Chapter 17
Through the Looking Glass

Featuring

This stop on our tour through DRAW’s special effects might be the highlight of the trip for you. It features one of DRAW’s most celebrated attributes: its ability to create transparent objects. Unlike effects such as Envelope and Extrude, which influence how an object is shaped, DRAW’s transparency tools determine how we see an object.

DRAW splits its transparency tools into two categories, each with different functionality: the Interactive Transparency tool and the Lens docker. We suspect that Corel still wants to evolve these features, because there is no apparent reason why the Lens effects couldn’t be an interactive set of tools with a property bar, like all the others. This chapter is similarly divided into two; we’ll start with the lenses.

New Lenses on Life

Lenses have historically been responsible for more oohs and aahs at trade shows and product demonstrations than any other feature of CorelDRAW. The Lens docker provides access to 11 different camera-like lenses that can be applied to an object. When you apply a lens, the object becomes the lens, filtering your view of all objects that are beneath it. Thus lenses allow objects to become, in essence, transparent—an effect that was impossible prior to their debut in DRAW 5.

In the past, to qualify to be a lens, objects had to be combined into a single curve, but no longer. Now any group of objects—even a multiple selection of separate objects—can act as a lens. An artistic string of text can also be a lens; paragraph text cannot.

You control the Lens effect with the Lens docker, shown in action in Figure 17.1. You get there from Effects Ø Lens or by pressing Alt+F3. Here, an inversion lens is being applied to the ellipse in front of a collection of graphics.

FIGURE 17.1  Like a photographer’s camera bag, this docker offers an assortment of lenses. But these lenses do some things that camera lenses cannot.

This lens studies the colors of objects underneath and converts them to the colors that are on the opposite end of the CMYK color spectrum. Red becomes cyan, green becomes magenta, and white becomes black. We intentionally drew the ellipse to hang over the edge of the graphic so you could see that it even turned the white page black.

To help you see the effects of the Lens tool, we have placed a file called Lenstour.cdr on the Sybex Web site for you to download. In this file, you’ll find several rectangles with different fill types and patterns, and then a simple ellipse placed on top. The bars on the left are created from a rainbow blend, and the four rectangles on the right are (from top to bottom) a fountain fill, a two-color pattern fill, a full-color bitmap fill, and a fractal fill. Figure 17.2 shows the effect of one of the standard lenses: a 50% transparency. In other words, the ellipse in front is set to allow half of the color intensities from the objects underneath to show through. Meanwhile, the ellipse itself is filled with red. You can re-create Figure 17.2 by following these steps:

1.  Open Lenstour.cdr and select the ellipse.

2.  Fill it with red.

3.  Invoke the Lens docker (Effects Ø Lens or Alt+F3).

4.  In the Lens drop-down window in the middle of the docker, choose Transparency as the type of lens.

5.  Set the Rate to 50%.

6.  Click Apply.

FIGURE 17.2  The red ellipse is 50% transparent, allowing half of the colors underneath it to show through.

With Lenstour.cdr, you can experiment with all of the different lens effects. Try applying each style of lens and refer to the descriptions in the following sections. When a particular lens has additional settings for rate, color, and so on, try varying them over a wide range to see the results. Also try changing the color of the ellipse that is acting as the lens—that can have a significant impact on the result.

Here are descriptions of the lenses.

Transparency

This is likely to be the most used effect but the least used lens, and we’ll explain what we mean in a moment. As you saw in Figure 17.2, Transparency causes the colors of the objects under the lens to mix with the lens object’s color, creating the illusion that you’ve placed a piece of transparent film over the object. In the Rate box, you enter a transparency rate from 1% to 100%. The greater this value, the more transparent the lens object; at 100%, the lens essentially disappears, allowing 100% of the underlying object’s color to show through unchanged.

However, while transparency is a popular effect, you probably won’t reach for Lens to apply it, thanks to the Interactive Transparency tool, discussed later in this chapter.