Mid- to high-level graphics professionals will like this package, but it's overkill for just touching up photos and drawing organisational charts.Year after year, CorelDraw Graphics Suite returns to compete and hold its own against the major players in the field, Adobe's Illustrator and Photoshop. And no wonder; the award-winning suite is a superstar graphics package with a brilliantly designed interface. Version 12.0 is no different. All three of its apps--illustration (CorelDraw), image editing (Corel Photo-Paint), and animation (Corel RAVE)--sport highly usable, totally configurable interfaces. For example, you can create separate work spaces and toolbars for specific tasks such as brochures or creative illustration, then save the entire setup to reuse later. As a result, the whole package lends itself to increased productivity.
The suite ships on four CDs, with the three major apps contained on the first CD. High-quality clip art, photos, templates, fonts, and training material fill up the other three CDs to round out the package. It's a terrific value at a fraction of the price you would pay for similar Adobe applications. However, although the full-package price is reasonable for what you get, we do think the AU$349 upgrade price is a bit steep.
CorelDraw, Corel Photo-Paint, and Corel RAVE cover the entire gamut of graphics tools--enough to complete whatever task you have at hand. Corel has added some powerful drawing tool additions and a handful of suitewide tweaks since its last version, such as better font control (easy Unicode character access) and import/export support (export to Microsoft and WordPerfect Office, enhanced SVG AutoCAD, Visio, and HPGL filters). The suite also retains its import/export capabilities for Adobe file formats, such as EPS and PSD.
Integration among the three major apps is very good. For example, if you have a brochure with a bitmap image, you can double-click the image in CorelDraw to launch Corel Photo-Paint and make necessary edits. Once you return to CorelDraw, the updated image will already be there. Similarly, you can drag the image to Corel RAVE and add animation effects.
The new features in the CorelDraw suite center on ease of use. For starters, CorelDraw now includes the Smart Drawing tool, which tries to resolve sketched input into common shapes. For example, if you draw a lopsided, wiggly circle with the mouse, the Smart Drawing tool uses its built-in knowledge to recognise the shape and transform it into a perfect circle. The tool works best when sketching circles and rectangles, but in our tests, it did a decent job with more complex shapes such as arrows. It didn't do such a great job with polygons, but it's handy for quickly sketching organisational charts or presentation templates.
CorelDraw's second major new addition is its CAD-esque snapping functions. Turn on Dynamic Guides, and you'll see temporary blue lines when the mouse travels over specific points such as an object's center. These guides are extremely helpful for placing objects in relation to each other.
The other two programs in the suite didn't see much major enhancement in version 12.0. Corel Photo-Paint adds a touch-up brush for removing defects (dust, scratches, wrinkles) from photographs. Unfortunately, the tool just seemed to smudge pixels in our tests--not impressive. Corel RAVE gains a symbol library for storing frequently used objects. (Symbols are defined objects that you can reference many times in a document, thus reducing file size.)
CorelDraw Graphics Suite 12.0
Company: Corel
Price: Full version AU$799; Upgrade AU$349; Education AU$229
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1800 658 850
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