Review by M Cox

The two main components of Corel Draw X8 that I will use are the Raw Photo Editor and the vector drawing program. This product feels like two programs that I used a lot. One was a vector based application called Arts & Letters that I used a lot many years ago. The Corel Draw drawing application is very intuitive for me except I had to explore the menu to learn which tool does what. Theres a lot to learn, but the basics don’t take too much effort. There are numerous useful tutorials built into the product plus there are a lot of YouTube tutorials on many different aspects of this application, so if you have the time and patience, you can learn how to do many different things.

I use the vector drawing tool to make draw renovations or add-on projects for my home cabinets and the likes. My wife is new to Corel Draw, but she is very interested in learning how to do everything. It has many options and will take a while to learn, but with some determination, I think most everyone can learn how to use it. But there is still a lot to learn to master the advanced techniques. This product is in a professional classification in my opinion.

I especially like the fact I can finally edit photos in Raw format. I have a Canon D5 Mark II that Ive used to take a lot of photos around the world. I take both Raw photos in CR2 format and JPG photos simultaneously. Memory is cheap these days. I am especially impressed with how well Corels auto adjust works. You can do a side by side split images to compare your adjusted image to the original. Thats quite useful to know if your tweaks made the photo better or worse. You can grab the image and move it around to different parts of the photo to see the difference in other parts of the photo being adjusted, not just down the middle.

And if you have previous experience with Photoshop, they have the option where the menu placement and structure will somewhat mimic Photoshop so you can reduce the learning curve when acclimating to Corels version. I like what I see so far and I intend to use Corel as much as I can going forward especially for Raw format editing.

This product is clearly not inexpensive. It is a fairly serious investment to make and you should be sure this is what you expect. Corel offers a free 30 day trial download and no credit card required. So if you new to this or have never used Corel Draw Graphic Suite, I strongly suggest you take them up on the 30 day trial before spending this much money. And make sure you download it when you have sufficient time to devote to learning how it operates. There is a significant learning curve, especially for newcomers. I have used comparable products and I think I even purchased some of the Corel products quite a while back. Using it seems all too familiar somehow. Anyway Im very glad to own this product and I will make good use of it. There are other components to Corel Draw X8, but I doubt that Ill use everything in this package. I think my wife might make full use of it. Shes excited to use it.

I did receive this product on Amazons Vine program, but just for the record, I have to pay self employment taxes (double social security tax) on what I receive and income tax as well. So that works out to be about 36% incremental tax for me. Amazon reports this as income to the IRS. In the beginning it appears to be free, but when I pay the IRS, it is definitely not anyway near free. I write Vine reviews the same as if I bought it directly and give out the full range of stars from 1 to 5. You can check my 800+ reviews for proof. If a product performs as advertised, then I give it 5 stars. I would never knowingly mislead anyone with my reviews.