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
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: Don't buy this version! Buy a newer version Comment: Spend a bit more money if you must and buy X4 or even X3 - Corel do not support this application anymore and THAT is the reason it is cheaper.
I recently bought CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 12 from Amazon with a view to upgrading when more familiar with the software...but I can barely use it on my computer. Whenever I try to save or even open an existing document, the application recovery manager comes up and tells me the application has become unstable, its very annoying. There is nothing wrong with my pc, probably one of my applications is incompatible with Corel, however Corel offer no advice or guidence on this particular product as it is too old. Of course, not everyone has this problem running Corel, but if you do it is better to have support from Corel to solve the problem. Dissapointed as I defintiely prefer Corel to Illustrator, looks like a wonderful package - if only I could get it to run properly. There should be restrictions on companies selling unsupported software, these people are just trying to move their old stock, its not a good deal at all. Customer Rating: Summary: Rock solid Comment: 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 Customer Rating: Summary: About to be replaced Comment: 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. Customer Rating: Summary: Classical Corel, powered by new great features Comment: 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, full of life, high resolution stuff. I would recommend it to anybody who is serious about computer graphics. Corel Masterpiece. Customer Rating: Summary: not a very impressive upgrade Comment: 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 for technical illustrations which demand a high degree of accuracy. As for Photopaint which was once a real contender against Photoshop, now it barely competes against paintshop pro. There is hardly any difference between version 12 and version 11, except for a third rate attempt at creating a tool similar too photoshop's healing brush. Coreldraw is still a good product, but this upgrade is not worth forking out for if you already have version 10 or 11.
