CorelDraw X3A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities—all
in all, a credible upgrade
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Whether you will like what you get for your two-year wait depends upon your point of view. If you remember the kitchen sink of features that Corel's aggressive engineers dropped into Draw 6, 7, 8, and 9, X3 will feel paltry. And if you are primarily a PhotoPaint user, you are unlikely to find satisfaction in the current release. All others, however, will find at least a few things to make their jobs easier, and perhaps a couple of changes that will have them singing the program's praises.
The big picture looks like this: Draw sports a handful of impressive new features, RAVE has been canned, Trace has been overhauled, Paint has been neglected, and the box itself has several impressive accessories and extras.
The Lead Player
CorelDraw itself enjoys the lion's share of new features, and some of them are truly noteworthy. While not quite in the stop-the-presses category, we were impressed right from the jump with the program's awareness of the custom workspace that we worked hard on in version 12, and more important, its ability to accurately migrate it forward. On our first trip into X3, here is what we encountered.
The next thing we noticed was a Crop tool in the venerable Toolbox that resides in its traditional vertical position on the left side of the interface. Using it on vectors makes it a quickie Trim tool, which is only worth the rise of one eyebrow. But the fact that you can use it to crop bitmaps is huge, reducing by many orders of magnitude the previous methods of either using the Shape tool or powerclipping it into a smaller shape. Cropping bitmaps is now a completely painless, even enjoyable, procedure.
We then wasted not a moment creating a simple rectangle and exporting it. Our longest-standing frustration with Draw regards its creators’ decision to apply anti-aliasing to edges of graphics, straight lines, that do not need it. This has habitually resulted in fuzzy web graphics, requiring a trip to PhotoPaint to fix. Finally, with X3, there is some progress toward resolution, as you can see here. About half the time we get nice sharp lines, half the time we don't. Adding to the mystery is the fact that Corel’s development team reports that it is not exactly sure what it did to partially fix this. We look forward to the day that Corel’s developers get a better handle on this quirk and can succeed in resolving this issue completely.
As soon as we activated the Text tool, we discovered another deliverance from annoyance: The default typeface is now Arial, not that old and tired Avant Garde. Upon changing the typeface, we noticed that the drop-down list is a bit more sophisticated, showing you the typeface design as well as the groupings of styles around a given face. Both can be disabled if they cause performance problems (which they did not on our P4 2.8G).
Lots of ways to skin an object
Many of Draw X3's enhancements are in the form of automated routines that provide a quicker route to a task. The Smart Fill tool is a good example — if you needed to fill an intersection between two objects, you could use the Intersect command to create the object and then fill it. Or with X3, you invoke the Smart Fill tool and simply click the area to fill — the software does the heavy lifting for you. Furthermore, any intersections in a single open curve that overaps on itself can be filled — you can’t do that with Intersect...
Ditto for the new functions that automate beveling, embossing, filleting, scalloping, chamfering, or the creation of an outline around the boundary of a group of objects. Each of these effects (whether you have ever heard of them or not -- chamfering, you say?) could be done with existing tools, and in X3, they are one-click maneuvers with tools designed specifically for those tasks.
New Trace function the bomb
After years of languish, Corel has infused new life into its auto-tracing module and the effort will be worth it. The interface has been completely revamped so as to be more seamless within the Draw interface, and the level of friendliness makes tracing a pleasure.
More important, the results are better— our test produced superior output than from previous versions of Trace.
Critical improvements for traditional output
With so many CorelDraw users turning to the program for web graphics and presentation content, it's easy to forget that Corel's base remains with traditional output. We took some heat last year for our persistent urging that Corel go after the PowerPoint user. So we're gratified (and a bit relieved!) to see new features for printing that are not just window dressing.
First, X3 builds in support for spot color across a broad spectrum of objects that heretofore had ignored that color model. Mesh fills, gradients, transparency, and drop shadows can now all be rendered in a spot color. And these color assignments are honored when exported to all flavors of PostScript — EPS, AI, PDF — and as a Photoshop file.
