Tutorial Tuesday: Digital Graphics Magazine

Today we're going to look at a free magazine, Digital Graphics, for those in working with large format graphics. According to the description of the magazine; they provide printer and software reviews, file management, ink and media selection, tips on workflow enhancement and more. I've been receiving the magazine for several years now and I've always found something useful in each issue. The subscription is completely free, you'll just have to provide some information on yourself.

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CorelDRAW on Inside Digital Design Radio Show

A few weeks ago I was a guest on the Inside Digital Design radio show. You can find an archive of the show if you would like to listen.

It was great to be able to speak to the audience about CorelDRAW, but it was sad that the hosts hadn't done any homework about CorelDRAW or Corel Corporation. Some of the questions they asked were about outdated information, really outdated information, that really had nothing to do with CorelDRAW. And like many Mac/Adobe users, they had no idea the power of CorelDRAW and the many ways it is being used today. I had the opportunity to try and correct some of the myths these users hold, but time limited me from truly presenting the power of CorelDRAW. Hopefully I can return to the show to present more useful information. It would also be great to see other CorelDRAW power users as guests on the show.

If you had five minutes to tell the world why you find CorelDRAW to be the best graphics tool for your needs, what would you say? Leave a comment and let me know!

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Digital Camera Exposes Original Paintings

Digital cameras have come a long way in the past ten years. The quality of the pictures continue to improve. The number of megapixels continues to rise. But I read about a digital camera today that is truly mind-blowing. It shoots at 240 megapixels.

This camera was specifically developed to photograph "Old Master" paintings. You can read about how it was used to restore one of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings. The detail was so good that you can actually distinguish da Vinci's fingerprint in the paint!

What is truly cool about this is that the technology allows the painting to be virtually restored to how it originally looked. Colors that have been hidden for years will suddenly emerge. Dirt creating a haze can be removed and none of this poses any danger to the original painting.

You can read even more if you go to Lumiere Technology's Web site. For example, there is a press release describing the virtual cleaning of the Mona Lisa. If you go to the home page of the site, there is a twelve minute movie showing how the Mona Lisa was photographed and how the technology works. All in all, it is just fascinating. My only wish is that there was a way to download some of the restored, high resolution images. I'm sure that will be possible some day. Then we can all have some of the finest paintings ever created on our own walls.

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Shooting Great Product Shots

With the advent of the digital camera, there are more people shooting pictures of their products for use on the Web and in other areas of their promotional campaign. This leads to some great pictures and some really awful ones.

The folks who created Bling It have created a short video (go ahead, it's free) that gives you some pointers on getting better pictures. Some of their top suggestions:

• Don't use a flash
• Fill the frame with the product
• Try to shoot in natural daylight
• Hold the camera still. Use a tripod or steady your arm on a wall or table.

All very good common sense things to keep in mind. Yet non-professionals don't always remember them all when it comes time to get some pictures.

If you aren't already familiar with Bling It, it is a cool utility that takes plain product shots and adds "bling" to them to help them drive more sales. All things we could do in Corel PHOTO-PAINT, but it makes this exact task very easy to do.

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Flaws with RAW Files

If you've been reading our CorelDRAW Unleashed magazine over the past few issues, you've seen that we've had a running series discussing the usage of RAW files from your digital camera. There is no doubt that they give you the highest quality images.

The downside is that the camera makers have created so many different flavors of RAW that it can be difficult to have a single piece of software that can work with all flavors of RAW. Recently there was a post in the coreldraw.com discussion forums complaining that Corel PHOTO-PAINT X4 didn't support the RAW from a fairly new digital SLR model. The poster was correct, it was not supported. Given that it was a popular model, there is no doubt Corel will add support with the first service pack for CorelDRAW X4.

You might think that Corel just isn't keeping up with RAW. So what if a company with what seems to be an unlimited supply of money didn't support current RAW formats? That's exactly the case with Google's Picasa software as Stephen Shankland recently described in his blog.

The real problem is that camera manufacturers need to standardize on a RAW format. Even if each manufacturer would agree to a single format that worked on all of their models, the processing of the files would be much simpler. But when every new camera, and even every new firmware version, brings a new format; it is just impossible for software developers to keep up.

Adobe tried to propose a standard with its Digital Negative (DNR) format, but it has not gained any steam at all. We can only hope that some sanity appears soon and somehow the camera manufacturers simplify things.

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