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X3 is here!

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Steve C.

New Member
That link is not working for me.


Service Unavailable - Zero size object
The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.
Reference #15.133bf546.1137519873.2417e308

OK, now it is.
 
Bigdawg

Bigdawg

Just Me
Got to admit - it is very reasonably priced too... always been a big Adobe fan, but at that price Corel will be a definite option when I'm asked to make recommendations....
 
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kevco

Guest
Haven't played with bevel yet in the trial version, but as I said I was very inpressed with the trace
 
Cadmn

Cadmn

New Member
friend of mine in Taft,Cali was beta tester for it & is sign Man & he loved it also said xara was excellent. I'm not sure but he's usually pretty acurate in his judgement
 
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2972renfro

New Member
I downloaded and tried the trace tool but was not that impressed. I send off about 4-5 jobs a week to a vector service, so I thought I'd try some recent ones, if I could do it myself then the sw would be worth it.

The only thing it did well with was a black and white line drawing of an animal, but the logos I tried were mediocre. Fonts and curves were bad with bumpy edges. And the original was like 400x800 pixels, not bad art at all. Probably would be fine for stuff that's biz card sized, but not good enough to blow up and cut.

I still don't think automated software can do as well as what a person can do by hand, sux but that's a fact.
 
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kevco

Guest
2972renfro said:
I downloaded and tried the trace tool but was not that impressed. I send off about 4-5 jobs a week to a vector service, so I thought I'd try some recent ones, if I could do it myself then the sw would be worth it.

The only thing it did well with was a black and white line drawing of an animal, but the logos I tried were mediocre. Fonts and curves were bad with bumpy edges. And the original was like 400x800 pixels, not bad art at all. Probably would be fine for stuff that's biz card sized, but not good enough to blow up and cut.

I still don't think automated software can do as well as what a person can do by hand, sux but that's a fact.
Click to expand...
with any vectorizing software you are gonna to have to go back and clean up a few stray nodes. Fonts never trace good that's why its better to find out what font it is.
 
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2972renfro

New Member
If a font doesn't trace well, then neither does the graphic itself right? Fonts are nothing more than a shape according to the trace software. I guess it has to do with your frame of reference. It did a poor job on simple shapes as well.
 
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ChiknNutz

New Member
Here's another thing I just noticed:

New! Create Boundary command: The new Create Boundary command
instantly creates a boundary around selected objects in CorelDRAW X3.
Particularly useful for sign-making or engraving, the boundary can be used
for various purposes, such as keylines, cut lines, or outlines around groups of
selected objects.

For those digital printing, looks like this will generate a curve that can be used as a CutContour or CutPath.

And another feature I use often via the Oberon Curveworks pallet:

New! Fillet / Scallop / Chamfer: Users can now easily shape curve
objects by using the new Fillet / Scallop / Chamfer docker. Filleting produces a
rounded corner; scalloping rounds and inverts the corner to create a notch;
and chamfering bevels the corner so that it appears flat.
 
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Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
X3 is here? X-Men 3 doesn't get released 'til May...
:tongue:

I'll have to see how Corel has improved the Countour function. Their website claims the X3 Contour tool generates up to 80 percent less control points than before. Not sure what that means in a comparison with similar functions in Illustrator and Freehand.

Apparently some significant improvements have been made with text on path effects.

I tried finding specific wording on how many of the Open Type format's functions are supported by CorelDRAW. Currently, Illustrator and InDesign are the only graphics applications on the market that feature complete support of OpenType functions. CorelDRAW 12 had Unicode support. But it wouldn't automatically insert ligatures and other expert characters or use the proper optical weight of font for a particular size.
 
2

2972renfro

New Member
GraphiXtreme said:
Here's another thing I just noticed:

New! Create Boundary command: The new Create Boundary command
instantly creates a boundary around selected objects in CorelDRAW X3.
Particularly useful for sign-making or engraving, the boundary can be used
for various purposes, such as keylines, cut lines, or outlines around groups of
selected objects.

For those digital printing, looks like this will generate a curve that can be used as a CutContour or CutPath.
Click to expand...

<!--StartFragment -->
Just tried the create boundary on a jpeg but it did the white box instead of following the outer edges of the shape I tried. Maybe it works differently on a file with a transparent bkgd - will try at some point.
 
Fred Weiss

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
2972renfro said:
I downloaded and tried the trace tool but was not that impressed. I send off about 4-5 jobs a week to a vector service, so I thought I'd try some recent ones, if I could do it myself then the sw would be worth it.

The only thing it did well with was a black and white line drawing of an animal, but the logos I tried were mediocre. Fonts and curves were bad with bumpy edges. And the original was like 400x800 pixels, not bad art at all. Probably would be fine for stuff that's biz card sized, but not good enough to blow up and cut.

I still don't think automated software can do as well as what a person can do by hand, sux but that's a fact.
Click to expand...

If you think about it, tracing of freeform artwork such as an animal is going to look good even if it isn't all that accurately done. It's the letterforms and geometric shapes that take the time and are best done by hand or by font identifying and typesetting.

Autotracing is a lot like the older technology where most things were done photographically. Work at larger sizes than you will be producing at and everything looks tighter and cleaner. What I have found is that if you fill up a canvas in Photoshop at better than 6000 pixels wide or tall and do a little cleanup at that size, then you can get pretty nice tracing of the more difficult artwork from Streamline, CorelTrace on anything else.
 
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SteadyBenny

New Member
I'm fairly good at pulling curves. Certainly better than Trace or Streamline. This would have to be a huge improvement to impress me, and I'll be the first one to admit my Corel Draw / Illustrator / Photoshop skills are merely "good" not excellent or world class. Even with the $180 upgrade from 12 price, that's going to have to be some impressive stuff. I went from 9 to 12. I went from 7 to 9. I still use Illustrator 9 and Photoshop 6.0. I'd prefer not to be a slave to the software industry.
 
B

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
Fred Weiss said:
What I have found is that if you fill up a canvas in Photoshop at better than 6000 pixels wide or tall and do a little cleanup at that size, then you can get pretty nice tracing of the more difficult artwork from Streamline, CorelTrace on anything else.
Click to expand...

I agree with that in general. Make a really high resolution scan from a clean original, do a little clean up work and you'll generally end up with a pretty good traced end result.

The problem is most people aren't bringing that kind of artwork to an auto-tracing program or filter. More often than not it is low resolution JPEGs and GIFs grabbed from web pages. None of the tracing programs on the market, even the innovative methods featured in IllustratorCS2's Live Trace and Live Paint, can fix the problem of a low quality source image. More often than not such elements require artwork to be vectorized by hand.
 
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Steve C.

New Member
I started with Corel3 then went to 4 and now use Corel 8. I have not upgraded because I've heard 8 has less probem with import export and it just works for me. I kept Corel4 installed because I prefered the Trace4 to the Trace 8. Until I got FlexiPro I didnt realize how good a Trace could be. If the new Corel Trace is half as good as the FlexiPro Vectorization tools I'll be impressed. Only thing I don't like about 8 is the enormous amount of nodes when creating contours.
 
Rick

Rick

Certified Enneadecagon Designer
I'm going to upgrade it even though I rarely use my Corel 12, my only question is....What happend to X1 and X2?



(I know... I know....X=10)
 
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