Corel Draw 10 Graphics Suite

Three powerful and complementary applications come together to make creative desktop design, publishing and animation as flexible and painless as possible.

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Price: £420

Manufacturer: Corel

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Now over a decade old, CorelDraw has matured nicely in a competitive and crowded marketplace. This edition sees it admirably enhanced by PhotoPaint and RAVE. If only Corel would sort out the product's prohibitive pricing.

Kyle MacRae, Computeract!ve 04 Jan 2001

If you've already checked the price, you'll appreciate that this isn't your average impulse buy. Rather, what we have here is a fully-fledged and featured suite aimed squarely at the professional graphic designer, web designer and desktop publisher. That said, a welcome emphasis on ease of use (sorely missing in some earlier versions of Corel products) and a revamped interface could make the package equally appealing to the enthusiastic amateur who's prepared to experiment.

First and foremost is CorelDraw itself, a vector-based illustration program geared up to producing printed publications. Templates are included to get you started, but it's just as straightforward to start from scratch. The addition of a real-time preview feature means that you can now see the effects of changes to your work before you commit - a great time-saver in the long run.

Another useful new feature is Page Sorter, where you can view thumbnail-sized images of each page in a long document and re-order them by dragging and dropping.

Working with text is less cumbersome than before, almost akin to using a word processor but with added design flexibility. Text can be aligned along any path, whether a freehand scribble or the border of an object, and remains fully editable throughout (as, indeed, does the path itself). We particularly liked the way that the shakiest freehand scrawl is automatically smoothed and rounded into something approximating the desired shape. Alternatively, a Bezier tool is on hand for those trickier squiggles.

Pictures can be rotated around any point, mirrored, coloured and generally tweaked and customised. The interface may not be instantly intuitive to a newcomer, but it is at least configurable - toolbars can be shunted around and docked wherever you please.

Also included as a separate program is PhotoPaint, a splendid photo editor. Here you can edit snaps and images captured from a digital camera or scanner or downloaded from the internet. Red-eye removal is virtually automatic and plenty of special effects are on hand. Smart Blur, for example, is a clever tool that lets you progressively blur a picture while keeping the edges sharp. Colour management is advanced and accurate, including a channel manager for blending specific colours by varying percentages.

For those working on online projects, the Image Optimiser tool previews how a picture will look on a web page as well as how long it will take to download at different connection speeds when saved in a variety of suitable file formats and/or resized. It's well worth experimenting a little here to make your site faster without necessarily sacrificing image quality.

The final component in the suite is RAVE, an animation application. RAVE is unlikely to turn you into a new Disney - you're much more likely to create a whiz-bang banner ad for your website than Snow White II. Nevertheless, it is fairly straightforward and rather satisfying to make your own moving pictures. After all, the process is simple enough: take a succession of images, make each one slightly different to the previous, and then run them all together in sequence and at speed. Many of the tools from Draw and PhotoPaint are also on hand within RAVE, and, of course, it's possible to work with all elements of the suite simultaneously to fine-tune your frames.

Whatever kind of project you create, it's easy enough to convert it into HTML for publication on the web, and equally effortless to make a PDF file that can be accessed on any platform. In a sign of the times, the Flash file format is also supported - but this one is definitely not for beginners.

Of the manual we can say nothing as we were testing an un-boxed pre-release version. However, the Help menu is one of these irritating affairs where every entry is hyperlinked to a dozen others, making it frustratingly difficult to work through even a relatively simple task. There is no tour as such, although a series of evolving web-based tutorials is promised.

The fact that this was a beta release may also account for the crippling effect on performance that we encountered during tests. Even wrapping text around a curve slowed our system to a crawl.

As for whether you should rush out and buy Graphics Suite, it's hard to say. Professionals who currently use an earlier version may not find the new toys in this version sufficiently compelling to justify an automatic upgrade. Certainly, if you are primarily concerned with building websites, we'd advise against this product as there are packages better suited to such work. And for simply tweaking the odd snapshot, CorelDraw would definitely be overdoing it. But if graphic design or DTP is your line, this suite is certain to get your creative juices flowing into some semblance of order.

Price
Price for upgrade from an earlier version, £200
Full price, £420 (with an option to claim £70 cash rebate if you own a competing product)

Contact
Corel 0800 581028 www.corel.com

See also:

Corel to spin off Linux division

Corel has confirmed that it will spin off its Linux business as part of a new corporate strategy aimed at "long-term growth and profitability". 23 Jan 2001