CorelDraw Essentials

The cornerstone of Essentials is CorelDRAW 9, a robust illustration tool. With its rich interface, users can quickly create simple or complex object-based drawings. The extensive tool set contains everything from simple freehand pens and ellipse tools to a versatile Bezier tool, complex fill tools, a text editor, and more.

Lines and shapes are treated as vector objects, which means they're completely dynamic. CorelDRAW lets the user edit, group, bend, transform, and otherwise manipulate each object. An object manager makes it easy to keep track of scores or hundreds of lines, curves, and shapes in even the most complex drawings.

For bitmap editing, the package includes Corel PHOTO-PAINT, which on its own would be a commendable program. Its relatively small number of tools (compared to Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro 7) is highly customizable. PHOTO- PAINT's paint tool, for instance, is so adjustable that users can create virtually any kind of brush, sprayer, or other applicator they desire.

The program also includes more pedestrian--but still welcome--picture effects. Lens and distortion effects, for instance, let users apply cylindrical, spherical, and other diffusive warps to their images. Users can sharpen and soften images, adjust colors and gamma, and tweak their pictures in dozens of other ways. PHOTO-PAINT can even split images into distinct color channels, including CMYK.

CorelDRAW and PHOTO-PAINT are tightly integrated, using their relative strengths to complement each other, and together they comprise a powerful one-two punch of full-featured image manipulation. Even though there's little feature overlap between the two, they share a few welcome conveniences--among them, step-by-step exporters that allow users to create HTML and PDF files out of their creations.

With a heaping slab of user friendliness, CorelDRAW Essentials is one of the easiest drawing programs to master. However, that doesn't mean it's simplistic; folks who can't quite master Windows Paint will find it daunting. Alternately, professional graphics designers, layout artists, and other veterans of the full-scale CorelDRAW suites will miss certain high-end layout features. Still, if you're looking for an affordable, yet sophisticated image-editing package, CorelDRAW Essentials is a good bet. --Joel Durham, Jr.

Amazon.com Review
CorelDRAW Essentials is a suite of graphics applications based on version 9 of Corel's highly respected vector drawing program CorelDRAW and its image editing application Photo-Paint. Having already released CorelDRAW 10, Corel is providing the prior versions of these applications within CorelDRAW Essentials--optimized for Windows XP at an extremely affordable price.

With version 9, Corel took DRAW from a quirky and complex application to a professional package, competing with the likes of Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. Sophisticated features such as the Mesh Fill tool and Natural Media tool make it possible to quickly create eye-popping illustrations. Additionally, DRAW was well ahead of the competition in introducing transparency--simulating the effect produced by layering partially transparent objects on top of one another.

The CorelDRAW interface also underwent an overhaul in version 9. The widespread introduction of dockers (collapsible, dockable tool palettes) and expandable color palettes make for a cleaner, more uncluttered workspace. The interface is also much more consistent; tools all work in a similar fashion and the Photo-Paint and DRAW workspaces resemble each other much more closely.

Like DRAW, Photo-Paint offers all the high-end functionality you're likely to want and then some. Photo-Paint's strengths include its exhaustive list of supported file formats, support for Photoshop-compatible plug-ins, and good Web production features. It also has everything you need to produce immersive 360-degree QuickTime VR panoramas.

The suite also includes Corel Capture, Barcode Wizard, QuickTime 5, and Canto Cumulus Desktop 5 LE--an excellent application for picture archival. As such, CorelDRAW Essentials makes a good choice for a small business needing in-house graphics, or for an individual with demanding graphics requirements that span the range from print to Web. --Ken McMahon

Amazon.com Product Description
A powerful and easy-to-use suite of programs, CorelDRAW Essentials offers graphics, page layout, photo editing, and painting tools to help you create dynamic graphics projects for print and the Web. The intuitive user interface and handy project-based tutors get you up and running in no time.

CorelDRAW Essentials includes:

• CorelDRAW 9: graphics and page layout (modified version)
• Corel Photo-Paint 9: photo editing and painting (modified version)
• Digital versions of the how-to guides CorelDRAW 9: The Official Guide and Corel Photo-Paint 9: The Official Guide by Osborne/McGraw-Hill
• Canto Cumulus Desktop LE 5.0 for media asset management
• Corel Capture 9: a screen capture utility
• Adobe Acrobat Reader 5
• QuickTime 5
• Digimarc digital watermarking
• Human Software's Squizz
• 5,000 high-quality clip art images and symbols
• 1,000 high-resolution photos
• 1,000 photo objects
• 100 TrueType fonts