Corel Gallery Magic adds spice to flyers

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.