Put Draw's beautiful Enhanced
View mode to a truly practical use. It creates superb
renditions of your illustrations, especially at small
sizes. Here's how to use it to enhance the view of your
web page graphics.
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Create a new image in
PhotoPaint
Launch
PhotoPaint and create a new file from the Clipboard
contents. This creates a new document containing a screen
image of the Draw window and the preview image of your
graphic.
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Crop Your Image
Use the
Crop tool to remove the background around your image. You
should be left with a much better bitmap than that one
exported straight from Draw.
Depending
on the resolution of your monitor, you may need to drop
the resolution of your graphic to 75 dpi. Use the
Resample command in the Image menu in PhotoPaint to
further tweak the size of the graphic.Sometimes
resizing/resampling an image can cause it to be blurry.
PhotoPaint by default uses an anti-aliasing algorithm
when resizing an image. You can use the Sharpen filter to
bring back any lost detail.
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Save as a GIF image
Convert
the image to 256 colors (adaptive palette, error
diffusion.) You'll find this command under Image, Convert
to, Paletted (8 bit.) Save the image as a GIF.
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Advantages
Better
Anti-Aliasing, Better Detail
The Enhanced View built into Draw 9 renders
drawings beautifully. Often times, text that is
unreadable in Normal View at a low zoom factor can be
clearly distinguised when Enhanced View is used. If you
don't have a powerful graphics card, editing a CDR file
in Enhanced mode can, however, be very tedious. Whatever
your hardware configuration, you should be able to put
this technique to good use.Predictable Color
One huge benefit to using this method is
the predictability of the color output. Because this
method takes an exact RGB image of your screen, what you
see is truly what you get. If you like the color as it
appears in Draw, this method preserves those colors
automatically.
Predictable
Size
Again, this method's true WYSIWYG quality
insures you get a graphic just like you want it. It can
be a little tricky choosing an appropriate zoom factor
before hitting Print Screen. Once you are in PhotoPaint,
however, you can use all its tools to tweak the image.
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Other Considerations
If
your graphic is supposed to appear on a colored or
patterned background, be sure to draw a filled rectangle
that approximates that background. For example, if you
need your graphic to have transparency AND you want it to
appear on a gray-colored background, draw a gray
rectangle behind the graphic before hitting Print Screen.
Then when you save the graphic in PhotoPaint, the edges
of the image will be anti-aliased into the gray
background. This avoids that jagged look we all hate.
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