CorelDraw transparency/color mode questions

[marlene]

I inherited a rush job. The client's designer sent me her "files in progress." The cover of the publication was set up in CorelDraw.

I redid the cover in Quark (5 for Windows), since I prefer to work in a page layout program, but one of the graphics from the CD file doesn't work right in Quark. It's a piece of clip art that looks like it started life as a WMF (all those points!), although that's probably irrelevant.

I know very little about CD (haven't really worked with in years, just use it to open CD files when necessary), and know nothing about how it handles tranparency effects. The graphic seems to have some kind of transparency effect where "brush strokes" overlap.

The graphic was RGB, so I converted the colors to CMYK in CD. I just bumbled my way through it -- double-clicked on the color swatches and changed from RGB to CMYK in the box that popped up. Is there an easier or better way?

When I export as EPS and import into Quark, either the transparency isn't working right or the colors aren't right -- it's possible I screwed up something when I changed the colors to CMYK. When I distill the file, there are areas in the graphic that are much lighter than they ought to be. (Especially when I compare it to a PDF created directly from the CorelDraw file.)

What I've done for now as a workaround is leave the graphic on the solid background color in CorelDraw (deleting all the other elements -- photos and text -- that I prefer to position in Quark) and exported that as an EPS.

I imported that EPS into Quark and now it looks fine when I distill it. I can certainly live with this, if that seems like a legit way to handle the problem. One possible glitch is that the background color is a metallic. I'm going to check with my client and make sure she wants the metallic, and if so, I guess I'll need to check with the printer -- I haven't worked with metallic inks and imagine there are some issues I'll need to know about (trapping, etc.).

If that solid metallic background is in the imported CorelDraw EPS file, might that cause problems?

I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions. Right now I'm working with a demo version of CorelDraw 12, since the latest version I own is CorelDraw 9 (which would not open the client's file).

The CorelDraw file (of just the background color and graphic) is tiny -- less than 25 KB -- so if my explanation makes no sense and anyone wants to look at the file, I can send/upload it.

TIA,

mxh

[Jim Hart]

Did you ever get a resolution for this? If not, I can take a look at it and maybe (no promises) figure out what's going on.

[marlene]

Well, I never did quite figure it out, but the transparency only worked in CorelDraw. If I opened the file in FreeHand or Illustrator, the transparency areas became sort of grayish-white.

And I couldn't quite figure out if the graphic was vector or bitmap -- in outline mode, it looked like vector. But when I exported from CorelDraw in EPS format, I didn't click the option to make bitmaps CMYK, and the graphic was showing up in grayscale. Took me a while to figure that one out. <g>

When I found the option about making bitmaps CMYK, and checked it, the graphic showed up in color.

The job went to press last week, but I'm still mildly curious about that graphic and its transparency. If you have spare time and feel like taking a peek at it, let me know where to send the file.

Thanks,

mxh

[Jim Hart]

OK, what you have are several shapes that have had a color applied and then a transparency applied with the interactive transparency tool. This creates a lens. Lenses modify whatever is underneath them, just like looking through a glass lens. Look through more than one lens and the effect is cumulative. Your star is a stack of several lenses.

When output for printing or PDF, lenses are flattened and all you have is the final effect. Lenses over vectors become vectors but lenses over bitmaps become bitmaps. This can cause problems when a single lens overlaps a vecoter and a bitmap and the vector is CMYK or PMS and the bitmap is RGB. There can be a distinct color shift where the lens changes colorspace (your image doesn't have this problem..

Draw 9 has lenses and interactive transparency so you can find more about them in the help files.

[marlene]

Jim,

Thanks for looking at my file and for the explanation.

So the image IS vector, not bitmap. (I was confused by the EPS export options.)

Apparently the interactive transparency tool/lens effect does not survive a trip through Illustrator or FreeHand. Maybe they have similar effects and I just don't know about them. In any case, it seemed prudent not to tamper with the image.

Although I DID convert all the RGB colors to CMYK!

mxh

[Jim Hart]

I don't think I've ever tried saving lenses as EPS and opening in either Illustrator or Freehand. Draw is usually a couple of steps ahead of them in something I'm using so I got used to something not working and don't try. I'll do it and see what happens.

BTW, I see what you mean about all the nodes. I think it may have been a bitmap and one time and was auto traced. That can create a lot of nodes.