Pixel Prophet: Great Expectations

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The problems of resolving size and resolution issues has been a continual theme in this column since the dawn of digital information, and that shows no sign of changing anytime soon, despite its almost complete adoption as a means of transferring images and artwork. In fact, as Martin Christie suggests, the gulf between those who use it and those who understand it has grown ever wider, and is likely to continue to do so.

Before digital it was all so simple. You had a hard copy of a certain size and you had to go to a professional to get it turned into print. When computers and electronic mail arrived many so called experts predicted the demise of printing altogether. That didn’t happen, nor did things change overnight. What did happen is that people who needed them bought computers to use at home, along with a basic scanner and printer, so that they could do a lot of the preparation work without going back and forth to the print shop with time consuming major or minor changes. At the same time software companies — I’ll mention them in the second part of this column — were giving birth to programs that would enable them to do a more personal job in a more economical manner. I mention this to set the scene, and fill in the history for readers who have come freshly into a print industry already dominated by the mobile phone. These portable devices have transformed the way we interact dramatically, and not always for the good. What they have created is what I have described before as the third generation customer. The first had no computer knowledge and therefore sought the expertise of those who had. The second had some, and therefore understood some of that nothing was either instant or simple. The third has simply bypassed the experience of the previous two and doesn’t understand why there might be any issues at all. That’s where present difficulties arise because although the digital revolution has made the creation and exchange of information easier, the speed and ease disguises the fact that the process is still extremely complex, and hence problems are easy to overlook and even harder to explain. It’s hard to remember, let alone describe how slow everything was at the beginning of the digital age, and how you had to accept things took time, and mistakes happened. We used to send this magazine to the printers on an 88Mb Syquest disk then later by ISDN. To distill a PostScript file to generate 60Mb print compliant PDF took hours and still end up finding an error message with no clue as to what the error was. Start again from scratch.

The classic, and often temperamental, SyQuest Disk

When you’ve aged through the three digital generations, it’s hard to have any sympathy with the impatience of today. Yes, we know you’ve just sent a file but we still need to check it before we waste time and paper printing it, rather than assume you know what you are doing. Even we can make mistakes! Then there is the basic issue that nothing is as simple as it seems to be transferring something from a phone to a full-sized hard copy print, from a pixel constrained screen to a dimensional hungry one. It can take so long batting back and forth with a customer to get an image of a size suitable to print because they can’t actually visualise it from their point of view. I got so fed up with a repeating exchange of unsuitable files, I sent the customer an image of the file representing the size she wanted; a print superimposed with a small rectangle in the top right corner being the actual image she kept sending me. We got there in the end. Working on a desktop computer with a full-sized monitor in any photo or design program, it is relatively easy to view actual file dimensions, and if the former, the number of pixels comprising the image, their ratio one to the other. These figures are all there to guide you. On a mobile device it’s almost exactly the reverse as if it doesn’t want to confuse you with all this surplus information — just show you a nice picture. In addition, it may enhance that image with a complimentary filter, or an effect which will actually reduce the quality of the original for anything other than viewing on a small screen. Of course all of the major software suppliers now have phone-friendly versions of their editing program, but unless you are familiar with the working space and tools, it’s unlikely to be an easy option for the average mobile customer compared to more ‘user friendly’ and usually free alternatives. But of course, you get what you pay for or not as the case may be. Back in the early digital days, no one could have predicted with any certainty all the many developments it would produce and that gave those software gurus a dilemma in how to direct their products. Would they be vector based, using flexible mathematical formula, or pixel dependent images. Although Adobe’s first program was actually vector-based Illustrator, it was the flagship Photoshop which cemented its dominance in the market place as digital images exploded in popularity. Adding a layout capability in InDesign, and eventually a Creative Suite that could seamlessly put together all of the parts of the jigsaw effectively sealed the fate of competition like the once popular publishing option Quark XPress.

CorelDRAW relaunched

CorelDraw developed as a contemporary company on America’s West Coast but was essentially a vector-based platform with an added on bitmap editor. As such it was popular for graphic designers, architects and the like, as it would also be able to handle CAD files. It never went away but was inevitably overshadowed by Adobe with Photoshop becoming a generic term for any editing tool, like Hoover is for vacuum cleaning. For 2019, CorelDraw is reborn with an expanded product line to be a very direct alternative to big A, while retaining most of its original working concepts, and certainly its familiar workspace. I say familiar, but although I used to be able to work in CorelDRAW back in the day, it takes some time to get used to the layout, controls and tools after a decade in Adobe territory. That’s because, unlike other software competitors they haven’t just done an Adobe clone, but retained the basic roots and trunk of the original and just extended leaves and branches to match current needs. It’s not a completely different workplace because you still need to arrange the various tools and options in a convenient way around the working image. Thirty years on, how we work and what we work with has changed dramatically as we have accepted. If one program were to try and tackle all the many varied tasks and file types it would become unwieldy with an impossibly cluttered workspace. Corel’s solution is to have the image editor as a separate application, quickly launched from the main platform. They have retained the original name Photo Paint which is perhaps unfortunate as it does far more than that and sounds too much like other inferior offerings. It has all the possibilities you would find in Photoshop, layers and masks, colour adjustment, sharpening and noise reduction to name a few. Then there is a further option for high dynamic range tuning of fine contrast between individual pixels. What it doesn’t have is the Content Aware capability to seamlessly clone areas of similar pixels which is a very powerful aid in Photoshop, but which is available in another Corel product, Paintshop Pro. It does have an Image Carver tool which is sort of similar but is going to take me a while to get my head round. One of the major features is the non-destructive editing of both bitmaps and vector files so that you can work on an image without doing any irreversible damage to the original. In fact, you can go back and forth through the actions and change any single one without having to follow the history sequence as you do in Photoshop. One of the more obvious differences an Adobe user would notice is that Corel uses a Docker column on the right hand side of the workspace to stack up its actions, layers, fonts etc., rather than floating them or minimising. Everything can be customised when you work out what you want nearest to hand, but it’s one of the workflow things that takes a little time to adjust to. There is also a very good range of tracing tool options in CorelDRAW itself to turn bitmaps into vector files. This is something that can be done in Illustrator, to transform pixel limited images into graphics that can be enlarged almost without limits, but Corel gives you a useful before and after display to guide you through the alternatives as well as a wider range of them. This makes it much easier to see and adjust the transformation of colour and detail that is the crucial factor in outputting a clear and accurate copy for enlargement. There is also a standalone font manager to organise most used fonts rather than trawl through all those available, and what is amusingly called a Font Playground for previewing text options. Even in Photo Paint mode text seems to behave better than it does in Photoshop where a lot of characters tend to behave quite sluggishly or are sometimes erratic. The mixing of vector and bitmap files is always a potential minefield in any design if you are going to preserve the integrity of any of the individual items. This is a task CorelDRAW seems particularly well suited to. Perhaps most important for the potential purchaser is that Corel gives you several options to pay and own, rather than a single subscription one. There’s a one-time payment for a perpetual licence as well as a pay as you go one, and several pick and mix ones in between designed to be as flexible as possible for customer needs. There’s so much to take in that, to be fair to CorelDRAW, I’ll continue to review points most relevant to print on demand in future columns as well as extending this feature on the QPP website. What emerges then is that CorelDRAW is certainly one of the best professional packages available as a design and editing program because of its comprehensive range of tools and functions. Because of its vector-based roots it is particularly good where pixel images, vector logos and additional text are to be mixed on flyers, posters, banners and the like, so in an increasingly web-based design world it still has a very strong application for outputting hard copy print.