Corel Photo-Paint 9: The Official Guide "Great for Beginners and Professionals"
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Title: Corel Photo-Paint 9: The Official Guide Author: David Huss Publisher: Osborne/McGraw-Hill http://www.osborne.com Publication Date: May 1999 Pages: 771 ISBN: 0-07-322985-3 Price: $39.99 Corel Photo-Paint 9: The Official Guide is designed to help you make the most of your software tools. It shows you how to quickly upgrade to the Photo-Paint 9 working environment, demonstrates how to use the new tools and features, and gives excellent guidance on making the most of Photo-Paint 9. The author has included special Workshop Projects throughout the book so that you can follow along to learn about the tools, features, and techniques that he explains. There is an exciting chapter on creating Web graphics that offers a wealth of information to ensure that your artwork is optimized for use on the Web. Inside the book, you will learn how to: follow step-by-step workshops to learn to create digital masterpieces; scan images like a pro and turn overexposed, scratchy, or timeworn photographs into visions of beauty; master version 9's new tools, brushes, filters, and masks; control your colors, including corrections, models, and palette setup; edit photos and remove portions of images without disrupting composition using the Clone tool; maximize the power of the Image Sprayer to create extraordinary images with a brush stroke; create custom Web graphics and dazzling Web pages; plus browse the 16-page color insert for brilliant ideas that will help you generate your own professional digital works of art. The author, Dave Huss, is well-versed in Photo-Paint and is a technical writer and graphic illustrator. He has authored or co-authored nine books on Corel Photo-Paint, been on TV, and won the Grand Prize in the 1997 Corel World Design Contest. You can download various images used in the step-by-step tutorials in the book from the Free Code section of the Osborne Web site. The image to the right is what you will work on in Chapter 18 using a combination of contour filters and merge modes. The original image appears at the top of the three photographs. The two images below it show the results of the step-by-step tutorial.
Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced users. New Corel Photo-Paint users, as well as those already familiar with the program, will find significant value in this book, and should benefit from the in-depth knowledge the author has developed from his experience with the program. Beginners will be amazed what they can create in a few minutes after reading the book. In Chapter 14, you will discover how to make the image to the right with metallic effects that look rusty and deteriorated.
Corel Photo-Paint 9: The Official Guide is divided into five basic categories or parts. In Chapter 15, you will discover how easy it is to convert this photograph of graffiti on a wall into a 3-D object as seen in the image to the right. Part 1: Introduction and Digital Fundamentals--the author provides a brief history of Photo-Paint; a quick tour of the program; and discusses what you need to run the program. You also learn about the basic terms in digital imaging; resolution and printers; and basic color theory. Lastly, you learn about setting up Photo-Paint 9, different settings, and how to customize settings. Part 2: Basic Photo-Editing Techniques--lets you delve into the basic colors; how to change colors; getting the right color; the uniform fill dialog box; and setting the mood-models, palettes, or mixers. Then image size, direction, and format are discussed and the following tools are examined: duplicate command, flip command, resample command, crop command, paper size command, and the mode command. Resizing an image and image conversion are also explored. Part 3: Exploring Photo-Paint Tools--learn to work with masks; The following tools are discussed: regular mask tools, the grow and similar commands, the mask transform tool, and the mask brush tool. Properties of a mask and selections are explained, as well as color-sensitive masks and making tiles using masks and mask modes. In the advanced masks section the author goes into saving, loading, removing, manipulating, and inverting masks. Plus color masks are examined in detail. The fill and shape tools are analyzed, also. You get acquainted with: the uniform fill mode; the fountain fill tool, bitmap fill, the texture fills, the interactive fill tool, and the interactive fill style. The brush tools and the picture tools are looked at. Within the brush tool section, you will discover how to select and configure brush tools and how to use the paint and effect tools. Within the picture tools section, the clone and image sprayer tools are covered. Lastly, text and objects are delved into. Objects are defined as well as the objects docker and property bar. You are also introduced to the text tool and paragraph text. In Chapter 11, you will create the glass ball of flags using the image sprayer tool as seen in the image to the left. Part 4: Photo-Paint Filters--filters are explored. The author examines: the installation of filters; the filter dialog box; the distort filters (blocks, displace, mesh warp, squizz, offset, pixelate, ripple, shear, swirl, tile, wet paint, whirlpool, and wind); the 3D filters (3D rotate, cylinder, emboss, glass, page curl, perspective, pinch/punch, sphere, and the boss); the blur filters (Gaussian, motion, jaggy despeckle, radial, zoom, directional smooth, smooth, soften, tune, and low pass); the transform filters (bit planes, halftone, psychedelic, solarize, deinterlace, invert, posterize, and threshold); the contour and custom filters (edge detect, alchemy, and band pass); the noise filters (add noise, diffuse, dust and scratch, median, remove moire, and remove noise); the sharpen filters (unsharp mask, adaptive unsharp, directional sharpen, sharpen, high pass, and tune sharpness); and the render and fancy filters (3D stereo noise and lighting effects). The image to the left is created in Chapter 15 using the glass filter tutorial. In Chapter 16, you will learn how to make the hammered-metal effect shown at right in a step-by-step tutorial. Part 5: Extending the Power of Photo-Paint--discusses scanners and scanning, photo CDs, and moving images between applications. Certain Corel graphic utilities or tools such as Capture 9, the Batch Process, the Recorder Docker, and the Scripts Docker are explained. An entire chapter is spent on creating elements for the Web, and it covers: measuring color and pixels; Web backgrounds; creating a tiling source image; image mapping and button making; other methods for generating background tiles; and batch editing. The last two chapters are devoted to repairing and restoring photographs and dazzling Photo-Paint projects. In Chapter 26 you will create the twisted and worn metal shown at top in image to the left. To the right and below are variations of that same technique. In Chapter 25, you'll discover recoverable information in the background of a photo as you go step-by-step to learn the recovery process (see image to the right).
Corel Photo-Paint 9: The Official Guide is a solid and thorough reference book that you can use as a guide to the program. You can use it to learn the program or peruse it when you want to review specific features. The author has a sense of humor and makes learning Photo-Paint 9 very easy and painless. His writing style is amusing, and he covers it all. He includes plenty of amazing techniques and shortcuts and before you know it, you will be experimenting on your own. It is great to have the examples that are used in the book so you can work along with the author. In Chapter 24, you will create the Web page shown on the left.
Graphics: CorelDraw & Adobe Photoshop Web Page Editor: Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0 Scanner: Hewlett Packard ScanJet 6250C Professional Series