A comprehensive graphic-design suite at a bargain price.
While many high-end graphics suites only offer reduced prices to those who can prove they’re currently in education, CorelDRAW Home & Student Suite X7 is available to everyone. It costs under £100 and is identical to the £480 professional edition, except it’s missing Corel Website Creator and a few features only very advanced users will miss.
This makes it a great option for hobbyists, whether you’re already a wizard with a graphics tablet or simply keen to try your hand at new skills. Plus, you can install it on up to three computers in your household.
The X7 suite includes two major programs and a number of extras. The core elements are CorelDRAW itself, a vector illustration and DTP page-layout program, and Corel Photo-Paint, a bitmap image-editing program that you can use to touch up photos and resize images for use on the web.
CorelDRAW’s revamped interface is immediately accessible, with easily customisable toolbars and an optional Lite interface that hides some of the more advanced features. We were also pleased to find a number of different CMYK colour palettes, which is important for accuracy if you want to send work to be professionally printed. A range of helpful new tutorials are included and this version is the first to support super-high-resolution screens.
CorelDRAW’s vector-drawing capabilities are excellent, whether you’re producing original artwork or just sketching a quick building plan.
We were delighted to find Corel’s widest-ever array of pen and brush effects, which neatly smooth a shaky hand. You get calligraphy pens, brushes and preset vector curves, many of which are new to this version, as well as a spray can that puts down patterns such as stars and musical instruments - great for children’s party invitations.
CorelDRAW also includes powerful tools to create page layouts. A number of templates are provided for document types such as business cards, letterheads, newsletters and more. These provide appropriate page sizes and margins, as well as suggested layouts. You can also create and save your own templates, an essential feature for monthly newsletters that always follow the same basic design.
To add graphics to your layout, a number of options are available. You can create or import vector graphics, import bitmap images such as photos, or use Corel PowerTRACE to convert a bitmap image into a vector. PowerTRACE works best with simple images that you want to turn into line art, but you can also use it to convert photos into clip art.
You can also download more than a thousand photos, fonts and clip art images using the new built-in Corel Connect Content Exchange feature. The Standard membership that comes with this version of the suite doesn’t give you as much as the Premium membership that comes with professional edition, but it’s still useful. Connect also lets you search a number of stock photo services, where you can buy more images.
When it comes to editing and optimising your bitmap images, Photo-Paint is both powerful and easy to use. While Adobe Photoshop Elements has far more sophisticated photo-editing tools, Photo-Paint is nonetheless a good alternative. It supports numerous RAW formats and gives you fine control over lighting and colour settings. It’s easy to cut out the subject of a photo from its background and we particularly like the program’s colour mask and selection tools, which lets you remove background elements by hue. A wider than ever range of pen settings and effects provide artists with plenty of options.
CorelDRAW Home & Student X7 is a fantastic buy, whether you’re new to the program or upgrading from the previous 2014 version. In one software bundle, you get everything you need to lay out documents, create original vector and bitmap artwork, and manipulate existing images. There are better individual programs for each of these tasks, but it’s unbeatable as a low-cost, one-stop shop.
VERDICT: A great all-in-one suite for DTP, vector graphics and bitmap image-editing.