Review by Raul G.

It’s been years since I last used a CorelDraw software suite and jumped at the opportunity to use CorelDraw Suite X5. I consider myself a novice user in that I don’t use the software everyday or professionally. I am, however, well versed in Photoshop and a few other offerings from smaller companies like ACDSee.

So first things first, installation; I installed X5 on my beefy HP laptop running Windows 7 and 8gb of RAM. I encountered absolutely no issues on install other than the installer taking quite a bit of time to finish loading the entire suite. All-in-all the process took about 30-40 minutes including registering the product, launching and turning off the tips that launch with the program.

This suite includes Photo Paint X5; Corel Draw X5; Corel Connect and a few other applications. For my purposes I’m a bigger user of Photo Paint. The layout is pretty intuitive to anyone that’s used an advanced photo editing suite before. You can load an image and the only real limitation is your imagination. It’s super easy to make quick adjustment to photos including adding effects like motion blur or lens flare (a little cheesy sure) or take a large file size and parse it down into a smaller (lossy) format. Since getting the software I’ve used it to sharpen images, remove red-eye from photos and blur certain aspects of images. For example I sold my wife’s Mini Cooper and needed to skew her license plate before posting. A simple tool later and the plates were pixilated and unreadable and ready for exporting and posting.

Corel Draw is an interesting application and one that is really uniquely suited to artists. My sister for example is an art major and experimenting with various digital drawing tools and hardware. She used her Bamboo Pen Tablet in conjunction with Draw X5 to make some really quick and amazing artwork right on my laptop. I’ll admit that’s she’s better suited to reviewing this aspect of the Corel Draw Suite than I am but I can address her impression here. In comparing Draw X5 to Autodesk (another application she uses on her own computer) she admitted that Autodesk seemed to be deeper and have more tools, brushes, and effects but was impressed with the layout and ease of using the Corel software.

In my own use I’ve used Corel Draw to make quick notes and modifications to images - specifically QC’ing maps in .tiff, .jpeg (and other formats) It’s a great tool, handles a huge assortment of file types and can export to a large variety of formats.

For novices like me Corel offers a TON of help to get you started. The software links directly to Corel for loads of how-to videos and tutorials. There is also a huge and active community of Corel users out there and various forums to support everyone from pro’s to novices. The production level on the Corel tutorials is professional and the people teaching clearly have a thorough understanding of the applications.

Very cool application that I plan on continually using and learning more!