Review of:
CorelDRAW and
Photo-Paint lessons 
Click-N-Learn CDs 

Each CD comes with 3-5 lessons using a certain tool or technique. Visualize watching a CorelDRAW screen with the cursor moving to various tools to accomplish various tasks and hearing a voice-over describing what is going on at each point of the cursor movement. That is what a Click-N-Learn lesson is all about. 

The producers of Click-N-Learn are based in Australia, therefore, be prepared to hear Australian accents throughout the series of lessons. I think I even heard the term Mate a couple of times. They use Lotus ScreenCam to capture the cursor movements and voice-over dialog. You can stop the lesson by simply pressing on the space bar, bring up your own copy of CorelDRAW or Photo-Paint and try the technique described thus far in your lesson — a very nifty way to learn a program with a steep learning curve. The ScreenCam control panel sits in the lower right corner of your monitor window and allows you to stop the lesson and/or start it over again. Right clicking your mouse cursor in the Click-N-Learn screen opens the menu of lessons contained on the CD and allows you to jump to a different lesson. It takes about two hours to view the lessons on each CD (some Photo-Paint CDs last four hours!).

When you insert a CD (the CDs have the lesson titles printed on the CD), a menu of the contents is presented. By clicking on one of the menu items, a Lotus ScreenCam operating steps appears, to tell you how to start, stop, repeat or skip lessons on the disk (remember each disk may be two hours of instruction).

Not sure what the Click-N-Learn technique is all about? Go to the download site for a list of free downloads of sample lessons (the number following the lesson description is the file size):

• Effect Dockers in CorelDRAW 9 — 3.2 MB
• Explanation of the Effect series of CDs — 3.2 MB
• CorelDRAW Contours — 1.95 MB
• CorelDRAW Blends — 2.77 MB
• CorelDRAW Lenses — 2.8 MB
• CorelDRAW Transparency — 2.8 MB
• CorelDRAW Transparency 2 — 3.3 MB
• CorelDRAW Shaping, Power Clip — 4.4 MB
• Corel Photo-Paint Masking Basics — 4.0 MB
• Photo-Paint taking Masks to the next level — 5.1 MB
• Photo-Paints great special effects — 5.1 MB

I recommend you create a special folder named ClicknLearn to send the free download files to. After unzipping each file, double clicking on the “filename.exe” will activate the Lotus ScreenCam lesson. I think you will like the presentation.

When you insert the Click-N-Learn CD in your CD player, it will self- activate by displaying a menu of lessons contained on the CD. Click on a lesson and Lotus ScreenCam takes it from there.
After watching several lessons and not figuring out how to “rewind” or go back a couple of steps without having to go back to the beginning of that lesson, I learned to quickly tap my space bar to stop the lesson in order to write down some of the steps of a complicated technique, particularly the settings the instructor used in various feature popup windows. 

The approach used in the various Click-N-Learn CD lessons is to work on various projects. The technique of working on a project to learn to use the various tools within CorelDRAW or Photo-Paint was much more meaningful to me — the information stuck with me more so than “here is this tool and here is what it does”. I did a screen capture in one lesson where a guy and a girl were at the beach. Now the guy has a new girlfriend and he doesn’t want girl #2 to see girl #1 in the photo so he used the Clone tool to remove girl #1.

Click-N-Learn is probably hard at work to produce lessons for CorelDRAW 10 and Photo-Paint 10 but each CD that is available now cover versions 5-9. In other words, during the lesson, the instructor will say (and show) you how to do the step in versions 5 through 9 (if the technique is different depending upon version you have).

Here are the CorelDRAW series, each CD lasts about two hours and cost $26 U.S.

• Vol. 1- Contours
• Vol. 2a - Blends 1 
• Vol. 2b - Blends 2
• Vol. 2c - Blends 3
• Vol. 3a - Extrusions 1
• Vol. 3b - Extrusions 2
• Vol. 4a - Perspectives
• Vol. 4b - Envelopes
• Vol. 5a - Lenses
• Vol 5b -Transparency 1
• Vol 5c - Transparency 2
• Vol 6 - Shaping/Power Clip

Here are the Corel Photo-Paint series, each CD lasts from 2 to 4 hours and cost $26 U.S.

• Vol. 1&2 - Basics (2 CD set & cannot be bought separately)
• Vol. 3 - Channels/ Color Mask/ Paint on mask
• Vol. 4 - X OR Mask, Chrome, Displace filter, brushed metal, noise, motion blur filters
• Vol. 5 - Photographic restoration
• Vol. 6 - Photographic correction and B&W photo’s converted to color
• Vol. 7 - Effects tools: Smear, Dodge burn, hue, Image sprayer and stroke mask effects
• Vol. 8 - New #D, FX’s Mesh Warp, Tile, Zoom, lighting, Sphere, Glass block, Ripple

Now here are the savings: order all the CDs and save 30% off the price of $546, paying only $382. That’s over 38 hours of lessons at a cost of only $10 an hour. Is that too rich for your budget? You can buy 6 CDs for $117, saving 25% (that’s only $19.50 for each CD)  and postage is included!

My advice is, go to the Click-N-Learn Website, click on the free downloads page, select a subject and download a free sample lesson. If you like what you see, get out your credit card and start learning the subtleties and richness of CorelDRAW and Corel Photo-Paint.
 

Click-N-Learn
PO Box 374
Happy Valley, Adelaide, South Austrialia, 5159. 
Questions: Scott Georgeson, Curriculum Administrator: 
Webpage to see everything available: .