• Regular masks, which are created by various methods, such as circling, delineating or painting an area.
• Colour masks which are created by "lassoing" areas of uniform colour or selecting areas within a specified colour tolerance.
• Transparency masks that enable you to apply effects to objects with varying degrees of transparency (Figure 1).

The masking tools provide a great deal of flexibility; you can use more than one tool as you strive to create a precise mask. A major problem is that the mask brush cursor always remains the same size, whatever the size of the nib. This makes it very difficult to assess which parts of the image will be affected by the movement of the brush. On the plus side, the colour masking tools are very powerful, enabling you to mask areas of the same colour scattered throughout an image.

Images can be anti-aliased (filtering an image to remove jagged edges) and smoothed, although smoothed images tend to either remain fairly jagged or lose definition, depending upon the smoothing radius specified (Figure 2).

Brush tools

There are 3 brush tools, Paint, Effect and Clone, each with different modes. The Paint tool offers 15 modes, including crayon, ball-point, pencil, felt marker and hi-lighter; each mode offers different styles (e.g. the pencil can be HB or 2HB, and each style can be fully customised (Figure 3). Customisation options include nib style, rate of flow or amount, texture, size, transparency, rotation, flatness, edging, bleeding, strokes, dab variation and colour variation. Customised brushes can be saved and are automatically added to the style list.

The Effect tool (not to be confused with the special effects filters) has similar settings, with the effects offered including smear, smudge, brightness, contrast, hue, hue replace, sponge, tint, blend and sharpen. The Clone tool offers pointillism, impressionism and eraser, again with several variations of each.

As with the mask brush, the size of the cursor remains the same for each tool, making precise strokes difficult.

Object handling

Objects can be created from masks and floated above an image. They can be aligned, ordered, locked, rotated, flipped, feathered, hidden or defringed to make them blend more easily into the background. Once merged into the background they can no longer be manipulated, but until then, they can be easily selected by clicking on them in the image itself or on their thumbnail in the Objects Roll-Up (Figure 3). Object marquees are difficult to distinguish from masks but can be hidden.

Text is created as a floating object and can be transformed, skewed and rotated, the same as any other object. Once it is re-edited, however, any effects applied are lost.

Colour handling

Images can be split into channels (e.g. red, green and blue for RGB), edited individually and then recombined, either under the original colour model or a different model. Channels from different images can be combined, and grey-scale images can be converted into monotones, duotones, tritones or quadtones. CPP supports several colour models (HLS, YIQ, Lab, HSB, HLS, RGB, CMYK, CMYK 255, CMY, Greyscale and Registration) and colour matching palettes (DIC, TOYO, Spectra Master, Pantone, Trumatch, FOCOLTONE). You can create custom palettes or use colour tables to edit individual colours or blocks of colours; you can also apply alternative colour tables to an image.

Special Effects

There are 75 special effect filters, including Terrazzo, Paint Alchemy, Lens Flare and 3D stereoscopic (Figure 4). Support is provided for third party plug-in filters, and the Fractal Explorer of Kai's Power Tools is included in the package. Most special effects can be previewed before being applied to an image.

Undoing mistakes

CPP provides several options for undoing edits. Checkpoint saves the current image to memory and lets you return to that point if need be, or you can revert to the last saved version of an image. An Undo command undoes the last action, and an Undo List tracks all actions. You can use the Undo List to restore your work to any previous state, although unfortunately, it is not possible to edit the list. The Undo List could be quite confusing for inexperienced users since it includes implicit commands as well as those explicitly specified by the user. It can be difficult to work out at which point to undo, and until you gain experience it may be easiest to undo one step at a time.

Prepress tools

A vital function of any image-editing program is its handling of colour. Colours must be consistent and predictable all along the production chain. CPP's Colour Manager calibrates your scanner, monitor and printer and establishes a system profile to ensure that colours are accurately captured, displayed and printed. It walks you through each stage of the process and enables you to select from pre-packaged profiles, or if you prefer, create your own. Multiple profiles can be created for different devices or environmental conditions.

Colours which will not print correctly on a particular printer can be highlighted by a Gamut Alarm and reassigned. Monitor resolution can be calibrated to ensure that the image on the screen has the correct proportions. There is a wide range of print options - crop and registration marks, page numbers, calibration bars, a densitometer scale, negative images or colour separations. Colour trapping (compensation for misaligned colour separations) can be either automatic or manual, and there are several proofing options.

Other features

CPP looks and feels similar to CorelDRAW and, like CorelDRAW, roll-ups are a trademark. For newcomers to Corel applications, these are dialog boxes that give immediate access to commands and which can be rolled up out of the way when not in use. Like most of CPP's tools and interface, you can customise them.

