CorelDRAW X3 Graphics Suite review

At one stage, the CorelDRAW suite dominated the field of PC graphics. But then Corel took its eye off the ball and allowed Adobe Illustrator to seize the professional market. With the re-branded X3 (effectively ’13’), Corel is confident that DRAW is back to reclaim its crown; but is this latest launch the real deal or just another marketing exercise?

It’s certainly been a miserable few years for CorelDRAW’s fanbase, as recent releases have seen little core power added to the main DRAW application, while other suite members have been quietly dropped. And at first sight it looks like X3 is more bad news, as the suite has now shrunk to just three main applications: DRAW, PHOTO-PAINT and CAPTURE, an uninspired screen-capture utility. Most strikingly, this means that the Corel RAVE application for creating vector Flash animations has been axed after just two releases.

It isn’t a huge loss, as although Corel RAVE was much-trumpeted it was underpowered and little-used: it’s just a shame Corel didn’t see fit to fold the capabilities into DRAW itself rather than simply dropping them.

TRACING

More worrying initially is the disappearance of CorelTRACE, the suite’s longstanding bitmap-to-vector conversion application. In fact, this turns out to be less of a blow since Corel, in a direct copy of Illustrator CS2’s Live Trace feature, has instead built tracing capabilities directly into the main DRAW application.

The resulting PowerTRACE feature is simple to use. Select an imported bitmap and the Properties bar now provides various drop-down tracing presets based on the type of image – line-art, logo, clip-art and so on. Select one of these and the new PowerTRACE dialog appears complete with before and after previews and control over the level of smoothing, detail and the number of generated colours. Make your choices, click OK and the original bitmap is overlaid with a vector replica.

There’s nowhere near the same power or control that Adobe’s Live Paint offers, or that CorelTRACE used to provide – there are no centre-line options for example, and the link to the bitmap doesn’t remain live. However, Corel does add some useful productivity features, such as the ability to see and specify exactly which colours are used during conversion and to automatically remove a bitmap’s background colour. Most importantly, having the tracing power built in directly to DRAW ensures it will be used far more regularly than the standalone application it replaces.

Tracing imported bitmaps is a great shortcut to producing drawings quickly, but tidying up the results can take longer than recreating them from scratch if you don’t have the necessary path-editing power. This is an area where DRAW has always been strong and X3 adds some important new features, with newly designed control handles, freehand marquee selection and the ability to move straight line segments more easily. Most importantly, there’s now the ability to automatically reduce the number of nodes, an option that works hand-in-glove with the existing curve smoothness slider.

TOOLS

Further drawing power is apparent in X3’s expanded toolset. The new Star and Complex Star tools extend the level of control previously offered by the Star Shape tool, while the handy new Crop tool works with both bitmaps and vector objects, as well as groups (although for non-destructive and non-rectangular clipping you’re better off sticking with PowerClips). There are also new dockers that let you precisely fillet, chamfer and scallop the corners of objects, manage the exact positioning of step-and-repeat effects and apply two kinds of basic bevel. And there’s a new Create Boundary command that automatically creates an outline of any selected object or group.
TEXT

It isn’t just DRAW’s core drawing power that has been tackled. Long-term users will be pleased to hear that Corel has finally overhauled DRAW’s text handling with new dockers for managing character and paragraph formatting. Plus, there are now menu commands for adding bullets, tabs, non-printing characters including ’em’ and ‘en’ spaces and optional hyphens. In practice, though, the changes prove disappointing, as almost all of this power was already there in the conveniently centralised Format Text dialog, which has also now been dropped. At least the new real-time dynamic preview for text-on-a-path effects is completely fresh and really does make it much easier to quickly produce attractive end results.

SMART FILL

Also new, for DRAW users at least, is the Smart Fill tool. Like Illustrator CS2’s Live Paint capability, it lets you quickly fill any area enclosed by overlapping lines with a single click. The sketch-and-fill approach this opens up is far more intuitive than having to build up your drawings as enclosed shapes and proves particularly useful when working with traced drawings. Again, Corel doesn’t offer the same power and control as Adobe, as the region must be completely enclosed and the effect isn’t live, so that if you move the surrounding lines the fill doesn’t update automatically. However, there’s no need to set up Live Paint groups first, so for most jobs the Smart Fill tool does all that you need. It’s a shame you’re restricted to applying only flat colour fills, though you can always change this afterwards.

