Corel CorelDraw Graphics Suite X5 review

Though Adobe dominates the graphic design industry, CorelDraw has always been the first vector drawing program that springs to most PC users’ minds. Graphics Suite X5 combines CorelDraw with numerous extras to offer a wide ranging set of capabilities. These include the Photo-Paint image editor, theSwish miniMax2 animation tool, and the new Corel Connect media browser. The emphasis here is on quantity: a full installation requires over 6GB of disk space and will take up a whole lunch break.

You can start CorelDraw from an expanded set of ready-made templates or from a blank page. Even the latter shows off new features, because you can set the colour mode to RGB or CMYK and select ICC profiles. Yes, Corel now fully supports industry standard colour management. Even though it’s something most users will never think about, this is an important step for a product on the border between enthusiast and commercial use, helping to ensure colours come out the way you and your client intended. An improved colour palette also helps you easily keep track of the precise colours you've used so far.

Such behind-the-scenes enhancements are this version’s focus. Instead of obvious changes, like X4’s revamped user interface, there are subtle improvements. The Mesh Fill tool now makes it easier to create complex colour gradients that look rich and seamless, and the ability to set the transparency of each node allows for subtle but precise effects. Tweaks to the curve tools, including more options and an alternative B-Spline drawing method, will interest illustrators, although they may not sway those who are adept with Adobe’s more elegant tools. Like Adobe, Corel now supports rounded corners which preserve their proportions when objects are resized – an overdue but very welcome addition.

Photo-Paint has a few new colour filters, plus an Object Docker that gives clearer access to layers, objects and groups. That’s about it, although, like CorelDraw, it now supports more file formats, including native Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator documents. Files can be ‘packaged’ to bundle fonts and placed images with the vector file, and output to web formats is more flexible. The large collection of bog-standard fonts is now accompanied by a small set of pro-quality typefaces.

Connect runs either as a standalone app or within CorelDraw or Photo-Paint, and integrates with Windows Desktop Search to find content by keyword across your system as well as within the supplied clip art. However, there's no facility within the browser to reorganise images by adding your own keywords, tags or categories, and this leaves the whole thing feeling very limited.

CorelDraw has plenty of professional users, especially in specialist sectors, such as garment design; with over 2000 vehicle templates now included too, it’s also attractive to advertising studios. Graphic designers and publishers, however, are more likely to find the core functionality and productivity they need in Adobe Creative Suite. CoreDraw is a worthy rival for Adobe Illustrator, but Photo-Paint still lags well behind Photoshop (Corel’s own Paint Shop Pro Photo falls between the two). Adobe’s tools for adding interaction and animation are in a different league, and for long documents, despite Corel’s best efforts, a dedicated desktop publishing program such as InDesign is still the way to go.

Then again, Corel’s suite is around a third of the price or less, whether you compare the full or student versions (a Home & Student edition of X5 is expected around summertime). It also offers more hand-holding, including context-sensitive hints, new video tutorials and plenty of templates and clip art, something that Adobe barely addresses. It has competition at the low end too: Serif DrawPlus X3 is remarkably capable at around £55, and the slightly pricier Xara Xtreme 5 convincingly covers vector, DTP, photo and web, although only the £199 Pro version offers colour management and commercial output.