Here is a request from a customer to create a big heart made up of a bunch of smaller hearts that follow along the shape of the heart. This was easy to do in CorelDraw using the blend command. I have used this command a number of times to create everything from dashes to ropes to stars. … Continue Reading
Laser Engraving or Sublimating Photographs
One of the biggest issues that faces us as engravers is reproducing photos onto a variety of products. Reproducing photos is not easy – even for those of us who have done a lot of it. Part of the problem is that there are so many substrates to work on and so many different types of photographs. There are some off the shelf programs that have tried to make doing photos easier but they tend to have mixed results. Programs such as PhotoLaser Plus, 1 Touch Photo and PhotoGrav provide these so called one click fits all solutions. PhotoLaser and PhotoGrav have gone one step further in that they will also give you the ability to tweak the image from within their software and have it try and display the image on a simulated display of the material you are working on. This tweaking can give you better results. However my experience with these programs is that they are again hit and miss. Why they are hit and miss can be caused by a number of factors and when you understand these factors you can achieve a better chance of getting it right. Which is why I am doing this series of articles. Hopefully I can clear up some of the confusion that rains down on this topic – and not only in our industry. … Continue Reading
This is typically more prevalent on early versions of CorelDraw up to X4. However I have seen it happen in X5. If you are having troubles getting AI (Adobe Illustrator) files into CorelDraw than open them up in Adobe Reader and than re save them as a PDF. Then open them up in CorelDraw. This tutorial will show you how to do this. I will assume you have the latest version of Adobe reader on your computer which is free so there is no reason not to have it.
I had a customer ask me to do a layout for him on a metal plate with some thermark so he could laser it. I could have done this creating 3 columns and used the align tools but I thought it would be a good exercise to show you how to use the table command in X4 and X5. The table command allows me to add the 3 columns I need to create this layout very easy. Check out the Thermark on Steel video that was done on this topic in my video section.
This is a file that was given to me by one of my customers who needed some help in the CorelDraw print merge. The original file I got had all the lines in one column so I suggested that the customer fix it up so that there were 20 columns of names. This excel file had over 5000 names. Because there was 20 names per plate Corel created 287 plates with 20 lines per plate. I would not want to enter this text in manually. Check out the CorelDraw print merge video
This tutorial will show you how to take a big photo and cut it up into a number of smaller "tiles" so that you can laser it on a tile or sublimate it on a tile
There are two types of text in CorelDraw. The first and the one that is used a lot is Artistic Text. The second type which we discuss later is Paragraph text.
Now let me ask you – how many people come into your shop and say “I need you to reproduce my logo and to make it easy here is some good quality black and white artwork”. Not often. What do we get?
The list goes on. So what can we do? Typically what I see is that dealers scan the bad image into the computer, vectorize the artwork and then sometimes spend hours “cleaning” up the logo. This may be a suitable way of doing artwork for some but not me. I would rather spend my time doing something else. So let me offer you an alternative that will give you a good clean vector image and hopefully do it in a lot less time. … Continue Reading
Problem: When I bring in my scanned file I get a white box around the image. This is a problem when I place the image on a coloured box. How do I get rid of the box?
First of all we need to scan our item. Now there is two ways that we can do this. The first way will be do the operation in Corel.
Open up Corel and import the scanned item into Corel. For this lesson we use a logo I received from a customer that was having the same problem. See figure 1. … Continue Reading
This is a preprint of a 2002 article I did.
One of the most common uses for doing sublimation is to produce metal plates. Whether they are round, rectangle, black or full colour the technique for doing these is the same. Lets say for this example that we are producing a number of round 2-inch plates. We want to do a multiple in Corel so that we can produce a number of the plates at once. … Continue Reading
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