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© 2004 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
AS WE BEGIN OUR ROUND OF SEMINARS across the country, it has become immediately clear to us: CorelDraw’s Eyedropper tool is one of the true unsung heroes in the box. Version 12 of Draw brings two exciting new capabilities to it, but even those who do not upgrade right away can benefit from keeping the tool in mind.
At its core, the value of the Eyedropper is its
ability to decipher both the color model and the specific color
value of any object that it finds on a CorelDraw page. It is as
easy as just activating the tool and clicking once on the object.
And it is precisely because the tool is so easy to use that many
users do not venture out much further than those basics. This article
will indeed make that trip...
The whole idea of the Eyedropper is that you can hover over any object on your page and pick up its color. It is just wasted effort and mousing if you first have to traipse over to the Toolbox on the extreme left edge of the application window, just to click once, and then traverse all the way back to the object of interest.
So your first order of business is to assign a hotkey to the tool to deliver you from all of that needless mousing. Here’s how:
1. Go to Tools | Options | Customization | Commands.
2. Click the binocular icon and in the Find What field, enter eyedrop.
3. Once Draw finds the command, click it, and then click Shortcut Keys.
4. Assign a hotkey to the command, as we have done here in Figure 1.
It does not really matter what hotkey
you assign to it — we used Y because
E is taken by the cEnter
align command — but note that you
do not need to make it a multi-stroke
command, like Ctrl+E or Ctrl+Shift+E.
Most of the time you use Draw, your cursor
is not placed in a string of text, so
you can just use the straight keystroke
(and if your cursor is in a string of
text, Draw would ignore the hotkey assignment
and enter the character of text).
The second oft-overlooked aspect of the Eyedropper tool is its corresponding Paintbucket tool. Once you pick up a color with the eyedropper, you can then drop it down onto another object with the paintbucket, but again, you do not need to journey to the Toolbox, click the eyedropper icon to fly it out, activate the Paintbucket tool, and then return to the page to find the object to fill it with.
Instead, note what Shift does to the eyedropper. It automatically toggles between the two states, picking up and dropping down. So to eyedrop a color from one object and fill it somewhere else, here is your recommended drill:
1. Click your custom hotkey to activate the Eyedropper.
2. Click the object with the color you seek.
3. Move to the object you want to fill with that color.
4. Press and hold Shift while you click either inside the object (to assign the color to its fill) or on its outer edge (to assign the color to its outline).
Another point to note is that the Eyedropper can be exceedingly specific if you want it to be. In fact, its default is to study the very pixel that you click on, and that could be helpful if you are trying to pick up a specific color from a photograph, fountain fill, or other continuous tone image.
You can tell the tool to be a bit less specific by setting its
“Sample size” to 2x2 or 5x5. Then it will survey the
wider area and assign a color that is an average of what it finds.
The more significant leap takes place when you combine the Eyedropper with another of Draw’s lesser-used features. When we showed this at the seminars, we had users scrambling for their pens and asking us to repeat the procedure.
Figure 2 sets the scene. In the hopes of recreating this logo for a cable television network, we first set out to identify the colors. So we used the Eyedropper to pick up various colors around the scan and drop them into small rectangles.
Once they are in objects like this, it is much easier to assign them elsewhere, but we are going to go one big step further and create a custom color palette from them:
1. Select all eight rectangles.
2. Go to Window | Color Palettes | Create Palette from Selection.
3. Assign a name for your new palette.
4. Note that it shows up right away, docked next to the existing palette.
Now you can assign colors at will. Most jobs will not require the
creation of a custom palette, but it is much more convenient, and
as it happens, the project that we staged here involved the use
of a mesh fill. And the only way to assign colors to a mesh is from
a palette. Same with an extrude, a drop shadow, and perhaps a few
other tools.
Version 12 brings two further capabilities to the Eyedropper, each of which has already proven to be enough to compel users to upgrade.
The first is a wholesale addition to its capabilities by allowing for the capture of any one and every one of an object’s properties. From a simple drop-down, shown in Figure 3, you can toggle between these two states (and true-to-form, we wish that the toggle was hotkey accessible). If you have just one object whose attributes you want to inherit from another, the Copy Properties From command or the now-familiar right-click-and-drag maneuver are just as convenient. But if you need to scoop up attributes and apply them to several objects, the Eyedropper’s new trick is the way to go.
The second shot in the arm that Eyedropper gets is the ability to go off and fetch a color from anywhere on your computer screen, not just from a CorelDraw object. This is huge if you’re trying to match a website color or a PowerPoint background. You used to have to grab the screen and dump it into Draw; now you can just go pluck it off the screen and work with it right away.
One of Draw’s smartest tools has just gotten smarter...
To discuss this article or PowerPoint in general, please head to our Forum.
To learn the product better, join us for our Spring Seminar Series.
Copyright 2004, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
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