Review by James Beswick

Coming from the Adobe camp, I’ve come to understand their bizarre keystrokes, lack of Windows shortcut integration and strange menu placements - it’s almost a rite of passage remembering PhotoShop’s quirkiness to get anything done. That said, I’m not a graphic designer, and test driving Corel’s suite was much easier. Draw and PhotoPaint are very powerful and easy to use with great tutorial videos to get you started. The interfaces are very slick compared with CS4 and the software was extremely fast on a quad-core machine with two hard disks.

While I doubt Corel will unseat the dominant Adobe products for serious graphic designers, I’d recommend downloading the trial at least to see if you like the features. Some of the included software is a bit clunky (such as Website Creator) but there are about a dozen extra applications included in this package that may or not be useful, depending upon your needs. Overall, I think it’s more intuitive that the Adobe suite so for my limited needs have found it very straightforward to use as an Adobe alternative.