We just received our VL200. We are starting cold in this business. I am a dog groomer and my husband and I own a sawmill/furniture making business. Obviously we have an unlimited source of wood to try out our new machine on. My question is should we spring for the big bucks on corel12 and for photograv? The salesmen (yack!!) was insistent that we go with coreldraw12 suite and photograv. He also was less than helpful in helping us get started. It seems like we are immediately jumping into more costs before we ever sell our first product. Can we use corel11? I think from reading that photograv is the way to go. I plan on taking pics of my clients dogs and engraving them onto alumamark, tiles, acrylic, and wood. Plus making christmas decorations, wooden business cards, and perhaps some personalized frames. I am not very good with computers and have been very frustrated trying to learn the corel12 trial that I downloaded. Would a local college course in corel draw make things a little easier for me?
What version of Corel are you currently using?
And if you are planning on engraving photographs, definitely go with the Photograv. It greatly simplifies the process.
Corel draw will do very little good for the engraving of photographs. Corel is an illustration package. If you wanted to draw a picture of a dog, you would use corel. Corel can also be used to add words to photographs.
Photograv is strictly a program which converts a photograph into an engravable image. Photograv is a form of halftone. People find the results acceptable and the process is repeatable. So if a customer likes the results of one photo, they will probably find the results of there photo also acceptable.
Personally I do 90% of my work in adobe photoshop. Photoshop can do both the words and the photo conversion. Learning photoshop is a lot like learning a musical instrument. It is played with 2 hands, the left hand plays the keyboard as the right mouse plays the mouse. Its frustrating at first, but once you learn to use it, you want to use anything else. If you know what your doing, the photos from photoshop are superior to photograv. If you don’t know what your doing, they will be worse.
Another personal preference is macromedia freehand over corel draw, but thats mostly because I first started using freehand at version 1, so it makes sense to me. Others prefer adobe illustrator over corel draw.
So I guess my advice would be photograv to start and enroll in a training course in photoshop.
I also have a VL 200 - a blue one.
I would recommend Corel 12. Since that’s the industry standard you may as well use the latest version. I also have Photograve and it’s perfect for what you want to do.
However since you’re starting from scratch I would hold off on purchasing it until you get to know the basic fundamentals of engraving, Corel and your computer. Another reason I suggest holding off from Photograve is you won’t be able to fully take advantage of the application with the VL 200’s default “standard” driver, which in a lot of ways is kind of “weak.” They have updated the driver several times for more power - I think their main fear is that if they make it too powerful, the beginner may start a fire. The VL 200 standard driver is very much for the beginner and good for basic engraving and it makes it easy to learn. At some point you’ll want to upgrade to the “advanced” driver when you want to start engraving photos for the creative control. But the Universal reps won’t give it to you until you have some proficiency in what you’re doing and they’ll also want to train you a bit on the “advance” driver.
You might want to start out engraving some picture frames and plaques in order to learn the basics and then move on from there. I would also learn to manual focus the VL200. You’ll get better results. Photograve also has a poor manual so that might frustrate you even more.
If you can, I strongly suggest signing up for a laser clinic through Laserbits. It’s a 2 day seminar and they go through all the laser basics, engraving on different materials and they even have instruction on using Photograve and Corel. It’s only 75.00 to attend and well worth it.
Your rep obviously sells Corel12, which is why he is so hot on it. You can use anything down to Corel8 without any problem. You can find a lower version pretty cheap on sources such as eBay. I will point out a few things…. Version 8 is very good. In fact I run it on my laptop connected to my laser. Version 9 was a dog - slow, sluggish and buggy. Version 10 was good. BUT, you need a fast machine to run it. I could run it on my laptop but couldn’t stand the wait for every operation I tried to do. I do run version 10 on my mac. Version11-12 - well I haven’t seen a single feature different from the previous versions that is a ‘must-have’ so I have not seen a reason to upgrade.
Incidently, I think I started with version 8 which I got on eBay for $40 and upgraded later. Compare that to the $500 I spent on the mac version since I insisted on getting the newest suite.
As for PhotoGrav - YES! I highly recommend it. It is a convienence, but unless you want to spend a lot of time in photoshop trying to get the halftoning ‘just’ right, then this is the way to go.
I have been using CorelDraw since Version 3 for logo engraving and now for sublimation artwork, so I think I am qualified to speak from experience.
As far as I’m concerned, CorelDraw and Corel PhotoPaint are the only way to go. No other package has the versatility of Corel.
As far as what version to buy it depends what operating system you are using and how fast a computer you have. If you are NOT running Windows 2000 or Windows XP forget about Version 12. Without 2000 or XP Ver 12 will not even install. If you are using XP version 12 is a MUST. Other than version 11 (which I have no experience with) older versions of CorelDraw and XP do not exist together very well. A lot of the complaints about V9 and older are direct results of trying to use them with XP and 2000 to a lesser degree. I ended up buying V12 for precisely that reason. I was using V9 under Windos 98SE with good results and very few problems. When I upgraded my main computer to a faster machine with XP Pro I had all sorts of problems and program crashes with V9. V9 is just not designed for the newer program architecture and features of XP.
That being said, I would suggest you check the internet (I found my copy of V12 on Yahoo Shopping) and look for an upgrade version or a OEM vesion of V12. I found mine for around $200 without manuals. Then I would head out to my local bookstores and computer stores and buy myself a third-party book on CorelDraw 12. Most of them are much more detailed and educational than the manuals anyway, the Corel manuals are more of a reference guide for the experienced user than a educational book anyway. Some of the books I’ve seen even have CD’s included with different tutorials on them. There are also some excellent websites with Corel tutorials on the web.