CorelDraw Graphics Suite by Harold McFarland

The Corel Suite X4 Installed on my Windows XP Pro system with Service Pack 2 without any problems. Then I started the program and it loaded… and loaded…. and loaded. It took several seconds for it to finally come up to a screen where I could do something. While startup was very slow, I was satisfied with how the program ran from that point forward. It appears that a lot of stuff has to load to get it started but when it is done it works fine. The only problem I had with the program was that it hung on two occassions. Unfortunately, it hung the system so bad that I could not even use control-alt-delete to get access to shut it down. Nothing responded. The second time it happened I pulled my USB drive out before powering it down and the system returned control to me! I don’t know the source of the problem but after some testing I could get it to hang consistently when the SanDisk USB drive with U3 was in the computer. It did not do it with my Toshiba without U3. So, maybe it is a U3 thing, maybe a SanDISK thing, or maybe the combination.

The first thing to note in the program is the very intuitive user interface. The more advanced a program is the more cluttered the interface tends to become. However, this Suite was fairly uncluttered given it’s advanced abilities. This is not to say there is no learning curve because there is one, but it was not as steep as I had expected.

This Suite includes CorelDraw, Photo-Paint, PowerTRACE, CAPTURE, Font Navigator and a few other utilities. The two components that impressed me the most were CorelDraw and PowerTRACE. The CorelDraw application competes well with Adobe Illustrator at a considerably lower cost. It has the ability to do very advanced illustrations with multiple layers and multiple pages. It does a good job of page layout and allows different layers on different pages as well as master layers that are consistent across all pages. Many professionally designed templates come with the system but it could use more. The problem is that many of the templates are not much more than basic variations of a similar theme. On the other hand it comes with a huge set of royalty-free photos, clip art, and fonts. It even includes a large book of the available fonts that you can browse through to select the right one.

With strong import and export functions it can import over 100 different formats including pdf. They have also included a link to the WhatTheFont Web site. If you are trying to identify a font in a publication or graphic file you can copy an example and paste it into the web site. The web site then tries to identify the font. This is nice to have available with a simple click instead of having to open a browser, enter the web site address, etc. CorelDraw also has an excellent preview function and live-editing that allows you to drag an image and see immediately how the text flows around it as you move it.

The other standout in the package is the PowerTRACE program for converting bitmap images to vector graphics. I tried several logos and basic graphics with various levels of quality and found it to work very well. Some of the conversions were not perfect but were easy enough to clean up to a really superb end product. This was a really impressive product that performed better than expected.

The Photo-Paint product is a bitmap-editing program that has very few features that make it standout from other similar programs. It is a solid intermediate to professional level product that does not have all the features of the high-end products but has much more than many other products. One of the things it does really well is the support for the RAW camera format. Other than the vendor’s viewing program, this is the only program I have that supports the RAW format for my camera. Interactive histograms also works well and lets you preview image adjustments.

In summary, I would highly recommend this program because it is priced as a middle level product but supplies programs that are at the upper end of the quality scale (CorelDraw) or upper middle level (Photo-Paint) and then throws in a great utility for those times when you need to convert a bitmap logo into a vector graphic. It is worth the price for the CorelDraw alone so it is a great deal to have the other products added as part of it. A great product with sufficiently high quality features that I can overlook the slow startup, and highly recommend it to anyone.