Product Reviews

If you want to create great-looking line drawings, cartoons or diagrams, you need a vector graphics program. Unlike photos, which are made up of tiny blocks of colour called pixels, vector graphics are created by plotting the co-ordinates of points, and calculating the maths of lines and curves between them. When you enlarge a photo, it eventually becomes blocky. Enlarge a vector drawing, though, and the program simply recalculates the maths, so there's no loss of quality. This is why professional artists use vector drawing programs to create graphics for magazines. Corel reckons the benefits of vector drawing will appeal to amateur doodlers at home, too. That's why it has just released a cut-down version of its professional program Corel Draw, called CorelDraw Essentials.

Although it doesn't have the more advanced functions of Corel Draw, Essentials still offers a sophisticated array of tools and features. For example, you get anti-aliased shapes, which means object outlines are smooth rather than jagged when you turn vector art into raster images (that is, images made up of pixels), plus support for transparency effects, soft drop shadows, 3D extrusions, and a whole range of gradient effects. The advantage of having professional-style tools is that you can create professional-looking effects. The downside is that they can be pretty difficult to use. Particularly difficult is Bezier node editing.

This works by creating lines or curves between points

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- Bezier points - which you position on the page. The shape and angle of these curves depends on the relative positions of the two nodes. The curves do not behave as you would expect them to, and getting the hang of this is pretty nightmarish if you haven't used a vector drawing program before - you can expect to tear at least some hair out. Corel provides a short manual and some training videos to help you get started, but it's really not enough.

Along with CorelDraw, Essentials 2 provides two new programs: Corel PhotoBook and Corel PhotoAlbum. PhotoBook is a basic image-editing program and PhotoAlbum is an image cataloguing application. By default, PhotoBook displays a 'Visual Toolbar', which attempts to guide you, step by step, through common image-editing tasks. Unfortunately, the toolbar is crudely designed and doesn't offer many features. Hide the Visual Toolbar, though, and you're presented with a more standard interface, which reveals a program that's actually quite versatile. You can carry out a useful range of tonal and colour adjustments, and produce multi-layered images. It isn't, however, up to the standard of standalone image editing packages such as Photoshop Elements. If you're a beginner, you may find PhotoBook crude initially, then daunting later on. Experienced artists will be much happier with Elements, PhotoImpact or Paint Shop Pro.

PhotoAlbum is a thumbnail browser that lets you add keywords and comments to images and organise images in 'albums'. This is a tried and tested system that works well. You can even store the same image in more than one album. All the same, dedicated cataloguing products like Photoshop Album, ACDSee or Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album are far better at this job. Finally, you also get 10,000 items of clip art from Hemera. These are useful, but a bit cheesy.

If you're keen to embark on a spot of PC drawing, CorelDraw Essentials 2 is a decent buy, if only for CorelDraw itself. Alas, it's all downhill from there. PhotoBook is uninspiring and PhotoAlbum far more basic than its competitors.