POSTS
Review by Fred Woodbridge
Corel continues its impressive series of high performing graphics suite with this version X7. As usual, the flagship product is the immensely powerful vector drawing program, CorelDraw. It is intuitive to use but comes with a comprehensive help file that does an excellent job of explaining the major topics. It is always available directly on the interface.nAdded to this are the (now) great number of videos and tutorials available online. Time was, a search on YouTube provided not many results (as compared to some other suites). This has changed and I believe Corel has undertaken an effort to introduce its suite of products to more people, who are in turn producing content on their behalf. There’s also an excellent manual available for purchase, which while it is for X6, still pertains.nI noticed that with this new version, the speed of start up is much faster than with X6. Installation is straightforward and easy to navigate though there is at least one puzzling thing where updates always show an Internet Explorer security error message. Work output type is profuse, including PDF. I have never used the image acquisition (TWAIN, WIA) so I can’t say much about it. There are a tremendous amount of settings (the RGB profile, for example, is more than 20 items long) so some time will be expended to get really comfortable with it. However, intuitive isn’t the wrong descriptor here. You can accept the defaults and play, and still figure out how to produce some pretty good content. Be aware, however, there’s a reason it costs a pretty penny to acquire, and why professional T-Shirt graphics designersthe ones I know anywayoverwhelmingly use CorelDraw: it’s top-notch software, and to get really good requires study. Luckily, there are now more resources than ever.nIf you have multiple monitors, CorelDraw X7 will be a delight to use as you may undock any number of sections to use. I don’t have one, but I have seen some work with digital pens (on a tablet) that will blow you away.nLet’s be honest, the other ingredient products in the suite aren’t as good as Draw. PhotoPaint is a perfectly adequate image manipulation software that does not approach Photoshop or even Corel’s other products in the space, PaintShop Pro. Font Manager is a nicety but not it’s not going to be a staple in your everyday use.nIn all, a worthwhile, faster, better version upgrade from X6. 5 stars.