I don't know art, but...
Written: Mar 05 '03 (Updated Mar 11 '03)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Features, features, features. If you can't do it with Corel it can't be done.
Cons: Expensive and complex. It'll take you a while to master.
The Bottom Line: In the graphics world, CorelDraw is the bigger hammer.
|
|
|
| zero_'s Full Review: Corel CorelDRAW V 10.0 for Win98/NT/2K |
So I finally caved in and tried CorelDraw 10. My search for a good paint program at length led me to it. I've been using PC Paintbrush 1 and CorelDraw 4.0 for ages now - Both Windows 3.1 applications. I call it time to upgrade.
CorelDraw is and always has been a professional graphics package. Corel makes no bones about it, nor does the price tag. At a hefty 400 bucks a license CorelDraw isn’t something that the average hack strolls over to his local Computers R Us to buy. It’s more like something that the average hack logs on to his nearest semi-legal P2P service and downloads, when you get right down to it. But I digress. The point is if you haven’t got a use for a really powerful 2d graphics suite and you aren’t willing to shell out the bucks for it (and this assumes we can’t hammer you into some sort of corporate mould, here) then you aren’t going to have much use for CorelDraw.
Well, you will. But too bad, because it’s expensive. This is one of the very few shortcomings of the package. If Corel could set up some sort of deal where home users could pay 75 or 80 bucks for the software people would snap it up faster than... Well, faster than I can run out of colorful catchphrases. Pictures of dead presidents are one thing. Pictures of dead presidents on your computer monitor are another. This brings us down to what really matters: Is it any good, and why do we care?
Yes, yes it is. I can say with confidence that CorelDraw 10 is easily the best graphics suite I have ever had the pleasure of using. I can only say this because no one’s dropped a copy of CorelDraw 11 on my lap yet.
There are three major components to the CorelDraw package: There is CorelDraw itself, which is Corel’s flagship 2d vector art application. Also included is PhotoPaint, a powerful paint and bitmap art application. You also get Corel R.a.v.e., which in addition to bearing a whole stack of Technical Looking Surreptitious Periods in its name is capable of vector based animation. Vectors, bitmaps? I feel another digression coming on.
Digital art is created and/or expressed in two major forms: There are bitmap graphics, which are simply big fat arrays of little colored dots (called pixels, if you didn’t already know and/or care) that are static and linear and that is that. Bitmap graphics are generally large files, since at their purest form they’re just what their name implies – Big fat maps of bits. Each pixel takes up enough space to store its color There are different color depths, of course. More color depth, more color detail, bigger file. Bitmaps are a good format for photographs, detailed pictures, and so on.
And in this corner, in the form of a horse of a completely different color, are vector graphics. Instead of a static array of colored dots, vector graphics are visual representations of geometric shapes. If you have a shape in the middle of a page as a vector it’s just a set of lines and angles. To a certain extent a vector graphic will take up less disk and memory space because all of the pixels that make up the shape don’t have to be recorded – Just the mathematical form itself. This only works to a point, of course, because some vector graphics can get pretty danged complex.
The upshot of all of this is that elements of vector graphics can easily be manipulated after they’re drawn. If your object is a little to large or too small or just needs to be skewed by half an inch, rotated 12 degrees, and moved to the left a touch you can modify it however you like. Vector graphics have their uses, but they’re different uses from bitmaps. Trying to convert a photograph into a set of vectors is a good way to make your computer tie itself in a knot. Trying to magnify a bitmap 29 times is a good way to leave yourself with one big fat blocky mess. Notice the advantages of each format.
End tangent.
All of CorelDraw’s applications are big, complex, and packed with all kinds of features. For starters there are fully customizable interfaces. You can map any function to any keystroke you want, build your own toolbars, shuffle your buttons around, whatever you like. This makes it easy for luddites like me to flog CorelDraw into behaving just like some suitably outdated application like Deluxe Paint. That, or just erasing all of a certain coworker’s key shortcuts just to drive them mad. Lucky for you (and them) you can import and export control settings to your heart’s content. You can even pack a few of them on a floppy and carry them around with you.
The rest of the CorelDraw suite is simply a mind boggling array of tools and features. The best way to explain it is to break down each application in turn.
