Graphics Software Talk ...

You shouldn't have to Gimp should update in place.

Ha the last version didn't possibly this one will ?
Might try it later
Did you see my last post Keith ?
cd7 project files will not work in cd6 not sure about the other way around though ?

Yes, thanks Mike. I guessed as much. I may have time tomorrow or over the weekend to give it a try.

Barman58 said:

I just did a quick search and an old post said something about Ctrl-H hiding the selection - but that was an old blog post.

the other way to work is to use the quick mask I seem to remember Ctrl-J controlling mask options once it was active (strange what you recall ), but haven't used CP for many years

You were very close Nigel thanks :)
Ctrl+Shift+H
Man that took a big annoyance away I can actually see what I'm doing
Although I haven't a clue what I'm doing

Glad you got there

As for not knowing what you're doing - Piffle :)

I have just looked at costings for CD for me here in the UK - The full version would cost me the equivalent of four and a Half years of my Adobe Photography package and I would still have to purchase Lightroom every year or so - I would have CD, Which is still probably the best Vector App around - But I do very little vector work these days so that's not really needed, (though it would be a nice thing to have),

My workflow is different from the majority of users here, I am primarily a photographer rather than a designer or Digital artist - Lightroom is where I do 95% of my image processing, the source of my Work are images I take myself and then Process - the only work I do in photoshop is if an image needs layers work so the Photo package suits me. I can see however that where you are designing graphics from scratch for Walls and Sigs the Vector route makes sense

It's horses for courses really some things are better drawn in vectors and others in bitmap. A lot of my walls will have elements of each but they will generally be finished in PS. I have an old version of Illustrator (CS2) but I find CorelDRAW much more intuitive. It is just a pity that to get a CD vector into PS you need to convert it to a bitmap first.

When I used to use corel they did have an Illustrator export option that was quite reasonable - and the AI import in PS is native so that may be something to look into. Of course Corel ar in direct competition with Adobe so I don't know what sort of integration is possible. It doesn't make much business sense to support your rival's formats. PSD is an essential for any graphics package due to Photoshop's dominant place in the market, but illustrator is pretty specialised software so it's possible that Corel do not support it as fully as they do PSD.

One option that may be worth looking at is Postscript, As Corel see themselves as a player in the Pro design market, they may support .PS and .PDF formats better - these are both Open Standards that contain both vector and bitmap data for use with top end printing Photoshop support both formats fully so if Corel's output meets the standards fully they may be a better transfer format.

Of course the standardisation in Postscript is pretty flakey in the graphics market, generally, but even then there are open source postscript render apps that may meet the spec. I use PDFCreator for all my Postscript output, (It sets up as a printer so works with all windows apps that have a print option), so if you havn't already looked at it it's well worth the look even for programs that have inbuilt Postcript support

AI doesn't work well at all. EPS has some problems with transparency. PDF seems to work well.

I suppose that is logical, AI is a proprietary format so Corel would need to reverse engineer the code to produce it, EPS is designed for print output, primarily, where transparency is often handled as white rather than a lack of colour. I would expect PDF to be good since Adobe made the format an Open Standard a while ago. For a long time, when PDF was a closed Adobe standard, you would find that a PDF produced by a third party program would display strangely in some other manufacturer's "reader".

I see the same thing with Office files - those created with "free" office suites are often "Just Off" from an original Office doc - Again the reverse engineering is not quite right on what is still a Microsoft CLosed format.

I still have the habit with newly installed programs to do a "Round Trip" test on "supported" formats - load an original file, save as the apps native format, then reload and export to the original format - if itpasses this test with a usable result then the translation algorithm is acceptable.

It can be interesting to create a new document in an app and export to a different format and re-import into the app, this should produce an exact copy of the original, but it's surprising how many apps fail this test highlighting faults in conversion.

It's akin to using google translate to change from language A to language B and then back to language A - it can result in some quite humorous results :)

LOL. I guess you are right Nigel.