Product Reviews

Corel Graphics Suite is a mini-suite that has at its centre Corel's flagship line-drawing application, CorelDraw 11, flanked by a professional-level image editor - Corel Photo-Paint 11 - and Corel's comparatively new R.A.V.E. 2 application for creating Web graphics and animations.

All three programs have been spruced up for this latest version, but it's CorelDraw itself which gets the lion's share of the changes, and one of the biggest is its inclusion of 'symbols'. These are definable objects that can be repeated at will in your illustrations. If you change the symbol, all instances of it are updated too. Symbols make it much easier to build and evolve your designs.

Also new are the three-point rectangle, ellipse and curve tools. With these you click and drag to define one axis of the shape, then move the mouse pointer and click to define the third. This makes it a lot easier to draw shapes that fit specific gaps, for example. New Roughen and Smudge brushes help you refine the outlines of vector shapes, and CorelDraw 11 has improved support for vector-based SVG Web graphics.

Corel Photo-Paint 11 gets a new Cutout tool, which looks and works like a

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dead ringer for Photoshop's Extract dialog box. You draw round the outline of the shape you want to cut out, use a fill bucket to fill in the area you want to keep, and Photo-Paint does the rest. The tighter your highlighter stroke, the more successful the extraction. Elsewhere, Photo-Paint adds support for image slicing and rollover effects - important for turning bitmaps into functional Web graphics. About time too, really, though even now it can't really compete with ImageReady, the Web graphics companion to Photoshop.

Lastly, there's Corel R.A.V.E. 2. This is a lot better than its first incarnation, offering the symbols introduced into CorelDraw 11 (they make even more sense in multi-frame animations), improved Flash support and compatibility, and the ability to program objects with 'behaviours' - essential if it's to compete with the likes of Flash.

That's not a full list of the changes, but it gives you an idea - evolution rather than groundbreaking changes. That's not a condemnation, though. Far from it. With the exception of Corel R.A.V.E., which was a bit weak, Corel's graphics applications were already pretty well sorted. CorelDraw itself isn't far behind Adobe Illustrator in the usability stakes, and the fact you're getting an image-editor and multimedia authoring kit thrown in makes this suite very good value.

It's ideal for keen amateur designers and cost-conscious professionals, as long as you realise what you're giving up. In the right hands, Corel Graphics Suite can do pretty much anything you can do in Illustrator and Photoshop; there just isn't the level of professional expertise out there that you can draw on for inspiration. Knowledge of CorelDraw isn't a career qualification - Photoshop or Illustrator know-how is.