Corel Gallery Magic adds spice to flyers
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): My friend Michael bought a Pentium PC about two years ago. He latter added an HP ScanJet 4P and an HP DeskJet 850C. He owned one of the biggest bakeries in town, and what he had in mind was to design the flyers and catalogs for his shops. Needless to say, this would be part hobby, part business strategy for him.
When he set out to put his first brochure together, however, he realized that he needed some cliparts to make it look more attractive. I happened to have some collections of royalty-free cliparts that he could legally copy into his hard disk. The problem was, although he had added another hard disk to his system, he would never have enough space to store all of these collections that I had. He had to select, but unfortunately he had no easy way of choosing which cliparts to copy and which ones to skip. There was no straightforward facility to view individual cliparts quickly.
And those of you who have been working with CorelDraw for some time would know that the package traditionally comes with thousands of cliparts and photos that you can incorporate into your leaflets, brochures and greeting cards. It's not surprising, because Corel has been actively involved in creating collections of gorgeous images, which include cliparts and stock photos. In fact, the size of the bundled cliparts collections grew breathtakingly from one release of CorelDraw to another. But now, to enable people like Michael, you and me to tap into their fast- growing collections of cliparts, Corel has released the second iteration of utility for managing the images that it calls Corel Gallery Magic.
Two versions have been launched to market, i.e., Corel Gallery Magic 65,000 and Corel Gallery Magic 200,000. Courtesy of Corel Corp., Canada, I got a copy of the larger collection that I found worth looking into.
Cliparts are ready-made images that can be inserted into a document. It can be a decorative border, a comic character, a picture that provides visual representation of your main offerings, etc. Normally, you can also edit them if you like.
Cliparts also come in different file formats. You can have a bitmap image in the BMP or TIF format, a photo in PCD format, or a drawing in a vector graphics format such as CorelDraw's own CDR format.
Collections
In the past, several companies made a lot of money selling only cliparts. One of the most popular collections at one time was Presentation Task Force. However, as free cliparts such as the ones bundled in the majority of Corel's products become readily available, people no longer thought they really needed to buy them.
But, the sheer number of cliparts that come with Corel Gallery Magic can be irresistible. Corel Gallery Magic 65,000 has about 25,000 cliparts in its collection. The version that I got, Corel Gallery Magic 200,000 is a collection of more than 105,000 pieces of cliparts. It comes in eight CD-ROMs. The first CD-ROM contains all the programs, including a screen capture utility and a collection of TrueType fonts.
Organizing such a huge population of cliparts, photos, animated web-arts for building your web sites, etc. isn't easy. The version that I received from Corel even has a collection of video files that you can insert into your PowerPoint Presentation. It has a collection of sound clips, too. You can play a MIDI file and listen to a classical piece by Bach, or play a wave file. You can install the .WAV file on your PC to make it sound a lot more fun. It's such a large collection of multimedia files and what I like the best about the package is the tool that Corel provides for organizing them, which is called Corel Gallery Magic Wizard.
When loaded, the Wizard will ask you what type of multimedia file you want to browse. Do you want to look at cliparts, stock photos, videos, web-arts or listen to the sound clips? It will then instruct you to place any of the eight CD-ROMs in your drive. Of course, your life would be easier if you had one of those CD jukeboxes from HP.
Corel Gallery Magic itself looks like Windows Explorer, with the contents of the selected album displayed on the right as thumbnails. Double-click on one of the thumbnails, and you'll have the full-size image of the photos, for instance. If you're looking at cliparts, the program will launch the appropriate application for previewing and editing them. If you double-click on a wave file, you'll have Windows' Sound Recorder applet loaded.
Corel Gallery Magic allows you to create personalized albums. To copy a clipart from the album and paste it into your word processor or desktop publishing program is as easy as drag and drop. You can even scan an image and import it into your album. A font navigator also helps you view and manage your fonts, as you don't want to have too many fonts installed in your Windows. If it has close to 500 fonts already, the performance of your PC will suffer significantly.
Now I can tell Michael that he can pursue his hobby without any more headaches. All he has to do is buy the US$69.95 package, and he'll be able to finally work on his marketing tools as well.