Combining Lenses

As you experimented with DRAW’s lenses, you may have noticed for yourself that you can overlay one lens on another. For example, you might want to both magnify and brighten an object underneath a lens. When you apply a new lens, you replace any existing lens; they are not added together. However, you can stack lens objects on top of one another. Make a quick copy of a lens object, which effectively duplicates the lens effect. Then change to a different lens effect, and you create a compound lens effect.

	WARNING Lens effects move into the high rent district in a hurry. DRAW creates lenses by duplicating the objects that are underneath. Thus a compound lens effect requires the quadrupling of objects, and in the case of a color bitmap image used underneath a lens, the end result can be crippling. In Chapter 23, we detail one solution—converting lens effects to bitmaps.

FIGURE 17.6  With Viewpoint, a lens object can act like a movable window.

Learning to Use the Lenses

Having experimented with the effects produced by each lens type, your head might already be swimming with ideas of how to use them. Here are a few.

Tinted Grayscale for Cheap Color

If you want to add a bit of color or take away color, the Tinted Grayscale lens is your answer. We mentioned earlier that you can import a full-color photograph or drawing and apply a Tinted Grayscale lens to it, to convert it to grayscale. You can also colorize a black-and-white image by adding a Tinted Grayscale lens. Despite this lens’s name, you can choose any color for it, making it easy and affordable to add some color to a project.

Heat Map

Like Tinted Grayscale, Heat Map is most effective when used with grayscale photographs. Try importing a photo and applying this lens. The result is an effect that has become very popular in Generation X publications. If you are planning to publish a magazine dedicated to heavy-metal music, this is definitely the lens for you.

Using Brighten to Create Text Backdrops

Another popular technique used in many publications is to brighten or “wash out” part of an image to place text over it. The Brighten lens makes it easy to accomplish this, as Figure 17.7 shows.

FIGURE 17.7  By brightening this photograph, regular-sized text can be placed in front and be easily read.

NOTE In Chapter 14, we showed you a clever trick for creating a background image, severely tinted from full intensity (we used a falcon behind a page of text). This technique produces similar results, and although we prefer the Blend strategy for its simpler instructions and reduced number of objects required, you cannot use Blend with photographs. When working with bitmap images, you need to use a lens to produce this effect.

The Miracle of Interactive Transparency

Our lead author relates a recent experience at a California seminar:

I was on a tour of six cities, in which I met over 300 CorelDRAW users. Most everyone exhibited symptoms of Version-itis, an uncommon, but rarely fatal, condition in which software users develop the inability to recall which version brought about which new features. I am not immune to this epidemic, regularly failing to remember if PowerClip was introduced in version 4 or 5, and when DRAW began supporting page sizes over 30 inches.

CorelDRAW users are the most susceptible, given the dizzying pace with which Corel Corp. develops new versions. I was particularly struck by the amazement that greeted me from regular version 7 users who attended these seminars to learn more about version 8. They encountered several features they had never seen before...only to learn that version 7 sported them also.

This was most widespread with Interactive Transparency. At each city, when I melted one image into another—an effect normally reserved for PHOTO-PAINT users—legions of users began gasping and taking frantic notes. “And how much RAM does version 8 need to do this?” was one of several typical queries. “No more than you have now—this effect is available within version 7.” Stunned silence was often the last word of this exchange.

Here it is version 9, and we suspect that many of you are still just getting to know this incredible tool. It does not produce as many effects as Lens, concentrating instead on the one lens effect, transparency, used by most users. As an interactive tool, it offers several usability advantages over the docker; and as a more refined tool, it offers functionality that Lens can’t touch.

Interactive Transparency, the tenth icon in the toolbox, operates like all of the other interactive tools that you have read about:

1  Select an object.

2  Activate the tool.

3  Work the controls on screen or on the property bar.

To use Interactive Transparency effectively, remember the following three points.

No More Docking and Applying

You can dispense with the Lens docker for standard transparency effects, as Interactive Transparency works straight off of its property bar. No more having to fetch the docker, and no more incessant clicking of an Apply button.

Just Like Filling an Object

Interactive Transparency works just like the Fill tool in its range of possibilities. But instead of applying a color, shade, or pattern to an object, you are applying a degree of transparency to it. (Technically, the same engine is used: when you apply transparency to an object on top, DRAW creates the effect by changing the fill pattern of any objects underneath.) Forget the nerdspeak; the essential point to take away is that you can create transparencies that are themselves fountains, patterns, or textures. The latter two are risky and carry a very high ugliness quotient, but fountain transparencies are very useful and potentially dramatic.

To that end, we promised a return to two graphics that we created in earlier chapters. In Chapter 10, we introduced you to text wrapping with a nice, clean graphic of an article wrapping around a globe. Figure 10.1 shows the image, made a bit more dynamic by the presence of the transparent text. We set the text in Futura ExtraBlack, filled it white, and stretched it out to fit the space. Then we used the Interactive Transparency tool to apply a “fountain transparency” to it—the degree of transparency changes gradually, like the degree of color of a fountain fill.