Terry Relph-Knight

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Posted on 26-03-2009

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Adobe And Corel Products

Digital still images are either bitmap or vector based, with bitmaps being used for photographic images and vectors for design graphics and text. Adobe are perhaps best known for their bitmap based photo editing software — Photoshop, while Corel are known for their vector based graphics design program — CorelDRAW. Both products are powerful image manipulation tools and because of the number of supported features have quite a steep learning curve. Many graphics design professionals use both programs and move image files between the two. A clear knowledge of the colour management in each product is required to be able to do this successfully.

In addition to their flagship products both companies market a range of image and graphics design bitmap and vector based software that also incorporates colour management. For example Illustrator is Adobe’s vector graphics design and editing program. Although Corel include a bitmap photo editor, Photo-Paint X4, with the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4, they also sell Paint Shop Pro, a stand-alone bitmap photo editor. Because some of these products started life in development by other companies and were bought up by Adobe and Corel, the way that colour management was implemented was not entirely consistent across the product range. For example Paint Shop Pro does not use the excellent flow chart diagram found in CorelDRAW to represent the colour work flow, but rather three menu branches — Color Management, Color Working Space and Monitor Calibration all of which access their own control panel windows. This menu branch is reached from the top line application menu through clicking File > Color Mangement (or using the [Alt] + [F] + [G] control keys).

Adobe have made more effort to integrate colour management across their product range. The Adobe Creative Suites include Adobe Bridge, a program that automatically synchronises colour settings across applications.

Unfortunately, in a perhaps misguided attempt to simplify colour management, Corel have chosen to use non-standard names for their Rendering Intent settings in Paint Shop Pro. These are referred to as Pictures, Proof, Graphics and Match.

Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator both run on the Apple Mac OS as well as on Windows while the Corel products are Windows only.