Scanning Problems

[Truroneil]

I think I'm losing it. I believe I could do it in Corel 3 but I can't now - Corel Draw 5/8. When I scan or paste one of my hand-drawn cartoons into Corel Draw, it includes the white square around the drawing. When I try to fill in colours, the whole square is coloured. I want to just colour a hat or a face or some other part of the cartoon.
Also when I want to merge one of my cartoons into one of my photographs, it merges as a square and not as just the cartoon figure. I can do both of these in Picture Publisher, but I should be able to do them in Corel Draw or Photo Paint or Xara. Can someone help me ? Thanks, Nei

[Truroneil]

I think I'm losing it. I believe I could do it in Corel 3 but I can't now - Corel Draw 5/8. When I scan or paste one of my hand-drawn cartoons into Corel Draw, it includes the white square around the drawing. When I try to fill in colours, the whole square is coloured. I want to just colour a hat or a face or some other part of the cartoon.
Also when I want to merge one of my cartoons into one of my photographs, it merges as a square and not as just the cartoon figure. I can do both of these in Picture Publisher, but I should be able to do them in Corel Draw or Photo Paint or Xara. Can someone help me ? Thanks, Nei

[inphoenix]

The scanned image it bitmapped and when I scan an image into CD I always select the scanned object and click the X for the fill color thus creating a transparent like image. I then click on bitmap/edit bitmap, while the object is still selected and then I fill with colors in PP as a bitmap is all one object and you cannot fill in between the lines with selected colors in vector pgm. I'm not sure if I'm on the same track as you are but no one else has answered yet and I've read your question for a couple of days now. Hope this helps you.

[Peter Clifton]

Neil

In Photopaint if you are using the fill tool it has a tolerance setting (called colour similarity if you hover the mouse over the number area) on the context sensitive property bar.

If this colour similarity setting is too high say around 99 then it will flood fill the entire graphic rather than just the area enclosed by a border.

Check the Normal (rather than HSB button is depressed) and set the value next to the buttons at something like 10 (to start with) and everything should now work.

The control over these settings is great, if you have anti aliased edges you can start to adjust the fill tool settings to increase or decrease what gets filled.


Here is a quick and dirty method for making scanned line art transparent in Draw.

Import the Bitmap, if it is a 2 Bit black and white bit map convert it to an 8 Bit greyscale image (256 grey levels) from the Bitmap menu.

Open the bitmap colour mask docker or rollup and use the dropper tool to select the white area on the Bitmap, press the apply button and you have a transparent bitmap. you can undjust the tolerance slider in the docker/roll-up to reduce feathering around the edges (if the line art is anti aliased that is).


Peter

[Truroneil]

InPhoenix and Peter, thanks for your help. I went to the Xara forum too, and I got lots of help re raster (bitmap) and vector images. By using the tracer I was able to solve things in Xara X, and I'm gewtting there in Corel Draw. Have use CD 5 for some time; trying to get used to CD 8 now.
Thanks, Neil [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_wink.gif[/img]