CorelDraw itself (the vector editing application, not the entire suite) comes with a competent array of vector management tools ranging from a slew of selection tools to lines, the ever useful freehand tool, all manner of prefabricated complex shapes, vector modification tools, and a fill texture generation feature that you could write an entire book about. It’s good to see that the editing performance has matured a lot through CorelDraw’s past versions. Welding objects is now useful for something, for a start, and the behavior of the vector modification and freehand tools is a bit more logical now. Bear in mind that I just upgraded from version 4. They probably fixed that ages ago.
Also quite welcome are the precision placement and resizing tools. With these you can place objects exactly where you want them to several significant decimal places and in a far more precise manner than your printer can even hope to output. This makes CorelDraw a viable option for drawing up plans and schematics that need to be precise and drawn to scale. As always, you can set up whatever custom scale you like (10 feet for every inch and so on) which CorelDraw will dutifully display in your placement boxes instead of the actual inches of your virtual piece of paper. There are other additions that are just nifty above all else, like a little tool that can generate working barcodes in a variety of formats. Calling CorelDraw a capable application doesn’t do it justice. I don’t know how else to express it.
I have since become very attached to PhotoPaint. It’s Corel’s all-singing, all-dancing bitmap editing application that aims to be all things to all people and does a damn good job of it to boot. It comes not only with extremely capable image touch-up tools (think Photoshop: Tone, color, bightness, contrast, filters, airbrushes, and so on) but a dazzling array of artistic tools to create your own pictures from scratch. It has optional simulated paper texture, transparency tools, dozens of simulated paintbrushes, markers, pastels, airbrushes, and pens, and fully customizable brushes. PhotoPaint’s shape tools can also act as vector tools, allowing you to move and modifiy lines and circles and such after you place them. Unlike a certain paint package this doesn’t cause any loss in accuracy and is executed flawlessly. PhotoPaint’s blending tools are top notch, as are its selection and transformation capabilities. As far as functionality goes I couldn’t find a thing wrong with it. Even if you do find an interface feature that bugs you all you have to do is take a stroll through the Customize menu and change it.
PhotoPaint can do animation, too. Frames can be set up and paged through in real time to create animated GIFs, AVIs, and all sorts of other things. PhotoPaint has not only become my staple paint application but my favored animation tool as well, replacing my ancient copies of Deluxe Paint. I use it to build game graphics. It works like a charm.
There are even more bells and whistles. PhotoPaint supports pressure sensitive tablets, which turns it into a playground for those of us with really funky input hardware. It supports every image format known to man and can import and export every single one of them. It’s got real time previews and layering and all sorts of switches and knobs I haven’t even found yet.
Which leads us to CorelDraw’s only real problem on the functional level: Complexity. CorelDraw isn’t something you just fling yourself into without prior experience with graphics programs. It handles some seemingly basic tasks in unusual but otherwise logical ways that will probably drive an inexperienced user insane. Once you get the hang of it it’s all butter, but until you do you’re going to have your nose in the manual more than in front of the screen. If you only want to put some text on your cutesy photos and home movies CorelDraw is serious overkill for you and you’ll hate it for the fact.
This leaves us with the rest of the CorelDraw package. I haven’t played with R.a.v.e. as much as the other applications but it looks no worse than either of them. It has most of CorelDraw’s vector tools along with its own animation tools to create vector based animations. Drawing working, animated schematics of things is the first use for it that leaps to my mind. You could use it to make cartoons and such if your drawing skills really suck, too.
There are yet more applications: Corel Trace, for converting bitmap graphics to vectors (within reason); Corel Capture, for capturing screenshots of things (including some things you aren’t “supposed” to be able to grab shots of like Windows Media Player images); And Corel Texture, a standalone texture generation tool that simply defies description. Most of these I have only scratched the surface of. All of them are spectacular.
For your money you also get the traditional Corel extras: A pile of additional fonts and two disks worth of more clipart, borders, symbols, and samples than you could ever possibly need. You get a set of manuals that you could use for doorstops, too. Reading them cover-to-cover is hardly necessary. Giving them a quick once over may do you some good.
Being a big fat complex professional application CorelDraw also has some big fat resource requirements. Overall things aren’t nearly so bad as they could be, but you will certainly want to have a 500 or 600 mhz machine and a good 128 megs of memory to prevent the experience from becoming painful to you and/or your computer. A computer of this spec is hardly a rare item these days, so that shouldn’t present a problem to very many of you.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
zero_
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Member: Robert "Zero" Drendall
Location: Claymont, DE, United States
Reviews written: 99
Trusted by: 19 members
About Me:
Providing your semi-regular dose of extreme verbosity since somewhere around the turn of the century.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.