Smart FillAlso new, for DRAW users at least, is the Smart Fill tool. Like Illustrator CS2’s Live Paint capability, it lets you quickly fill any area enclosed by overlapping lines with a single click. The sketch-and-fill approach this opens up is far more intuitive than having to build up your drawings as enclosed shapes and proves particularly useful when working with traced drawings. Again, Corel doesn’t offer the same power and control as Adobe, as the region must be completely enclosed and the effect isn’t live, so that if you move the surrounding lines the fill doesn’t update automatically. However, there’s no need to set up Live Paint groups first, so for most jobs the Smart Fill tool does all you need. It’s a shame you’re restricted to applying only flat colour fills, though you can change this afterwards.
Image EditingAnother major introduction is X3’s Image Adjustment Lab. This is a new dialog that provides instant access to all of the most common colour-correction commands for managing temperature, tint, saturation, brightness, contrast and so on. It also offers the ability to explore options by saving snapshots of the current state of an image in a strip at the bottom of the dialog – click on one and its settings are instantly restored. Centralised control is certainly a step forward but, unlike Illustrator, all adjustments are applied destructively so you can’t call up the Lab and return to an earlier snapshot, and you can’t apply effects to vector objects as well as bitmaps.
OutputIn terms of final output, X3 sees a number of advances. When it comes to commercial print, there’s a new onscreen preview that attempts to simulate overprint settings. Spot colour handling is also more viable than before, as vector effects such as transparencies, mesh fills and blends can now contain both process and spot colours. Export to PDF has been enhanced, most noticeably with greater support for security and permissions. More generally, file compatibility and workflow integration with Adobe’s PostScript (EPS, PS) and Illustrator (AI) standards, not to mention Corel’s own DESIGNER (DES) and Paint Shop Pro (PSP) formats, have been improved.
ConclusionsThere’s no escaping the continued trend – more dropped applications, more dressing up existing features as new and, in some cases, making too much of very niche power. And there’s no avoiding the fact that where it used to lead, CorelDRAW now follows. After all, the two most exciting introductions in X3, PowerTRACE and Smart Fill, aren’t innovations but simply copies from the latest Illustrator – but neither feature improves on its rival.
On the other hand, for non-professional users, maximum power and control aren’t necessarily the be-all and end-all. PowerTRACE and Smart Fill are much simpler than their Adobe equivalents and so easier to take advantage of. Most office-based and occasional users will happily settle for 80 percent of the power if they can produce acceptable results in half the time. Throw in the fact that the X3 suite includes PHOTO-PAINT, 1000 OpenType fonts, plenty of clip-art and that, unlike Illustrator, the main CorelDRAW module can handle multipage publications, and it’s clear that CorelDRAW still has lots to offer.
The problem is trying to persuade non-professional users who aren’t pushing the envelope to upgrade. Thankfully for Corel, X3 is indeed the real thing. This is the first release in years that provides CorelDRAW users with new core power that will make a real difference to their everyday working experience, enabling them to produce better work more quickly. But there isn’t enough here to lure existing users of Illustrator.
Corel PHOTO-PAINT X3During its long history, the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite has included various applications for handling business presentations, basic 3D, animation, charting, desktop publishing and more. Nowadays, it’s been boiled down to the vector-based DRAW module and the bitmap-based PHOTO-PAINT. This makes the latter more important than ever to the success of the suite as a whole.
As you’d expect, some of its new features are shared with the main CorelDRAW module. There’s the new Hints docker that provides information about the active tool, and a Help menu which says what’s changed over the past few releases -- which isn’t much. More useful is the new Image Adjustment Lab, which doesn’t add new power but brings together the most common existing correction commands in one dialog. There’s also new support for spot colours, which can be created with the Channels docker and saved to both PHOTO-PAINT CPT and Photoshop PSD formats.
The Cutout Lab for extracting objects from their backgrounds now offers tools to restore and remove detail, an undo capability and the ability to export results as a new layer or as a clipping mask. But that’s about it and, to cover over the ever-widening cracks, Corel has resorted to bundling a cut-down copy of Pixmantec’s RawShooter for handling RAW format files -- a core capability if ever there was one in the age of the digital camera.
This is disappointing. At one time PHOTO-PAINT was a serious alternative to Photoshop itself, but now it lags behind even Photoshop Elements. The inclusion of, and integration with, PHOTO-PAINT should be the CorelDRAW suite’s greatest strength, but only if both stay up to date.
