Transparency Mania

Corel 7 is proving to have lots of goodies for the serious DTPer as well as the casual user.

The transparency features are particularly exciting - people have been yearning for tools to drop the backgrounds out of greyscale and colour bitmaps for years - they are finally here - and they work well!

There is a bitmap colour mask tool that allows you to choose colours to hide and/or show using an eye dropper to pick up colours from the bitmap. It is a snap to remove those annoying white squares around bitmaps (now you don't HAVE to use a clipping path or Power Clip, but you can choose to if it is better suited to your image).

Another tool called the Interactive Fill Tool allows transparency to be quickly and simply applied to objects including bitmaps in a huge number of ways. This technology is a real surprise in Corel and presumably has been adopted from Xara which has done this sort of thing very well for some time. Serious publishers will also enjoy the new EPS export features which preserve the overprinting settings present in a Corel file when taken into a page layout program. The export box even has an option to apply overprint black and auto trapping to an EPS file.

The new user interface will prove to be a time saver once users get used to it, although it does look pretty intimidating to start with. There is an options section at the top of the screen which changes to suit the context of the currently selected drawing tool, a bit like having a combined super Roll Up window from the Corel 5/6 interface. This will help speed up the learning curve as all the options relating to each tool are visible on the screen without the user having to search through menus looking for relevant options.

Above
1. Background dropped out with bitmap masking tool.
2. If you set the tolerance too high you get "holes" in your image.
3. The old problem - that white background.
Left
Effect of a bitmap mask to drop out background, combined with a fountain fill transparency.

Corel Xara

Xara was written a couple of years ago by a small English company. Early reviews suggested it may be going to give CorelDRAW! and other major programs a serious run for their money. The company was later purchased by Corel and Xara has been pushed as a Web graphics program. (Which it really is good at!) Previously we were discouraged from supporting Xara for pre-press work as it could not directly separate colours and could only export bitmap files. When imageset and printed the anti-aliased text was very fuzzy (although it looked great on the screen).

The latest release, V1.5, has addressed these areas and it now looks like a much more viable and valuable proposition for pre-press work too. Xara is a curious mix: a vector drawing program with excellent bitmap manipulation features - it allows amazing (and quick!) transparency effects to be applied. Drawings are always object based and are displayed on the screen using really good anti-aliasing for beautiful edges on text and curved objects.

The screen rendering speed of smooth blends and effects blows other programs to the weeds, so if you want fast graphics without upgrading your computer consider blazing a trail and learning to use Xara. It won't do everything that CorelDRAW! can do, but it may be all you need from a drawing program when used in conjunction with a good page layout package.