Product Reviews

The CorelDraw graphics suite might play second fiddle to Adobe's Creative Suite, but Corel clearly hopes this latest version will do something to turn the tables. Price is a good place to start: Adobe's Creative Suite costs the best part of £1,000 and is aimed purely at professional designers.

That leaves a gap in the market for business users and others who need to do the occasional piece of computer graphics work but don't want to shell out for Adobe's professional products.

The new CorelDraw X3 Graphics Suite is well qualified to grab a slice of that market, as it provides a comprehensive set of photo-editing and drawing tools for less than half the price of its Adobe counterpart. The suite consists of two main programs: CorelDraw X3 for vector drawing and illustration work, and Photo-Paint X3 for photo editing. Both programs gain some useful new features in this upgrade, and Corel has fine-tuned a number of existing features to make them easier to use.

Photo-Paint has acquired two very handy new tools: the Image Adjustment Lab and the Cutout Lab. The Image Adjustment Lab enables you to adjust colour, brightness and contrast settings quickly. As well as displaying before and after versions of your photo, it can create a series of snapshots that use different image settings. This makes it easy to experiment with different settings and switch quickly from one version of your photo to another.

We also like the Cutout Lab, which you can use to cut around very fine details such as hair

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or fur in photographs. Most photo-editing programs provide a similar feature, but the Cutout Lab is easy to use and produced good results with very little effort on our part.

CorelDraw X3 receives its fair share of new features as well. Some of these are pretty minor, such as new options for drawing stars, and it made us wonder why Corel took so long to include them in the suite in the first place.

Fortunately, other additions to CorelDraw X3 are more impressive. Previous versions of the suite included a separate tracing program for converting photographs into vector-based drawings. Corel has overhauled this and integrated it into CorelDraw itself. You can import a photo and use the Quick Trace option to convert the image automatically. The results are pretty good, but if you need a little more control over the process, you can select additional options such as Logo to produce line-art drawings for use as part of a company logo or letterhead.

There's also an excellent option for making text flow along irregular paths. Just draw the path, type some text and select the Text To Path command. As you move the mouse over the path, it displays a preview of the text flowing along it. You can also see how text would look above or below the path. It's one of the best text-manipulation tools we've seen in any graphics program.

In technical and creative terms, CorelDraw X3 Graphics Suite is undoubtedly a very strong upgrade. It will certainly appeal to small-business users who need an all-in-one graphics suite for producing brochures and other types of marketing material.

Even so, we're a little concerned about the price. It may be cheaper than Adobe's Creative Suite, but consumers and business users can still opt for less expensive products, such as Photoshop Elements, or hybrid photo and drawing programs, such as ACD's Canvas, both of which cost well under £100. The current price leaves it sitting somewhat awkwardly between the professional and business markets, and a more reasonable price would give CorelDraw X3 Graphics Suite a better foot in the door with business users.