Corel PhotoPaint 5 - Deep Etching
Corel PhotoPaint 5 - Deep Etching
In the last issue we ran an article about deep-etching with Adobe Photoshop.
Many people have asked if it is possible to achieve this using Corel PhotoPaint V5 and if so how? The good news is that you can do it, however if you have Corel PhotoPaint V5 the result will not be as good as you could achieve with PhotoPaint V6 or Adobe Photoshop.
Here we will be looking at how to deep-etch an image (ie remove the background) with and without a clipping path. Remember that you only need a clipping path if you plan to drop the image into a page layout package and your image must cut out from background objects. It is a lot of wasted effort and a cause of potential printing problems to use a clipping path when you don't need to!
A clipping path is a mathematically defined curve that is included with the bitmap in an encapsulated Postscript (EPS) file, so that when the file is printed on a Postscript printer only the area within the curve is imaged, and the area outside is blank (clipped).
When you make an EPS with clipping path there is no need to remove the background of the photo in PhotoPaint, as whatever is outside the path will not be printed, simply clipped by the curve.
If there is some way to create the effect you want without using clipping paths, such as combining the objects in PhotoPaint and then importing the composite object into the page layout, then this is the preferred method as it usually is quicker to do and results in faster printing times.
Due to limitations of Postscript printers there can be a problems with clipping paths, particularly if they are made too complex (ie have too many node points).
When you are deep etching and not using a clipping path you may well find a problem with visual stepping along the edges of the image, this is because of the sharp visual change between the image pixels and the background draws the eye's attention to the edge. The way to fix this problem is to anti-alias the edge of the selection, this technique causes an adjustment to be made to the colour of some of the background pixels and so minimise the visual stepping at the edge.
Before you can do much at all with PhotoPaint 5 you will have to learn how to drive it's selection tools to define a mask. The same set of selection tools are used to define masks and objects, although it is a mask that is used to deep etch a photo. The selection tools are available from the flyout menus relating to the mask and object buttons on the toolbar.
The PhotoPaint manual has a brief description of how to use the selection tools. It is probably best to sit down with the manual and spend half an hour becoming familiar with the tools available, depending upon the background and subject of each picture you deep-etch a different set of tools may be appropriate.
One thing to keep in mind while creating your mask is that at the end of the day it will be a black and white bit map that allows you to protect the black part of the image from being edited (in the case of deep etching the editing will be to fill it with white or some other background colour) while allowing all editing effects to happen in the white areas, so even though you may use a combination of magic wand, lasso, node editing tools or whatever to create it, you will end up with a mask that is simply a black and white image (which can be saved for later use as a PhotoPaint file).
If you plan to deep etch your image without a clipping path, you will probably want to achieve a smooth look around the edge of your mask outline using anti-aliasing. PhotoPaint 5 does not have a true anti-aliasing feature, but you can achieve a similar effect by creating a feathered transparency mask from your original mask.
Just as a mask being is black and white bitmap that protects an area from editing, a transparency mask is a greyscale bitmap which provides different levels of protection depending upon the shade of gray at each point in the mask. You can save a transparency mask as a PhotoPaint file for later use, it is interesting to do this and examine the edges of the mask in the file to see how this relates to the overall result you obtain.
To create the transparency mask select Mask/Create Transparency Mask, set Opacity to 100 and Feathering to approximately 1-3 (experiment to see what number gives the best result with your image!) and use this to create the effect. To actually white out the background you have to set the fill colour to white and use the floodfill tool (paint can) to apply white to the entire image (the masked area will be protected from being filled with white by the transparency mask).
There is a roll-up menu that will assist greatly when working with masks which can be accessed using Object/Layers/Object Roll-Up. This allows you to select whether you edit and or view the mask or the image, and displays the mask as a red tinted area. To change the floodfill colour, first turn on the tool settings menu with View/Tool Settings and then select the floodfill tool, the tool settings roll-up will now display the settings and allow you to change them (notice that the controls are much the same as in CorelDRAW). To fill the entire image choose Mask/All and then apply the floodfill tool to fill the image.
Once you have created your mask, making the clipping path is easy, unfortunately you don't have very much control over how the path is created, or the ability to edit or preview the path to be used. When you have a mask loaded and you save your images as an EPS file, PhotoPaint 5 automatically includes a clipping path which it creates by auto-tracing the mask for you. The tracing is performed using the current setting for the mask node edit tool (to see the current setting invoke the tool settings roll-up with View/Tool Settings and then choose the mask node edit tool from the mask fly-out menu).
You can get an idea of what the clipping path would look like by performing a trace yourself by choosing the node edit tool from the mask flyout, but be sure to undo it straight away, as if you continue on and cause the mask to be redefined as a new bitmap based on the results of the trace performed by using the node edit tool, the mask will become slightly distorted and the trace performed when saving the EPS file will be different from the one you have previewed.
We'll look at deep etching with PhotoPaint V6 in the next issue of the newsletter.
