses a Generic CMYK printer and not an inkjet printer. Thus when CorelDraw tries to manage onscreen colour (which is turned on automatically) it tends to display colours that are not right. Figure 16 shows you what your colour palette looks like with colour management on and colour management on. In both figures on the left is the default CMYK palette in Corel while the palette on the right is the RGB palette. Both figures show you what the colour palettes look like with colour management on and colour management off. What this figure portrays is that with Colour management on your colours are not as true as when the colour management is off especially if you are using the CMYK palette which is the default palette that is loaded. As you can see the blues are very suspect. Check out the browns.
Thus you may ask, when should we turn the colour management on. You turn colour management on when you have access to an ICC profile. What is an ICC profile? Here is Corel’s definition:
What does ICC mean – ICC (International Color Consortium) color profiles are standard profiles that contain information about how color is reproduced by devices. The ICC options available in Corel graphics applications include setting the rendering intent, which is a way to map colors to various output devices by controlling how the color management system converts colors between different spaces.
Thus you need an ICC profile to accurately portray colours on your system. Most sublimation suppliers have created a profile of their inks. Thus when you load this profile into CorelDraw you can than portray the colours more realistically than they are now displayed.
Now let us throw a monkey wrench into this discussion – your colour management system is only as good as your monitor, computer and graphics card. You need a good computer can give you the power to run graphics. You need a good graphics card so that you can display colours properly and in at least 24 bit depth. And you need a good monitor to take that information and display it accurately on the screen. To top it off those in the know will take this exercise one step further and they will calibrate their monitor so that they can come as close to the actual printed colours as they can.
So you may be now wondering if this whole exercise is worth it. Well you do not need to go as far as calibrating your monitor but let me say that if you do not have a good video card and monitor and you are doing sublimation you are doing yourself an injustice.
So if you are using CorelDraw turn off the colour management. See figures 17, 18 (version 10 and 11) 19 (version 9)(if you do not have a colour profile). If you have an ICC profile use it so that you can more accurately portray the colours that you want use.

NOTE: I recommend that you close the CYMK palette and open up the RGB palette.