Technical Library: Smoothing an Outline in CorelDRAW
Creating an accurate outline with the Bezier Tool can be time consuming in CorelDRAW. In this article, we're going to show you how you can take a few shortcuts when creating your outline, and still have a smoothly cut image on the laser.
For this project, we're going to cut out the shape of Italy to create a 3D sticker to place in a photo album.
1.
Zoom in close on the map we are outlining and click on the Bezier Tool in the toolbar.
This tool will let you draw a cut line around the image that is very close to the actual country's outline.
2.
There are two ways to use the Bezier Tool. The first is to click and drag each point that you make. As you create your nodes along the line, you are dragging parallel to the curve you want to create.
This creates a very smooth line, but can be difficult and time consuming.
3.
When we zoom-in to the line, you can see how smooth this line is drawn, which will create a very nice vector cut.
4.
The other way to create a line with the Bezier Tool is to click each dot along the line. While this is a fast way to outline your image, it creates a very jagged line.
5.
When we zoom-in to the line, you can see how jagged this line is drawn, which will create a very jagged vector cut. Since we want to create this outline very quickly and easily, we're going to use this method of using the Bezier Tool, and smooth the line afterwards.
6.
We continued to click our points all the way around the country until our outline was complete.
Now it's time to smooth out this line. First, click on the Shape Tool in the toolbar so we can see the individual nodes that make up our outline. Then click onto the Select All Nodes button located at the top of the menu bar. This will make sure that we're working with all of the points in our image when we smooth it.
7.
Now that all of the nodes are selected in our outline, we can smooth the curve by typing a number between 1 and 100 in the Curve Smoothness box next to the Select All Nodes button. The higher the number you type, the smoother the curve will be. When we set the curve to 30, we had a balance of smoothness and number of nodes which will give us a clean cut in the shape of Italy.
8.
Using this technique we cut out the outline of Italy from a printed image of the map, attached it to foam and made a 3D sticker to place on this scrapbook page. You'll be able to use this step-by-step instruction on a number of different projects with your laser!
For more scrapbooking ideas, be sure to visit our scrapbooking page in the Sample Club!
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in the toolbar. 
