Corel Commands and Tools
that I'll be using.
Since many of you may not be familiar with the tools I'll be using, I wanted to describe what
most of them are, and where you can find them. If you're not using Corel, you may have similar
tools by different names. Hopefully the description will help you find its match.
Tools:
The tools are the icons found down the left side of the screen.
Mask: I like the name of this tool! This is probably the most important tool you can have! Mask
creates an area of the image that is to be manipulated, and then protects everything
outside the mask. Imagine placing a clear piece of plastic over a real drawing. Then
if you were to cut out a portion of that plastic, you could still see the whole image, but
you can only paint, erase, etc over the part that has the plastic cut away. This is a mask!
There are many tools used to create different shapes of masks:
A "squared mask" creates a box or rectangular mask.
The "lasso mask" creates a shape that forms around similar colors.
A "freeform mask" creates a mask that traces your pointer's trail.
Eyedropper Tool: With this tool, you can pick a color directly off of your image to apply to your
paint and fill color. This is great for matching existing colors to patch up areas that
you're working on. Left click to set the Paint color and right click to set the Fill color.
Fill Tool: With this tool you can fill in an entire masked area with a certain color or pattern.
Erase Tool: Simply that! It's an eraser. Like the paint tool, it has a variety of controls that
are good to get familiar with. They'll increase your degree of control considerably.
Paint Tool: Just like it sounds. This is how you apply colors to the picture. There is a large
variety of controls for the paint brush. Get in there and play with them. Different
brush types like, airbrush, pen, pencil, brush, sponge, etc. Some good controls to get
used to are the Trasparency and Amount controls. These adjust how much paint actually
flows through the brush.
Clone Brush Tool: A two part variation of the Paint Tool. I use this tool alot! You right click
in one location of the image, and then left click where you want to copy what's at the
first clicked point. As one brush moves, the other moves along with it. It's great for
cleaning up halos, covering unwanted objects, extending backgrounds, borrowing shades
of skin color, etc. Get familiar with this tool.
Smear Tool: This tool blurs colors together much like dragging a finger through wet paint, or
rubbing a finger over pencil lines. It has many controls that are worth exploring. This
tool is great for smoothing areas that have been painted over and may have a "stiff"
look to them.
Commands:
Most of these are found under the "pulldown" menus at the top of the screen.
Paper size: This command is found under the Edit pulldown menu. With this, you can adjust the
size of the space around the picture.
Resample: This command is found under the Edit pulldown menu. This allows you to adjust the
pictures resolution and size. You can determine the size by pixels, inches, etc.
Paste from File: Find this under the Edit pulldown menu. With this command you can insert
another image file as an object into your current picture.
Crop to Mask: This command is found under the Edit pulldown menu. This quick command cuts
away everything except what's inside a masked area you've created.
Invert Mask: Find this command under the Mask pulldown menu. After you've created a mask,
use this tool to invert it. This means that everything that was protected outside the
mask is now exposed, and vice versa.
Create Object: This is found under the Object pulldown menu. After you've created a mask
around a portion of your picture, you can choose this command to make that masked
area into an object. This object can then be moved, rotated, mirrored, sized, etc. You
have two main choices for creating an object: Copy Selection, and Cut Selection. The
first copies the masked area, and the second cuts the masked area out, leaving a hole
in the picture. I usually use the "Copy Selection" so I still have the original area for
anything else. It can always be painted over later.
Combine Objects: This command is found under the Objects pulldown menu. This makes
objects that have been created in your image, become part of the background. When
you've created an object, or pasted in an object, it can't be modified with the tools
like the rest of the image can. When you combine it, the object becomes part of the
picture, and can now be painted, smeared, erased, and so on, just like the rest of the
image.
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