CorelDraw Graphics Suite 12 Upgrade
by Corel
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List Price: Category: Software See more product details and other editions |
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Software Reviews of CorelDraw Graphics Suite 12 Upgrade
Customer Review: Just bring back Micrografx Designer, case closed
Summary: 3 Stars
For all those great years of superb engineering and illustrative graphics from Micrografx and Igrafx only to see them absorbed into Corel.....one must pause to try to understand why Corel has not caught up or surpassed the quality and ease of use of the Micrografx programs.
During all those years when Micrografx Designer ruled the engineering graphics world, Corel languished as a primitive, stubborn, uninspired drawing (I can't bring myself to call those versions "graphics") program, one step above PowerPoint.
Now with the Micrografx expertise in their back pocket, Corel now enters the big leagues of professional illustration, with seemingly no competion. Version 12 seems like a step in the right direction as it radically changed the GUI and allowed the adoption of Illustrator concepts. Let's hope Corel gets the message and continues the improvements.
I must admit that V12 at least makes a good attempt to revive the efficacy of Designer V8. For the most part, the filter export and import translators work reasonably well. Corel FINALLY decided to give us a 3-point parabolic stretch tool in V12. Not having it in V10 was embarrassing for this high priced "graphics" program.
Like it or not, with the demise of Igrafx, the Corel illustration program is just about all we have out there for professional graphics under $2K. So hang in there...........Designer 8 is very tough to find, and guess who is now "supporting" it...yep, you guessed it........Corel.
Customer Review: If Adobe Illustrator makes you crazy... or even if it doesn't
Summary: 5 Stars
Hi,
I've used CorelDraw on the PC since version 1 blew me away at a PC Expo. Since then I have upgraded at least every other version with the only regret being #6. To be fair though, that was the days of the 486 PC and I was asking a lot of the software.
Bottom line, many of Draw's standard features were long after appearing as "major" upgrades to Illustrator. CorelDraw always seems to be ahead of the curve not only feature wise but in ease of use. Even today editing nodes in Illustrator is much more awkward. There are many free resources, tutorials and help available as well as CDUG, one of the friendliest and genuinly helpful user groups around (no flames, newbys welcome).
Yes, keep Illustrator. I use it as my most expensive import / export filter.
FWIW
Customer Review: A great release of Corel Draw. The various naysayers don't know what they are talking about.
Summary: 4 Stars
CorelDraw 12 is the best bargain in graphics today. It is reliable and very easy to use. You don't have to pay the hefty ransom Adobe demands for Photoshop and Illustrator because CorelDraw can do most of the things that Adobe does with far more flexible and easier-to-master interfaces. This is powerful, first-class software.
For about 1/2 the price of either Photoshop OR Illustrator, you get get top notch bitmap AND vector editing. You also get a slew of good fonts, in both Type 1 and True Type formats, from a variety font vendors including Adobe, Agfa, and Bitstream. These fonts alone are worth the cost of the program.
About the only area where you would need Illustrator instead of CorelDraw is in prepress production, where the Illustrator's ability to open and modify almost any Postscript file is unsurpassed. However, this is also Illustrator's main weakness in that it is so tightly coupled to the Postscript language that the drawing metaphors are very complex and hard to use for creating new art.
With Coreldraw, you can create complex graphics with powerful, wonderfully interactive drawing tools, and a clean, easy-to-master interface.
Photopaint is no poor stepchild to CorelDraw, especially since version 8. It fully supports Adobe Photoshop layers, but Photopaint also supports a much more friendly object-oriented metaphor, where bitmaps can be stacked, aligned and rotated on each other just like vector objects in CorelDraw. Various filters and transparencies can be applied interactively to each object. This makes it much easier to experiment and often results in fewer trips to menus compared to photoshop.
The import/export filters are just fine thank you. CorelDraw writes and reads a vast number of formats including Illustrator, Photoshop (.psd), postcript, pdf, and CAD files with good accuracy. I don't know what is wrong with .pdf support because CorelDraw makes excellent PDFs with plenty of control, over font embedding, converting font outlines to curves, bitmap downsampling options, and color conversion.
As a programmer, I love the VBA macro languages used by both Photopaint and CorelDraw. I have used them to automate the creation of web interface elements.
The commercial sign industry uses CorelDraw almost exclusively. If it was as terrible as the Mac/Adobe bigots would have you believe, you would think these vendors would have found some other program by now. It isn't, try the demo and see for yourself.
Customer Review: The best version yet!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been a CorelDraw user since version 3, and have owned every version except 6, and even beta tested a couple.
Draw12 is terrific. I use it on a daily basis for everything from technical illustration, to 4-color advertising, to landscape design, and beyond. This version is very stable. The snapping options alone are worth the price of admission. I output prepress PDF files with no problem.
PhotoPaint is also a major player. Somebody complained that an object rotation of less than 90 degrees caused major blurring of the object. I found some blurring to occur, but running the unsharp mask clears it up nicely.
All in all, terrific bang for the buck.
Customer Review: Dissatisfied with upgrade
Summary: 3 Stars
In Photo-paint when rotating 1-bit objects at increments other than multiples of 90 degrees anti-aliasing fails and the object edges become jagged and random artifacts appear in the object background. Version 9 of the software did not have this problem. This is a major problem for those working with black and white images.
After much stonewalling the customer service admitted that they were aware of the problem but had no plan for a fix. I wrote (not email) to president of Corel complaining that they should provide a fix. I received no response.
Version 12 is no great improvement over version 9, and in my case it is worse. The company no longer seems concerned with customer service and a quality product.