Setup

Installation was a breeze and required little user action, just enter the product key, accept the End User License Agreement and leave the rest to the software. The suite took less than 8 minutes to install on my Dell 8300 Dimension, 3.2 GHz P4, 2 GBs of RAM, nVidia Geforce FX 5200 128 MBs of vRAM. CorelDraw, the flagship drawing application, plus Corel Photo-Paint X3 for image editing; Corel PowerTrace X3, a bitmap-to-raster converter; Corel Capture X3, a screen-capture utility; BitStream Font Navigator; and Pixmantec RawShooter essentials, a RAW format converter for digital photographers. Three content CDs are included in the suite with more than 10,000 images and clip art; 1,000 OpenType fonts; 35 Windows Glyph List 4 fonts; and 100 templates. The CDs also contain tutorials and training videos.

Interface & Draw Features

Again, not much has changed, the consistent look that users of the product have known remains the same, I personally like how it’s not as cluttered or overwhelmingly heavy as its rival. Corel Draw combines elements and functionality of traditional illustration and desktop publishing packages, so users of both products will appreciate and easily adapt to the program tools easily. For new users, the Hints window features context sensitive guides that help you along the way as you work, its a friendly convenience for users who are not so verse in program. For power users this might be a bit too much, but can be easily turned off. The interface tries to be non intrusive and displays intelligent palletes called Dockers that can be easily docked on the side.

 The Docker allows you to create multiple instances of an object, with the ability to change its horizontal and vertical offset. Dockers are an efficient way of managing palettes, still the disadvantage is clearly apparent through the lack of real-time preview of effects, this results in the user having to click Apply to see changes, which cumbersome if you are applying repeat changes.

Users can appreciate help with task such as fitting text on a path, shape or curve which is now made easy.  The New Smart Fill tool intelligently fills a specific region with a chosen color even when the reigion is intersected between over lapping objects. Common features associated with page layout include the ability to add Drop caps, bullets and multiple columns. The tracing feature is much improved, users will appreciate that its now built into the program, although its a bit unstable at times I was able to achieve great results.

Corel Draw X3 features a much improved bitmap-to-vector conversion tool, which now competes directly with Adobe’s Illustrator. Other missing features make a welcome appearance finally Draw has a basic bevel tool! Advanced users will also welcome the improved Fillet, Scalpel and Chamfer tool that rounds and adjusts corners. Draw X3 does an excellent job at differentiating itself from the other powerful players on the market in areas such as vector editing and cropping. Crop tool works as you would expect it to, dragging it across a portion a vector image simply removes the section outside that boundary. Smart Fill is another great addition; this feature applies colour fills directly to overlapping areas of objects. Draw X3 automatically detects the edges and creates a closed path so that it treats the overlap as a single object.

Corel Draw X3 features strong integration with the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Well known Acrobat features include the ability to preserve transparency, spot colours; add security protection to exported PDFs, restrictions on who can who can open and print a document. Spot colours are retained when printing and exchanging files with popular Adobe applications which this should make Designers who work with a mix of products in one environment.

Corel Photo-Paint X3 

Both Draw and Photo-Paint have greatly improved the way they work with text these include enhancements  to including better handling of text on paths and the ability to add formatting code, such as a non-breaking space, to text. The Paragraph Formatting Dock supports aligning and adding drop-caps to text while the Character Formatting tool, lets you kern and add character effects, such as uppercase and underline.

Photo-Paint X3 features an improved Cut out Lab making it easier to extract objects from backgrounds by drawing around borders with a highlighter tool, in comparison to Adobe Photoshop’s Extract command it was not as powerful but still remained satisfactory. The Image Adjustment Lab main window provides a single place to correct colour and tone. You can create snapshots of adjustments and store them as thumbnails at the bottom of the window, then switch between them for comparison purposes.

Corel PowerTrace X3 

A new feature in this release is the PowerTrace X3 converter, which succeeds Corel Trace from version 12.0 of the Corel Draw Graphics Suite, is integrated in CorelDraw application. It's fast, customisable and capable of producing better results than its predecessor. From the Trace Bitmap menu option you can choose a variety of conversion options, from a low-accuracy quick scan to a high-quality image if the original material meets the bar. When the bitmap is traced, the application produces a colour palette for the resulting vector illustration. In the end PowerTrace makes it easy to reduce the number of colours in the palette or change those colours, which makes it a powerful feature for producing dramatic vector images simple bitmaps.  Scanning and converting a high-res image took only a few seconds on my Dell 8300, which produced output that lost nothing of the original's detail.

Final Comments

Corel Graphics Suite X3 is pretty much amazing and powerful for its price which could fool most users into thinking there is some catch to it. But based on my testing and my experiences with the suite over years, Corel continues to add value and improve the programs ease of use and productivity with professional results. I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to get into graphic design and publishing on small budget. Aside from Capture X3 out dated screen-capture utility, the inclusion of Pixmantec RawShooter Essentials, which imports and processes RAW images makes up for that but could be better integrated with rest of Graphics Suite. Although Adobe’s Suite of products remain industry standards, Corel still stands out for those who don’t want all the power or don’t have the time/money and would like to take a shortcut to producing great results.