One of the nice features of CPP is its task manager, which enables you to assign priorities to processor-intensive tasks. If you are trying to print a large file, for example, while working on an image, you can allocate resources to whichever task is the more urgent. As your priorities change, so too can you reallocate priorities to your tasks. Tasks can also be set to complete only when there are no other tasks running, or can be suspended indefinitely.

CPP can be slow at times, but speed can be improved by opening only part of a file or by cropping or resampling it before opening. It is also possible to create scripts to speed things up further.

It is easy to become lost in image-editing programs, especially when zooming in for close-up views. CPP has a solution for this problem with its Navigator roll-up, which gives you a reference point when zooming and panning across an image, and makes it much easier to move around.

Corel SCRIPT

In Corel terminology, macros are called scripts. Scripts are created by recording keystrokes or using the Corel SCRIPT Editor. Corel SCRIPTs can be quite sophisticated, with prompts for user input and support for a variety of dialog boxes, and can also be used in other Corel applications.

Scripts can really save you time; you could, for example, edit a low resolution copy of an image, then play the recording back over a high resolution one.

Corel CAPTURE

CC provides an overpowering range of screen capture choices. As well as the usual full screen and current window options, CC enables you to capture the client window (same as the current window but without the title bar, status bar or window borders) or any rectangular, elliptical or freehand area. Strictly speaking, the freehand tool is misnamed since it draws line segments rather than curves. By setting a delay before a capture is activated, elusive menu lists and flyouts which disappear when you press a key can be captured. The colour type, size and resolution of the captured image can be set to match your monitor or printer and you can place a simple border around each captured image.

Images can be exported to files, the clipboard or the printer. Repeated captures can be exported as individual frames of an animation file or as individual files. Captured images can automatically launch a Corel graphics application with the captured image placed in a new document. One problem with this, though, is that the screen mode of the application is always changed to window mode, whatever the current setting may be.

Corel MULTIMEDIA MANAGER

CMM is an organiser for clipart, bitmap images and video clips (Figure 5). Items are stored in albums and subalbums and displayed as thumbnails. When you need an item it can be dragged and dropped or copied and pasted into your document. Keywords can be assigned to individual items and to whole albums, and each item can be described and notated. There is a reasonably powerful search engine which enables you to search for strings in the keywords, label, description, note field and file path. It will look for strings that are LIKE, NOT LIKE, EXACTLY LIKE and NOT EXACTLY LIKE. Searches can be further defined using parentheses and Boolean operators AND and OR.

By default, CMM creates a link to the original location of a file, but you can choose to embed the file in the album, allowing the original file to be deleted. I recently reviewed another graphics manager where embedded files take up much more space than the original file. It was nice to find that CMM's embedding is truly a viable, space-saving option.

CMM provides two mini-editors to allow quick manipulation of vector and bitmap images, such as flipping, rotating and resizing. A slide-show viewer enables you to view images at full-screen size, and a batch editor facilitates the editing of file-links, keywords or thumbnails of multiple items at once. Whole albums or selected images can be printed.

Documentation

Following today's trend of cutting costs by producing only very rudimentary - if any - paper manuals, CPP's manual is only 15mm thick. Half of it is devoted to thumbnails of the supplied clipart, with 4-5 pages each devoted to the basics of CPP and the utility programs. The balance of the manual is a tutorial on the main features of CPP. Although the tutorial gives a reasonable introduction to the basics of the program, there are many features it does not cover, and my copy had some missing and duplicated pages.

Online help is available, but it seems you are expected to discover most of CPP's features by trial and error. For a program of this size and complexity, the lack of a proper user manual is a sad oversight. I had a lot of trouble finding out how to calibrate my devices even though I knew it could be done. The "how to" sections of the online help sometimes omit a couple of important preliminary steps, which could frustrate inexperienced users.

Free technical support is available for 30 days from the day of your first call. In Australia the technical support telephone number is in Queensland, but assistance may also be obtained from the Corel forum in the Microsoft Network or on Corel's World Wide Web (http://www.corel.com) and File Transfer Protocol (ftp.corel.com) sites.

Conclusion

I like CPP. It takes a while to learn to use the tools and navigate your way around the program, and some features need a sure hand, a steady eye and lots of practice to use to good effect. But the colour handling tools are good, the prepress tools excellent and the roll-ups put most commands close at hand. The latest version has many powerful features and establishes CPP as a solid contender in the mid-range image-editing arena.

Reprinted from the May 1996 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia