Corel Photo House provides powerful photo-editing and painting tools, but is easy enough for beginners to use. When you need assistance, the Notebook helps you apply effects and choose brush shapes quickly and easily. For more flexibility, you can preview special effects before applying them to your photos and experiment to get the look you want. If you’re planning on painting, you’ll find that the painting tools come with a large selection of brush shapes and sizes to satisfy your creative needs.

Painting in Corel Photo House is as easy as you need it to be. You can use the preset brushes from the Notebook to get started, and then begin experimenting with the controls in the Tool dialog box when you’re ready.

Whether you’re creating new images, or bringing new life to old ones, your photos and paintings will look their best with Corel Photo House.

About vector and bitmap graphics

Bitmap images

Images that you create and edit in Corel Photo House are bitmaps. Bitmap images are most commonly used to display photographic images, but they can also be created from scratch using the Corel Photo House painting tools. Bitmaps are made up of a series of small dots called pixels. Each pixel is a single color, and the arrangement of the pixels creates both the shape and color of the bitmap.

The number of pixels in a bitmap determines its resolution. Images with a high resolution appear sharp and crisp, while those with a lower resolution can appear jagged and indistinct. Resolution is expressed in dots per inch (dpi), which measures the exact number of pixels found in one inch; the higher a bitmap’s dpi, the higher its resolution.

Once a bitmap is created, the number of pixels it contains is fixed. When you resize a bitmap, the same number of pixels are either stretched over a larger area, or condensed into a smaller one. This stretching and condensing results in poor image quality. Bitmap images are best displayed at the size at which they were created.

Grayscale images

A grayscale image is a type of bitmap used for black and white pictures. A grayscale image is made up of 256 shades of gray, offering a higher picture quality than a standard black and white image. If you don't have a color printer, you can use Corel Photo House to convert your color photos to grayscale images.

Vector graphics

Vector graphics use mathematically defined curves and line objects to represent shapes, rather than using dots or pixels as bitmaps use. Complex vector graphics such as Clipart are created by placing many different vector objects together to form a picture. Regardless of how much you resize a vector graphic, it retains its crisp, smooth lines. Graphics applications such as Corel Photo House or Corel Draw use vector graphics.

You can open most vector graphics (e.g., .CDR, .CMX, and .WMF) in Corel Photo House. Corel Photo House converts a copy of your vector file to a bitmap image and leaves your original vector file intact. Once the file is in bitmap format, it can no longer be edited as a vector graphic. For example, if you open a piece of Clipart in Corel Photo House, you cannot break it down into its component objects to reshape or resize it. You can, however, use bitmap-editing tools and effects to change its appearance.

Photo House and OLE

What is OLE?

Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) is a method of exchanging information between applications. OLE allows you to create objects (e.g., pictures, charts, and text) in one application and then display and edit these objects in various other applications. For example, using OLE technology, you can create an image in Corel Photo House and display it in a text document in Corel WordPerfect. Objects that are placed into an application using OLE are called OLE objects.

For OLE to work, the application used to create the OLE object and the application in which you want to place this OLE object must both support OLE functionality. If you are uncertain about whether another application is completely OLE compatible, check its documentation.

Server and client applications

Whenever you use OLE, two applications are involved: a server application and a client application. A server application is used to create and edit an OLE object (e.g., picture, chart, text). A client application is the application in which you place an OLE object once you have created it. For example, if you create an image in Corel Photo House and use OLE to place it into a Corel WordPerfect document, then Corel Photo House is the server application and Corel WordPerfect is the client. Corel Photo House supports all of the features of an OLE server, with the exception of in-place editing. This means that Corel Photo House objects embedded in other documents must be reopened in Corel Photo House before they can be edited. After the editing is complete, the object can be updated in the client document by using the File, Update command in Corel Photo House.

Linking and embedding

OLE objects can be either linked or embedded in client applications. A linked OLE object is connected to a separate file. The appearance of the OLE object in the client application is controlled by the information stored in this external file. When the external file is changed in the server application, the OLE object updates to reflect these changes.

An embedded OLE object is completely contained in the client application file; therefore, there isn't a link to an external file.

Since Corel Photo House can only function as an OLE server, the procedure for creating a linked object depends on the client application. Typically, this involves selecting all or part of an image in Corel Photo House, copying it to the clipboard, and then pasting it to the client application using the Paste Special command. Check the client application's documentation for specific details.

Changing the content of photos

Part of the fun of photo-editing is adding items that weren’t there when the photo was taken, or removing parts of the original image. Here are a few examples of photo-editing tricks:

• Add someone to a photo
• Give someone a new head or body
• Remove unwanted background items such as overhead wires
• Hand-color a photo

Most photo-editing tricks aren’t hard to achieve with a little practice. Using the Zoom tools to get close to your work will help you create the desired effects.

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