The Publish to PDF engine sees evolution as well, with better support for transparency, password protection, and display of embedded EPS files (instead of the gray rectangle).
The Image Adjustment Lab
Cutting across Draw and Paint, the new Image Adustment Lab promises to be the magic tonic for many. Responding to the ever-increasing challenge that controls for photos be more intuitive and more powerful at the same time, this new engine places the effects used most often in one friendly dialog box. In the example linked here, it was quite simple to brighten up the shadows of the front girl's face. The Create Snapshot button is especially handy for trying out variations.
PhotoPaint on Cruise Control
The good news about the Image Adjustment Lab is also bad news: This nice new feature is just about all there is to say about PhotoPaint. Like Draw, Paint is more adept at maintaining spot color assignments in incoming files, but unlike Draw, there are few of the nice time-saving additions. In fact, there's only one — the Cutout Lab for creating objects and masks — and we find it to be of dubious value.
There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Paint X3 is both faster and more stable. And to be fair, the scripting engine has been overhauled, bringing scripability to several functions that were without them. We would view all of this as good news, obviously, but not enough to stem the tide of discontent we have already heard about the relative paucity of improvements to the product.
The other frustration is Corel's inclusion of support for raw camera formats; we use the word "include" advisedly. Corel has licensed Pixmantec's RawShooter, a program for opening, editing, and converting raw files, and while it works just fine, this move feels like an afterthought, or an initiative that lacked necessary resources. What Corel's users really want is support for raw files built directly into its applications, making this quick fix a disappointing compromise.
We are not surprised at what we perceive as an identity crisis for PhotoPaint. Since Corel acquired Paint Shop Pro, a program with a larger user base and higher brand recognition, its leaders have been faced with a dilemma about how best to leverage all of the pixel-pushing software they now own. We think it likely that Corel will consider integrating CorelDraw and Paint Shop in some way. Until then, Paint might continue to wither.
The Rest of the Box
Historically, Corel has produced ancillary components and products that have been lackluster. Its clipart has devolved, its typefaces have been stagnant, and various extra apps have been marginal at best. X3 is different:
TYPEFACES: All typefaces have been delivered in Open Type format. And while it's unfortunate that Corel couldn't rename the font filenames themselves, this is definitely a positive step.
CLIP ART: Not just tired icons and cartoonish figures, X3's clipart is more refined and more relevant, and its bitmap fills and patterns revamped.
THE DESIGN COLLECTION: CorelDraw's templates have been misunderstood and virtually ignored since version 5. But with the new Design Collection engine, Corel delivers well-conceived and usable template designs in a great interface.
Speaking of marginal apps, Corel has officially given up on RAVE, the Flash-creation tool that never lived up to the promise it never really had. Unable to move it forward, Corel did the only sensible thing in exercising digital euthanasia on it.
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The final observation has to do with Corel's long-standing affinity with reptiles. Ever since Bill Frymire won accolades for depicting his pet iguana in 1992, CorelDraw has had a strange kindred connection with amphibuous creatures, featuring them in its clipart collections, on its splash screens, and even using them in high-profile advertising campaigns.
But on the cover of the box? Sure enough, CorelDraw X3 features on the cover as its showcase graphic, a picture of a lizard. Granted, it's a very nice rendering with lots of delicate tonal shifts — undoubtedly a skillful display of the tools.
But please...is this the enduring image that Corel wants associated with its new version? We think not, and we can't even begin to imagine the conversation that ensued among the product marketing team that led them to this place.
So take our word for it that the software in the box is better conceived than the box itself. At $179 USD upgrade and $399 full ($20 cheaper in both cases for download only), CorelDraw remains one of the highest values you will find in graphics software. And so far, there are no outcries for immediate fixes to hopelessly broken new features. After about 60 hours of use, including lots of saves, exports, and prints, we have yet to crash once.
Devout PhotoPaint users will find few compelling reasons to upgrade; the rest of Corel's loyal userbase will enjoy the new features and the nice extras.