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© 2000 by David Milisock. All Rights Reserved.
To offer information is a good thing but one needs to validate that information otherwise it may misinform. To that end I offer this brief history of my involvement with CorelDRAW and the printing industry. In 1975, after a tour of duty with the U.S. Navy, I returned home during a recession and took any job I could get which happened to be an entry level position in printing. For the next 16 years I held various jobs such as pressman, image assembler, as well as working my way into production management, with responsibilities for a multimillion dollar production flow and 40 employees. A little over 9 years ago I started my own printing company which specialized in custom work. That company continues in an evolved form to this day. When CorelDRAW was in version 4 running under Windows 3.1, my company entered the computer age. First, thinking that I would run the company and do a little desktop publishing. Little did I know that in 1997 this would lead to a phone conversation with the head of the Corel CASB team and a very interesting and mutually beneficial information flow between our two companies which continues to this day. The staff at Corel understands programming for PostScript and I had over 20 years of printing experience. The information that was shared has helped produce a productive future for my company as well as providing another piece of the puzzle for Corel, helping them produce what I know is a very viable graphic application for creating high-quality graphics for printing. In 1998, due to the changing environment in the printing industry I decided to take a different approach to our marketing in hopes of reversing the trend in the printing industry of reduced profit margins. I formed Custom Graphic Technologies Inc., this is a company that has targeted the corporate marketing and printing professional by offering training and support. This has increased my average billing as well as my profit margin. I currently operate my two companies with a client base that reaches from Maine to Hawaii producing a wide range of printed graphics. I am also the contributing pre-press editor for Spencer\Cygnus publications (Print & Graphics - Southern Graphics Magazines) with a distribution of 30,000 magazines monthly.
The innovations that have been built into CorelDRAW 10 are not necessarily apparent at first glance. My first observation is that the interface from Draw 8 through 10 have provided improvements at each upgrade while producing a very shallow learning curve. You can jump right in and be productive while you are learning to utilize the new features. That is a major breakthrough in Corel's understanding of the needs of a team manager who is responsible for training on the new applications. My first observation about 10 is the Status Bar and the Property Bar (above), at first glance this seems to be no big deal. I would suggest that you explore the functions of these two devices with various types of elements that are placed into your file. Case in point, when I open a client's file in Draw 10, the Status Bar now indicates the original scanning resolution of placed bitmaps and the Property Bar now indicates if that bitmap has been resized. As a pre-press person I know instantly if I must resolve a resolution issue, a designer may see other aspects to this information but the reality is that these tools have been honed to provide a greater latitude of pertinent information at a glance.
There are two other aspects of bitmap work in 10 that enhance the ease of the
workflow. A bitmap that was placed into Draw 10 and resized in Draw 10 will
retain it's dimensional size when transported into PHOTO-PAINT 10 and then
back into Draw 10. That is a 4" x 6" 300 dpi cmyk bitmap resized to 2" x 4" 600 dpi
in Draw when taken into PHOTO-PAINT will remain 2" X 4" and will remain properly
sized when returned into Draw. This did not happen in 8 or 9 and was a
source of a great deal of lost time. The resample dialog (at right) in Draw 10
now indicates the resolution and dimensional size of the original bitmap when
it was first placed into Draw 10. If you use the resample dialog to resample
(change resolution) at this stage you will get a predictable but undesired result,
not an error. This workflow method provides useful information to the user but
does require a change in procedures for changing the resolution of the placed
bitmap that has been resized in Draw 10 versus Draw 8 or 9.
To change the resolution of a bitmap that has been resized after it was placed into Draw 10 use the convert to bitmap dialog (at left) in the bitmap menu. When converting to proper color space and resolution (you're really not converting because it is already a bitmap but the resolution change takes place during this procedure) use convert to bitmap instead of using the resample dialog. Getting the additional inter-application interface functionality and the additional information comes at the minuscule price of this procedural change. Once the bitmap has had the resolution changed in Draw 10 you may then use the resample dialog for subsequent resolution changes without an adverse effect if you so desire.
There has been an improvement in the aspect that all effect and shape tools are now on flyouts which I consider organizational, the eyedropper tool and the paint bucket tool work much more smoothly. I mention these because this is an example of what I see as the major reason for purchasing this upgrade. This is a better thought out tool for the person whose livelihood depends on their tools working properly and with intuitive function.
I will list as many of these new enhancements as I can before you go to sleep! The new color docker window and color pallette fly out (at right) is a great new feature to help with keeping all of your work within the same color pallette, one of the most common mistakes made in file creation.
The Lens Effects docker (left) now adjusts itself to the lens effect applied to the selected object, in 9 we had to use the current effect docker.
The tone curve dialog (at right) and the unsharp mask dialog (below) now have a tremendously increased latitude in their range of operation making critical fine level adjustments much easier. One note of interest with the tone curve is the improved latitude in the adjustments help making RGB tone curves for top quality color calibrated scans a much simpler task.
Speaking of color calibration we need to address the new color management dialog (at right) that is under the Tools menu. This is an improved version of the color management tool for Draw 10 which retains settings that you can create for different working environments. This dialog is object oriented and is much simpler to use!
Now to what I know as a graphic professional is an absolute fact and my reason for saying, if you work as a professional with CorelDRAW in the printing environment you must get this upgrade. I have created many pieces of political materials this November. It happened that I received Draw 10 at a time when I could create scans through 10 from prints that I had scanned only a day or two before through Draw 9. The time it took me to calibrate and to create operational tone curves in 10 was about 20 minutes, much less then it took me to calibrate 9 and the resulting color was a noticeable improvement. It is not that Draw 9 produced bad color, it does not, the difference is that in 9 the scans lacked 1/4, mid and 3/4 tone and the curve always had to be pushed to provide quality color. This makes calibration more difficult because you are trying to give a scan something that it doesn't have. When I worked with the raw scan in 10 building an RGB base curve from a scan, which was scanned through a profile we found that the base scan had an increase in tone and with the improved latitude in the RGB tone curve our color was improved to a superior level. All base tone curves should be done through the RGB color space and Corel has improved their ability to manipulate this with the improved tone curve. This is important because within reason it is much easier to reduce unwanted color from a scan with greater quality then it is to try to give a scan something it doesn't have. This keeps my company on the cutting edge of quality and productivity! The scan I worked on was a 300% enlargement of a 3" x 5" color print that was used for campaign brochures. This enlargement was used for full color posters for street signs printed at 150 line screen on coated 1 side 14pt stock. The effect these posters had on the campaign is unknown but the opponent went and had posters printed with his picture on them within two days after our posters hit the street. When printed, the pressman (who has printed for 30 years) remarked about the quality from such an enlargement. We received about 2 dozen calls from future potential candidates (even from the other side) and best of all the client was very happy and paid. In conclusion I know that as a professional you will find the CorelDRAW Graphic Suite 10 an asset to your company regardless of what your graphic specialty may be. I have only worked with the application for a few weeks and I'm still finding improvements and, for your information, outputting files for Corel users has never been an issue for me. We use the latest equipment and find printing film or poster work from driver based or digital front end based PostScript level 2 or 3 equipment is a piece of cake although we do prefer PostScript level 3.
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