April 2004

Eyedropping

Version 12 makes a good tool even better...

AS WE BEGIN OUR ROUND OF SEMINARS across the country, it has become immediately clear to us: CorelDraw’s Eyedropper tool is one of the true unsung heroes in the box. Version 12 of Draw brings two exciting new capabilities to it, but even those who do not upgrade right away can benefit from keeping the tool in mind.

At its core, the value of the Eyedropper is its ability to decipher both the color model and the specific color value of any object that it finds on a CorelDraw page. It is as easy as just activating the tool and clicking once on the object. And it is precisely because the tool is so easy to use that many users do not venture out much further than those basics. This article will indeed make that trip...

Better Access

The whole idea of the Eyedropper is that you can hover over any object on your page and pick up its color. It is just wasted effort and mousing if you first have to traipse over to the Toolbox on the extreme left edge of the application window, just to click once, and then traverse all the way back to the object of interest.

So your first order of business is to assign a hotkey to the tool to deliver you from all of that needless mousing. Here’s how:

1. Go to Tools | Options | Customization | Commands.

2. Click the binocular icon and in the Find What field, enter eyedrop.

3. Once Draw finds the command, click it, and then click Shortcut Keys.

4. Assign a hotkey to the command, as we have done here in Figure 1.

It does not really matter what hotkey you assign to it — we used Y because E is taken by the cEnter align command — but note that you do not need to make it a multi-stroke command, like Ctrl+E or Ctrl+Shift+E. Most of the time you use Draw, your cursor is not placed in a string of text, so you can just use the straight keystroke (and if your cursor is in a string of text, Draw would ignore the hotkey assignment and enter the character of text).

Giveth and Taketh Away

The second oft-overlooked aspect of the Eyedropper tool is its corresponding Paintbucket tool. Once you pick up a color with the eyedropper, you can then drop it down onto another object with the paintbucket, but again, you do not need to journey to the Toolbox, click the eyedropper icon to fly it out, activate the Paintbucket tool, and then return to the page to find the object to fill it with.

Instead, note what Shift does to the eyedropper. It automatically toggles between the two states, picking up and dropping down. So to eyedrop a color from one object and fill it somewhere else, here is your recommended drill:

1. Click your custom hotkey to activate the Eyedropper.

2. Click the object with the color you seek.

3. Move to the object you want to fill with that color.

4. Press and hold Shift while you click either inside the object (to assign the color to its fill) or on its outer edge (to assign the color to its outline).

Sampling

Another point to note is that the Eyedropper can be exceedingly specific if you want it to be. In fact, its default is to study the very pixel that you click on, and that could be helpful if you are trying to pick up a specific color from a photograph, fountain fill, or other continuous tone image.

You can tell the tool to be a bit less specific by setting its “Sample size” to 2x2 or 5x5. Then it will survey the wider area and assign a color that is an average of what it finds.

Swatching

The more significant leap takes place when you combine the Eyedropper with another of Draw’s lesser-used features. When we showed this at the seminars, we had users scrambling for their pens and asking us to repeat the procedure.

Figure 2 sets the scene. In the hopes of recreating this logo for a cable television network, we first set out to identify the colors. So we used the Eyedropper to pick up various colors around the scan and drop them into small rectangles.

Once they are in objects like this, it is much easier to assign them elsewhere, but we are going to go one big step further and create a custom color palette from them:

1. Select all eight rectangles.

2. Go to Window | Color Palettes | Create Palette from Selection.

3. Assign a name for your new palette.

4. Note that it shows up right away, docked next to the existing palette.

Now you can assign colors at will. Most jobs will not require the creation of a custom palette, but it is much more convenient, and as it happens, the project that we staged here involved the use of a mesh fill. And the only way to assign colors to a mesh is from a palette. Same with an extrude, a drop shadow, and perhaps a few other tools.

Two New Capabilities

Version 12 brings two further capabilities to the Eyedropper, each of which has already proven to be enough to compel users to upgrade.

The first is a wholesale addition to its capabilities by allowing for the capture of any one and every one of an object’s properties. From a simple drop-down, shown in Figure 3, you can toggle between these two states (and true-to-form, we wish that the toggle was hotkey accessible). If you have just one object whose attributes you want to inherit from another, the Copy Properties From command or the now-familiar right-click-and-drag maneuver are just as convenient. But if you need to scoop up attributes and apply them to several objects, the Eyedropper’s new trick is the way to go.

The second shot in the arm that Eyedropper gets is the ability to go off and fetch a color from anywhere on your computer screen, not just from a CorelDraw object. This is huge if you’re trying to match a website color or a PowerPoint background. You used to have to grab the screen and dump it into Draw; now you can just go pluck it off the screen and work with it right away.

One of Draw’s smartest tools has just gotten smarter...