Joe Lavery looks at the latest version of Corel’s premier graphics suite
Here we have version 8X of the CorelDraw Suite, bristling with new features and a few tweaks for the old ones. If you’re familiar with the product, you’ll already know it contains a lot more than the illustration program that forms the core part of the package, because you also get Corel Photo-Paint, Corel Website Creator, Corel Capture, Corel Font Manager and more. The company have now made purchasing the product more flexible. Naturally, you can still buy it with a one-off payment, but alternatively you can start a 365-day subscription for £14.95 a month. At a total outlay of £179.40, it’s considerably cheaper than upgrading.
I accept that many people don’t like change, yet I feel one of the first new features was badly needed. It’s the ability to fully personalise the interface, effectively creating your own workspace, from the size of the icons and toolbars, to the background colour of the desktop. You can even change what tools will be displayed and change the overall colour scheme to make the GI look more like an Adobe product. Clearly the designers have realised that users have different needs and aptitudes, and these new customisation options allow you to set up your workspace for the task in hand.
Version 8X now supports 4K monitors and allows you to spread the interface across multiple screens. It also supports Windows 10 and with that its touchscreen interaction – assuming of course that you have a touchscreen system. You can also use it with any Windows Real-Time Stylus pencompatible tablets.
I’m pleased to see that Corel has dumped the old font navigator and introduced a new Font Manager. This is a much better program, in which you can browse the fonts both on your system and those provide online by Corel. You can install or uninstall fonts, create collections and type in your own text to get a preview of each font. Corel has done a similar makeover to the font list dialogue, which now works in tandem with the Font Manager, displaying any highlighted text in each font as the mouse pointer passes over it.
In previous versions, it was far too easy to grab objects you didn't want to, particularly if you were working with objects laid one on top of the other. Now you can lock individual objects within a layer and carry on working, in the knowledge that everything hidden will stay where you put it. The only way to do this before was to use lots of layers and lock off the ones you’d finished with.
Corel Photo-Paint has also been updated with the same interface enhancements as Draw and a few new tools of its own. The first of these, the Healing Clone Tool, when compared to the Photoshop version, is a poor imitation, I’m afraid. It produces quite obvious blurring and is cumbersome to use; even on my i5 machine the cursor trails well behind as it tries to clone an area in real time. It’s easier to use the standard clone tool. In contrast, the red eye removal tool works much better than the Photoshop one, which is decidedly a hit and miss affair. I see the Adjustment menu has also had some work, particularly the Perspective Distortion and Gaussian Blur tools, which work a lot better and are quicker than they were previously.
Finally another new feature introduced to both Draw and Photo-Paint is the Get More docker (not a burly welder from Tyneside). It’s basically a web interface for downloading applications, plug-ins, and extensions, designed to expand the overall scope of the product. Some of these, like the Corel Website Creator, are free; others like AfterShot Pro have to be paid for.
As usual, if you’d like to see what Corel has on offer, you can download a fully working version from the company’s website. You’ll also find some great video tutorials to get you started. Joe Lavery
A genuinely worthwhile update.