Product Reviews

CorelDraw Graphics Suite holds a unique position in the market. The main application, CorelDraw, is a professional-level vector editor and the only serious rival to Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is widely recognised as the industry standard, but it's not cheap at around £450. Not only is CorelDraw Graphics Suite less expensive, it also comes with Photo-Paint X4, an image editor to rival Photoshop. However, home users may only need the cut-price Photoshop Elements or Xara Xtreme, a capable vector-graphics application that costs just £45. So with a price that places it out on a limb between the home and professional markets, CorelDraw's has its work cut out to attract either group of users.

There's plenty to please professionals, though. Barcode generation is built in, and with pre-press checks, CMYK support, colour separations and PDF and PostScript export, it's more than up to the demands of preparing graphics for professional production. Unlike Illustrator, CorelDraw supports multiple-page documents, making it a viable option for DTP. Handling of layers across multiple pages has improved; the Object Manager's Master Page contains guides and objects

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common to all pages, while other elements on layers are grouped by page number. The new Table Tool will be welcome for both DTP and graphic design tasks, as it can merge and split cells, as well as manipulate rows and columns. Cells can contain text, fills or graphics, but we couldn't find an easy way to import Excel data.

CorelDraw's excellent text handling is valuable to all kinds of users. The new live text preview speeds up text formatting by showing changes as you scroll down lists of fonts rather than having to select each in turn. Another new feature cross-references unknown fonts, say from a scanned image, against an online database to find an exact or near match.

Photo-Paint X4's new features include an improved Tone Curve filter, non-destructive effects that behave like Photoshop's Adjustment Layers, plus a tool for straightening images. However, while it's not short of features, Photo-Paint is far behind Photoshop for ease and speed of use, and lacks equivalents for some of Photoshop's best features, such as the Liquify tool. It now supports Photoshop CS3 and camera RAW files, but we found opening some files problematic.

Ultimately, it's not just CorelDraw's smaller professional user base that makes Illustrator and Photoshop more tempting for businesses. It's also a relative lack of polish. Despite a redesigned interface, CorelDraw Graphics Suite felt as if it required a bit of a prod before we could get what we wanted from it. We also experienced a few errors and crashes. Photoshop and Illustrator, while just as complex and as time-consuming to learn, are more intuitive and reliable. For home and occasional business use, CorelDraw and Photo-Paint are uninviting compared with Xara Xtreme and Photoshop Elements.