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Showing posts from November, 2009

Removing the virus VirusRemoval.vbs

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I found my home computer and a few thumb drives infected with this virus. The only indication that something was not right was that whenever I plug in my multi-card reader into my USB port, a message will pop up saying that the drive is empty or something to that effect; or in other words, something was trying to write to my multi-card slots. So I examined my thumb drives and SD cards and found these hidden files VirusRemoval.vbs and Autorun.inf on it. Luckily this virus doesn't do anything more damaging than changing the home page of Internet Explorer and propagating itself onto portable drives. And I was able to remove it with a few simple steps. Symptoms of the virus: If a computer is infected, then the following are true. The file VirusRemoval.vbs can be found in the Windows system folder c:\Windows\System32\ as a hidden, readonly file. The HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\ registry entry will be set to start up the VirusRemoval.vbs scr...

Brush tracking (or conditioning Corel Painter to your brush strokes)

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Before you begin any drawing or painting with your Wacom tablet on Corel Painter, it is preferable that you adjust Painter to your brush stroke style - pressure and speed . To do this, simply do the following: Start up Corel Painter. Select Edit > Preferences > Brush Tracking . The Preferences dialog box appears . With the stylus and tablet, draw a stroke with your normal strength and speed on the Scratch Pad area of the Preferences dialog box. Click OK . The brush tracking has been set to match your normal stroke .

Creating your own Color Set from a photo

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In Corel Painter , you can create your own palette of colors from existing photographs or images by sampling discrete colors;. the Painter term for this customized palette is: Color Set . From this Color Set, you can paint new images that matches each other's color hues. An example of a Color Set is shown below. To begin, start up Corel Painter and open up a photograph to sample colors from. Open up the Color Sets palette by selecting Window > Color Palettes > Show Color Sets . Click the Color Sets selector button and choose New Empty Color Set as shown below. Before sampling the colors from the photograph, we want to turn off the color variability so that the sampled colors are exact. So select Window > Brush Controls > Show Color Variability to display the Color Variability palette if it is not displayed.Then move the sliders for HSV all the way to the left as shown below. To start sampling, click the Dropper    icon on the Main toolbar. ...

Create a digital woodcut engraving with Painter

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I tried out a method using Corel Painter to create a black and white woodcut image from a photograph. The result is shown above. The idea is simple - just fill the photograph entirely with black color and then use the Scratchboard Tool to etch out the white areas. Open up a photograph in Corel Painter as shown below. Select File > Quick Clone to make a clone image of the photograph. The clone image is created . Now we want to fill the clone image with the color black. Press CTRL+A on the keyboard. The entire clone image is selected . Click the Paint Bucket command on the Main toolbar. The Paint Bucket properties appear . Choose a black color in the Select Fill combo box of the Paint Bucket properties. Make sure the Fill is set to Current Color . Click anywhere within the clone image. The clone image is filled with black . Use the Colors palette to set the main color to white . Now choose the Scratchboard Tool brush variant of the Pens brush...

Use Wacom tablet buttons to dynamically resize Corel Painter's brush size

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I learnt a short cut using the Wacom tablet to dynamically change Corel Painter 's brush size. To change the brush size , do the following: In Corel Painter, click the Brush icon   in the Main toolbar. On the Wacom tablet, press down the two buttons as shown in the figure below. While the two buttons are pressed down, use the tablet pen on the tablet to press down on the tablet and drag. The brush size is dynamically resized as you drag the pen .