IMAGE EDITING

Another major introduction is X3’s Image Adjustment Lab. This is a new dialog that provides instant access to all of the most common colour-correction commands for managing temperature, tint, saturation, brightness, contrast and so on. It also offers the ability to explore options by saving snapshots of the current state of an image in a strip at the bottom of the dialog – click on one and its settings are instantly restored. Centralised control is certainly a step forward but, unlike Illustrator, all adjustments are applied destructively so you can’t call up the Lab and return to an earlier snapshot, and you can’t apply effects to vector objects as well as bitmaps.

output

In terms of final output, X3 sees a number of advances. When it comes to commercial print, there’s a new onscreen preview that attempts to simulate overprint settings. Spot colour handling is also more viable than before, as vector effects such as transparencies, mesh fills and blends can now contain both process and spot colours. Export to PDF has been enhanced, most noticeably with greater support for security and permissions. More generally, file compatibility and workflow integration with Adobe’s PostScript (EPS, PS) and Illustrator (AI) standards, not to mention Corel’s own DESIGNER (DES) and Paint Shop Pro (PSP) formats, have been improved.

CONCLUSIONS

There’s no escaping the continued trend – more dropped applications, more dressing up existing features as new and, in some cases, making too much of very niche power. And there’s no avoiding the fact that where it used to lead, CorelDRAW now follows. After all, the two most exciting introductions in X3, PowerTRACE and Smart Fill, aren’t innovations but simply copies from the latest Illustrator. Moreover, despite the advantage of being a considered response, neither feature improves on its rival.

On the other hand, for non-professional users, ,maximum power and control aren’t necessarily the be-all and end-all. PowerTRACE and Smart Fill are much simpler than their Adobe equivalents and so easier to take advantage of. Most office-based and occasional users will happily settle for 80 per cent of the power if they can produce acceptable results in half the time. Throw in the fact that the X3 suite includes PHOTO-PAINT, 1,000 OpenType fonts, plenty of clip-art and that, unlike Illustrator, the main CorelDRAW module can handle multipage publications, and it’s clear that CorelDRAW still has lots to offer.
The problem is trying to persuade non-professional users who aren’t pushing the envelope to upgrade. Thankfully for Corel, X3 is indeed the real thing. This is the first release in years that provides CorelDRAW users with new core power that will make a real difference to their everyday working experience, enabling them to produce better work more quickly. But there isn’t enough here to lure existing users of Illustrator.

Corel PHOTO-PAINT X3

During its long history, the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite has included various applications for handling business presentations, basic 3D, animation, charting, desktop publishing and more. Nowadays, it’s been boiled down to the vector-based DRAW module and the bitmap-based PHOTO-PAINT. This makes the latter more important than ever to the success of the suite as a whole.

As you’d expect, some of its new features are shared with the main CorelDRAW module. There’s the new Hints docker that provides information about the current active tool, and a Help menu option to highlight what’s changed over the past few releases – which isn’t much. More useful is the new Image Adjustment Lab, which doesn’t add new power but brings together the most common existing correction commands in one dialog. There’s also new support for spot colours, which can be created with the Channels docker and saved to both PHOTO-PAINT CPT and Photoshop PSD formats.

The Cutout Lab for extracting objects from their backgrounds now offers tools to restore and remove detail, an undo capability and the ability to export results as a new layer or as a clipping mask. But that’s about it and, to cover over the ever-widening cracks, Corel has had to resort to bundling a cut-down copy of Pixmantec’s RawShooter for handling RAW format files – a core capability if ever there was one in the age of the digital camera.

This is disappointing. At one time PHOTO-PAINT was a serious alternative to Photoshop itself, but now it lags behind even Photoshop Elements. The inclusion of, and integration with, PHOTO-PAINT should be the CorelDRAW suite’s greatest strength, but only if both stay up to date.