Alternate vision

Design techniques, , ,
12/03/2010

Let’s make an alternative vision of the world. This is a cool web-to-print design idea for a colorful view of a variable photo through sunglasses. Works equally well for web-to-print and dynamic imaging templates.

Web-to-print alternate vision

Before you start

Web-to-print before you start

  • Add a page frame (Layout/Page Setup/Add Page Frame). This will create a rectangular shape with the exact same size as the paper size of your template and place it as a bottom layer.
  • PowerClip an image inside the background shape and turn it into a variable web-to-print image field.

In a nutshell, we’re going to sandwich a transparent lens shape between the background PowerClip and the foreground transparent image of the eye glasses. The lens shape will have a special transparency operation assigned to it, altering the colors of the background part underneath.

Inside Photoshop

Let’s get the glasses layer ready. Take an image of sunglasses and remove the background since we only need a transparent image of the glasses. You can use Photoshop or any other image editing application to cut out the background of the photo.

Web-to-print foreground image

The result should be similar to this. Save the image in a format that retains transparency, e.g. PNG (for dynamic image), TIFF (for hi-res web-to-print).

Lens effects

Web-to-print foreground

Import the transparent sunglasses image inside your web-to-print template and place it on top of all other objects.
CorelDRAW Polyline tool

Activate CorelDRAW Polyline tool from the toolbox menu on the left and start clicking along the middle of the glasses frame.

Note. The lens shapes don’t have to be too precise, just make sure that the edge can be covered by the eye glasses frame.

Web-to-print lenses shape

Select both lens shapes and click on the Weld icon in the top properties bar to turn them into a single curve.

Transparency

Select the lens shape, activate CorelDRAW Transparency tool and assign a 30% Uniform transparency to the shape with the Saturation transparency operation.

Web-to-print transparency settings

Web-to-print object manager

Move the lens shape object under the transparent image of the sunglasses in your Object Manager (Window/Dockers/Object Manager).
Web-to-print colorful vision

The result should be similar to this.

All done!

Our web-to-print software can handle this effect easily! Upload the template into your catalog and test it. This is a dynamic imaging template but the technique can be applied to web-to-print templates as well.

Download the FREE CorelDRAW template file.

See also: