CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 review

Collaborative tools

So far X4 has provided a range of more-or-less significant enhancements but, with the honourable exception of live text preview, none breaks significant new ground. The one introduction that seems to fit the bill is X4's new web-hosted collaboration and review capabilities.

These are handled through the new ConceptShare docker: from this location you can sign up to the service (it's another third party-developed feature) and then post your designs, which are then organised into workspaces containing multiple concepts. Other users can then be invited to view the concepts, post comments and even chat about the artwork in real time.

The elephant in the room is Adobe PDF which has provided a platform for electronic collaboration and review for the past 15 years and which CorelDRAW has long supported. Admittedly PDF's longstanding round-robin approach isn't as efficient as a centralised web-based solution, but that's why the latest Acrobat Professional 8 (included in Adobe's CS3 suites) enables web-based review using the latest free Adobe Reader.

Pitched against a freely available, established and superior standard - behind the scenes ConceptShare rasterizes all posted artwork to JPEG - I can't see many taking it up. And that would remain the case even if it didn't cost $20 a month for standalone designers and up to $200 a month for enterprise-level use.

Conclusion

Over its 14 releases the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite has built up enough power to keep most occasional professional users more than happy. In fact, with its multiple page support and its bundled templates, clip art, fonts and copy of Photo-Paint (see below) it offers some real advantages over the market-leading Illustrator. And for new, non-professional users, X4 is probably the better choice as it offers most of Illustrator's design power without its high-end complexity and cost.

Persuading its occasional non-professional users that they should upgrade, however, requires delivering both a little excitement and some real tangible benefits. X3 did this; X4, alas does not.

Corel Photo-Paint X4

At various times in its history Corel has included a whole host of supporting applications in the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, covering everything from business however, apart from basic font management and screen capture utilities, all you get is the bitmap editor, Corel Photo-Paint.

Photo-Paint shares much of the same code as the CorelDRAW module which means that it benefits from many of the X4 enhancements including the new look, improved thumbnail previews, text-based search and, for what it's worth, the ConceptShare-based review and collaboration functionality.

Particularly relevant in the bitmap context is support for the latest Photoshop PSD format, Adobe colour management and RAW files. The latter is particularly useful, and allows you interactively and non-destructively colour-correct photos taken with digital cameras that use the format.

There's a new grid-based dialog with which you can straighten images scanned or photographed at an angle. Tone handling has moved up-market with the ability to add, delete and edit individual nodes on the image curve, while the new histogram feedback shows what effect these changes have on tone distribution.

Finally, new lenses have been added, which let you non-destructively convert colour images to black and white, mix channels, map gradients and apply photographic filters.