CorelDraw 12 consists of three programs: CorelDraw itself for vector graphics, Photo-Paint for bitmap painting and photo editing and RAVE for creating animations. As in previous versions, there are also utilities such as CorelTrace, for tracing bitmaps, and CorelCapture, for screen grabs. You might think that by the 12th iteration of a graphics application, there wouldn't be much new left to add. Corel is ingenious enough to have though up some very useful improvements, though, such as the SmartDrawing tool. Draw a freehand triangle with this tool and it becomes a real triangle, draw a rough ellipse and it becomes a perfect ellipse, draw a freeform squiggle and it becomes a beautifully curved squiggle.
If you need temporary guide lines to help align objects, CorelDraw 12 provides dynamic guides, which you can snap to and later delete when you've finished with them. Talking of snapping, you can snap an object to snap points in other objects, with the target point highlighting as you drag near to it. Symbols, introduced in CorelDraw 11, save space in Web design by taking as much file space as an object, no matter how many copies of them you create. Now you can build libraries of symbols to re-use in different drawings and distinguish them from objects by their blue handles. CorelDraw 12 can delete arbitrary segments from drawings with the Virtual Segment Delete tool and use the Eyedropper and Paintbucket together to transfer not just colour, but properties like transparency from one object to another.
The only real improvement to PhotoPaint is the addition of a Touch-Up brush, which helps remove blemishes like dust and scratches from scanned photographs. Like the other modules of the program though, PhotoPaint can optimise finished images for export to Microsoft Office or WordPerfect Office applications and now provides a separate Export command to save images in a wide range of different graphics formats. The improvements to RAVE, the animation module of the Suite, are pretty much the same as in CorelDraw. They include the SmartDrawing tool, dynamic guides, which can be used from frame to frame in an animation, symbols (and their animated equivalent, sprites) and virtual segment delete. --Simon Williams
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Rock solid I don't know how other people are having trouble with this software being buggy, its been rock-solid for me - never a single crash in several months of use. I find it competes well with anything I could do with Adobe software (that includes Photo-Paint) and has much less of the 'bloat-ware' effect, although I wouldn't try running it on anything under 1Ghz with 512Mb RAM
About to be replaced A great product, but a few weeks after I bought it Corel announced a new version. Hang on and wait to see if that would make a better upgrade choice.
Classical Corel, powered by new great features If you are fan of adobe photoshop, maybe you won't like it as much as I am. But Corel really did a great job with this version. It gives you full power of working with vector graphics. Features supplied on other 2 CDs are trully amazing. It's good value for money, you get not only most powerful publishing software, but collection of registrered fonts - only this worth several hundred pounds. And plus the collection of images and clipat. And this is not just boring little images - this is full quality,... more info
not a very impressive upgrade As upgrades go this is not very good. Very few new features have been added and most of them have limited use. To start with the smart drawing tools only recognises the most basic of shapes (circles, squares, rectangles, etc) which can be easily created by using the other tools coreldraw already offered. I'm not sure who will find this tool usefull as most coreldraw users will use coreldraw for far more complex tasks than this. What is a much better conceived idea is the new dynamic guides, very usefull... more info
