Review by Kyle Slayzar

My buddies and I are trying to start a Youtube channel with an accompanying website and that means we need many things, original graphic art being one of them. My crew and I primarily operate MacBooks so our options for software are limited. With the opportunity to try out Corel Graphic Suite X7 I handed the trials over to our artist/token PC user since X7 operates on Windows only and, so far, we’ve been impressed with his work while he’s been intrigued over the ease of use and complete control over what he does.

The first thing we noticed is that the software doesn’t require much in terms of system requirements so our friend with a relatively older PC was able install and utilize it with no issues. It ran smoothly and was amplified by the fact that it’s user-interface is very intuitive (has features where an artist would want them to be rather than require a treasure hunt to find) and user-friendly. This saves a lot of time on production since no one likes to navigate through endless menus to find one simple feature.

After a week of playing around with the features our artists sent in his first samples and the results are nice. Granted we’re doing this for a youtube page and website, which the software seems grossly overqualified for, but it allowed our guy to crank out images and samples like none other and we’re very impressed with the output.

However, one of the issues we ran into were that not all of us can read Corel images without sufficient patches, which weren’t a problem but goes to show that one must be ready for PC-Mac interfacing if you’re running any kind of business/project with a diverse collection of computers.

All in all, I can’t say if X7 is better than Adobe or Photoshop, which are used by most professionals I know in the industry, but we’re happy with it on our lower end of the spectrum as we inch our way upward. A pricey, but worthy purchase for anyone that wants to get started and avoid the stigma that is MS Paint.