CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 (£329/£149 upgrade) is Corel’s flagship graphics application. Sporting more than 40 new and enhanced features, the software is still not as strong as Adobe’s offering, but it costs a lot less. With CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 (read ‘thirteen’), budget-minded design professionals and business users get access to excellent graphics tools at an affordable price. It’s also available in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese versions.
Pitched at both design professionals and small-business owners creating their own marketing materials, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 offers an extremely comprehensive toolset. The suite has been designed to simplify the design process for projects of any scale, including logo creation, professional marketing brochures and eye-catching signs, and it really is a snap to use.
The suite (now over 20 years old) competes with Adobe’s Illustrator CS2 (£525) and Photoshop CS2 (£565), both of which are the preferred tools of professionals but carry a high price tag and steep learning curve. Even Adobe’s Creative Suite Standard (which also includes InDesign page layout software), is too costly for many at £855. CorelDRAW Graphics Suite has for a long time offered very similar tools, but at a much lower cost.
And while it comes with the flagship vector drawing program (CorelDRAW) and image editor (Photo-Paint) there’s also over 1000 fonts, 10000 clip-art and digital images, and 100 templates for projects such as business cards and brochures. For some reason Corel has ditched R.A.V.E, a vector animation program. Nevertheless it’s an excellent choice for budget-minded professionals and business users who need access to powerful graphics tools at an affordable price.
Corel says it has worked with customers from various industries, gathering their feedback and spending days at their deskside to watch how they work. As a result, the latest version of the suite addresses customer needs better than ever before. For instance, there’s a new PowerTRACE tool which lets you convert bitmaps into editable vector graphics. For control and flexibility, PowerTRACE generates a colour palette, enabling you to pick which colours appear in the traced result and quickly convert them to the appropriate colour mode (including spot colours).
Seasoned users will immediately notice the new Hints Panel docked to the right side of the display. Information about the current tool is displayed here, along with links to relevant tasks. Say, if you select the Text tool, you'll see information about fitting text to a path, adjusting frames, editing text, and more.
The orange highlighting on tool buttons and menus is also new, and a really neat feature is that you can highlight new features added to versions 9 to 12. If you haven't upgraded CorelDraw since, say, version 10, you can request that new features added since then be highlighted so you don’t miss out on any fun.
Accessible from both Corel Photo-Paint and CorelDRAW, the new Image Adjustment Lab also makes it simple to work with images that have poor colour balance and contrast by offering manual and automatic controls for common colour and tone corrections. You can create snapshots of your adjustments to easily compare each snapshot against the original and choose the best result.
The new Hints docker provides context-sensitive information on the currently selected tool. The hints docker makes it easier than ever to learn to use the tools in the toolbox and also gives longtime users helpful tips that they might not have previously discovered. And with an improved user interface, the interactive Fit Text to Path tool lets you select text, move the pointer along a path, choose an offset distance if desired, and then click to set the text’s position.
Other improvements make it easier to select, edit, and format text. New enhancements include controls for alignment, drop caps, tabs, bullets, and columns, text size can be displayed in inches, and hyperlinks can be created for specific characters. You can visually control the flow of text in your designs by choosing from em dash, em space, en dash, en space, 1/4 em space, optional hyphen, non-breaking hyphen, nonbreaking space, and column/frame break.
Built on the power of Corel KnockOut, the enhanced Cutout Lab includes new controls to simplify the process of cutting out image areas and improving accuracy. Enhancements include the new Add Detail and Remove Detail brushes that make it easy to refine the cutout area, Undo and Redo buttons to quickly correct mistakes, and background modes that make it easier to see results.
The new Bevel effect docker reduces the time required to apply bevel effects to graphic or text objects and gives you quick access to Bevel styles and controls, and the enhanced Interactive Contour tool lets you contour objects with optimal curve results. The latest version dramatically reduces the nodes created.
The Smart Fill tool enables you to apply a fill to any enclosed area, the new Crop tool lets you remove unwanted areas in objects and imported graphics (whether you are working with bitmap or vector graphics), and drop shadow, transparency, and mesh and fountain fills now support spot colours. Import and export filters also provide improved spot colour support for Adobe’s Illustrator, PDF, encapsulated PostScript (EPS), and Photoshop (PSD) files. Spot colour effects are preserved when files are sent to a printer that supports spot colours, or exported to PDF, EPS, PSD, and AI.
Finally, the new Enhanced With Overprints viewing mode simulates the colour of areas where overlapping objects were set to overprint, and you can now set security options to protect your PDF output - controlling whether and to what extent a PDF file can be accessed, edited, and reproduced. In addition, PDF functionality now includes full transparency and spot colour support.
[8.5]
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