Turn Digital Images into Vector Artwork with PowerTRACE

By Steve Bain

Recent versions of CorelDRAW include powerful new onboard tracing tools you can use to quickly trace your digital images into vector artwork. In this tutorial, I’ll highlight the value of using CorelDRAW’s revamped bitmap-tracing tools and demonstrate the results of using various tracing options.

Protect Your Creative Assets with PDF Security

By Steve Bain

Today’s free-flowing information made available by online technology presents a certain degree of intellectual property risk. Most of us wouldn’t want our personal, corporate, or copyrighted creative property from being somehow absconded by strangers. Having a strategy to protect your information and ideas is more important than ever.

Cool Tricks with Paragraph Text in CorelDRAW

By Steve Bain

These days, there’s no excuse for churning out plain-looking text layouts. Using recent versions of CorelDRAW, there are so many ways you can make text more interesting to read, it’s a shame not to take advantage of them. In this tutorial, we’ll explore a few tricks that you can use with paragraph text to produce more visually appealing and professional-looking text layouts. Although this tutorial depicts a previous CorelDRAW release version, these tips are valid throughout virtually all recent versions of the program.

Dynamic Guides May Change the Way You Draw

By Steve Bain

Once in a while, you discover a drawing feature that’s so innovative, it has the potential to completely change the way you draw. The dynamic guides in CorelDRAW will do just that. In fact, after using dynamic guides for a while, you’ll wonder how you ever did without them. In this tutorial, I’ll reveal just how great these convenient guides really are.

New Rules for the Pick Tool

by Steve Bain

If you’re a legacy CorelDRAW user peforming advanced design or illustration tasks or even basic vector drawing work, this may pique your interest. Since the release of version 12, there have been a couple of key changes to CorelDRAW’s Pick Tool default behavior. You can no longer manipulate object nodes using just the Pick Tool and you’ll need to pay closer attention when selecting unfilled objects.

Custom Sprayers Can Add Real Drawing Power

By Steve Bain

There’s nothing better than harnessing the power of your computer to create hundreds or even thousands of objects in the blink of an eye. CorelDRAW’s Artistic Media Tool sprayer enables you to do just that. You can ’spray’ objects onto any open or closed path and for amazing technical and creative effects. In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to create your own sprayer effect and set options to control its appearance.

How to Crop Bitmaps in CorelDRAW

By Steve Bain

With all the various ways you can work with digital images in CorelDRAW, you’re eventually going to need (or want) to do a little cropping. Image cropping involves temporarily hiding – or even deleting - portions of a digital image. It’s generally done to change the image proportions to fit a specific design need and/or delete unneeded pixels and reduce your file size. You can do it easily with any version of CorelDRAW and it’s a relatively straightforward operation.

Create Cool 3D Chiseled Graphics (part 2)

By Steve Bain

In part 1 of this 2-part tutorial, we learned how to create the illusion of chiseled effects in CorelDRAW using very basic shapes. Now we’ll explore how to work with more complex shapes. We’ll also reveal how to add realistic color schemes to simulate various lighting levels.

Create Cool 3D Chiseled Graphics (part 1)

By Steve Bain

In this visit to the CorelDRAW toolbox, you’ll discover a technique you can use to create perfectly chiseled shapes. It’s an effect that will enable you to create the 3D illusion of shapes which appear either recessed into – or raised above - a flat surface. Your success will depend on your object’s shape, your skill at node editing and path commands, and of course how closely you follow these tutorial steps.

Five Top Photo Fixes using Corel PHOTO-PAINT

By Steve Bain

Whether you’re out snapping photos with your digital camera or just scanning old family album favorites to disc, you’re bound to end up with little anomalies that you wish you could fix quickly. In this tutorial, we’ll show you five common problems with scanned images and digital camera photos, and the techniques you can use to fix them using the tools and filters in Corel PHOTO-PAINT. Although this tutorial shows version 12 in use, most of these techniques apply to any recent version of the program.