Graphics Software Talk ...

[Barman58]

The corel suite is a strange one - I used Corel Draw for years but could never get on with Photopaint at all.

The strange way it treated it's version of layers - the object system, was logical for someone coming from CD, I suppose but I just couldn't get used to it, plus other things were just in the wrong place or just didn't feel right, I kept an old version of PS on hand for the occasional bitmap edit I needed.

As Digital Photography took off and I needed more bitmap editing it made sense to go to Photoshop for the majority of work - any business related vector graphics I needed could be covered by tools in Office, especially with the improvements in Publisher, Word & Visio

 

[ThrashZone]

One thing is for sure,
If I get over a couple of hills I'm sure cp will get better,
It took a while to get used to draw and it's tools... and I'm sure paint will come along in time,
To be truthful working with layers has always been a bit of a draw back,
I believe that's why Inkscape and cd are actually allot more straight forward dealing with them or different objects
So layers in paint ? I don't see them as an issue yet it's just some little stuff or paint's tools I need to get to know better which I'm just starting to do

 

[JDobbsy1987]

For the gimp users out there Gimp 2.8.14 has been released

Change Log:

* General:
- Fix libtool versioning (forgot to bump gimp_interface_age)
- Massively clean up and fix the OSX build and bundle
- Add Jenkins tutorial
- Documentation updates
- Bug fixes
- Translation updates
* Core:
- OSX: Fix migration code for old GIMP directories
- Fix brush sizes when used from plug-ins
- Windows: Allow to Explorer-open files with UTF-8 characters in the filename
- Make XCF loading more robust against broken files
* GUI:
- Make sure the widget direction matches the GUI language
- Remove the option to disable the warning when closing a modified image
- Fix canvas overlay widgets (like the text options) for tablets
- Make DND work between images in one dockable
* Libgimp:
- Make gimp_image_get_name() return the string used for the image title
* Plug-ins:
- Make script-fu-server more secure by listening to 127.0.0.1 by default and add a warning about changing that IP. This breaks the procedure's API, but for security reasons.
- Bring back proper script-fu translations

 

[kado897]

Thanks Jamie. I don't use Gimp much these days so I have the Portable Apps version which will update automatically.

I also noticed that there is a Home and Student version of CorelDRAW X7 out today. Graphic software ? CorelDRAW Home & Student Suite X7. I may give it a go sometime.

 

[ThrashZone]

Really Thanks Jamie,

Keith cd7 did have a very nice gradient smoothing feature not sure if it's in the home and student version though ?

 

[kado897]

Yes I heard about that.

 

[ThrashZone]

Let us know how you like the new integrated online stuff I'm sure it's all there I doubt corel would deprive people of that

 

[ThrashZone]

A little heads up,
cd7 files do not work in cd6 if you choose to not go for cd7 the files will be worthless

 

[JDobbsy1987]

For the gimp users out there Gimp 2.8.14 has been released

Has anyone downloaded this version yet, i don't see the 'New Layer' icon any more?
It's there to click but invisible which is annoying, is it a bug or just me?



Cheers,
Jamie

 

[ThrashZone]

No I haven't,
I dread reloading G'Mic and layer styles again which I just updated a month ago :/

 

[kado897]

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

 

[ThrashZone]

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 ?

 

[kado897]

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

 

[ThrashZone]

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 :roflmao:

 

[Barman58]

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

 

[kado897]

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.

 

[Barman58]

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

 

[kado897]

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

 

[Barman58]

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

 

[kado897]

LOL. I guess you are right Nigel.