Great software. I saw a very good price at Buy dot com. Just search for CGS12ENGPC.

I have a 5MP DSC camera and use Photo-Paint 10 for all my digital photo work. I am continually irritated by the inability to set default values for the ruler. To edit EVERY photo using pixels, the process is Tools : Options : Units : Pixels ; OK – FIVE clicks for EVERY photo. I thought this would have been fixed in Photo-Paint 12 since the issue is continually brought up in Support. I downloaded the trial version of CorelDraw 12 from corel.com and alas it has not been fixed. I would pay the upgrade price for this feature alone.

I have been using CorelDraw since version 3 quite a few years ago. Although I have used Photoshop and Illustrator, I find myself using CorelDraw for word processing right up to anything I can think of for productivity and publishing. I got a new computer with XP on it and decided that it was time to look into an upgrade for CorelDraw since I did not upgrade for several versions. After reading the reviews here on Amazon.com, I was excited to try this program once again. I was FURIOUS when I received my upgrade with NO MANUAL!!!! I opened up the box and found a note that if you want the manual with the clipart, font, etc information, you had to call the company AND PAY AN ADDITIONAL $32 FOR IT!!!! WHY DIDN’T ANYONE SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THIS???? The price for CorelDraw 12 upgrade would be okay if the manuals came with it, but unfortunately, if you want the clipart guides and lists you have to shell out another $32. I have found CorelDraw to be a decent improvement over my older versions, but quite frankly, nothing has thrilled me too much about it that I am raving about the upgrade. The only manual that came with the upgrade is rather dry and sparse. All in all, I am disappointe in this product, although it does not move along as slowly as I expected it to, being an XP program and loaded with so many supposed extras. Of all of the CorelDraw versions I have tried, I still like version 7 the best for the interface, but the Photopaint back then was lacking. If the manuals had all come with this upgrade, I might have better things to say about it, but without them, the program is substandard and low class for the money. The clipart manual is spiral bound, by the way, which is an improvement over previous versions. The company maintains that most people have CorelDraw 11 so they do not need a clipart manual. Whatever that means. Quite stupid considering that the upgrade requirements do not even require that you have a previous version of CorelDraw, but you can upgrade from other brands like Adobe.

I have been using CorelDraw since it first came out. This software has helped me create stunning results effortlessly. Also, CorelDraw’s layout and ease of use beats Adobe products hands-down! I love CorelDraw and hope they stay in there as they have a “winner” of a product despite Adobe’s overly-touted, expensive and snobby software. Hang in there CorelDraw, you’re the very best… I love your product! Been a loyal fan of yours for years and years…

With all due respect to the person who says that there’s nothing new in CorelDRAW 12 over even version 9, what the heck are you using and what features?Just looking at my version 9 and my new version 12, there are a bunch of things that make the difference for me:* Windows XP support* Symbols support* Enhanced snapping* CutOut tool for masking in Photopaint* Dynamic guides* Smart drawing tools* PDF enhancements* Export for Office* Preflighting engine* Color Management interface* Web image optimization* Faster Photopaint* RAVE animation* Image slicingMaybe you don’t think there’s much of a reason to upgrade, but I *LOVE* this new release

Well, I’ve been in love with CorelDraw since version 5 but it’s all over between us. 12 is a waste of time and money. This application is horribly overadvertised and is terribly unstable (you can crash it without even trying). The list of bugs is too numerous too mention here but the corel newsgroups (censored for the most honest comments) are filled with bug lists. Here are some of the worst: ROLLOVER (application crashes when attempting to add alt comment), PRINT MERGE (Cursor sticks when inserting fields & ODBC fails to connect to Access database), DROP SHADOWS (Creates a hard edge with box when making a PDF on any item under the shadow), WORD IMPORT OR PASTE (Incorrect erratic formatting for indents and numbered lists), PDF EXPORT (Fonts exported as Trutype will cause all Dingbat style picture fonts to fail), TEX DISTORTION FROM PREVIOUS COREL VERSIONS (Incorrect text kerning when opening previous files generated in other versions), and WEB IMAGE EXPORT (Erratic scaling issue). The best reason to avoid this application is that Corel tech support – and customer support in general – has regressed to the point where they don’t much seem to care about the quality of upgrades before they release them. The support responses are sarcastic, incomplete, and hasty. What happened to our friends at Corel? I don’t know but my work time is too valuable to waste training them to produce sound applications. I want to be traded! (Note – why isn’t there a ‘no star’ rating? Or even a negative? That seems more appropriate for this application…)

I have used Coreldraw for almost 6 years everyday in my job from version 9 thru 12. I was so comfortable with Coreldraw 9 and it was very easy to learn. It was an amazing program for screenprint and embroidery purposes. I upgraded to 11 and they changed all the icons on the toolbars, alienating all the Corel 9 users, but the basics of the program where still there. This is a minor point as its still a great program. Luckily Corel 12 has the same toolbar look as 11 so I’m now used to it. Corel 12 is a much more stable program than 11 and I have yet had a problem with it crashing. Corel have added some nice features, including the smart drawing tool. You can draw a rough shape and the program will convert it a clean square or circle. This can save alot of time if you want to lay things out quickly. You can also take a clean straight line object and easily give it a jagged edge with the move of the mouse. The Corel program in general is easier to use than Illustrator as its more down to earth, and alot more direct to achieve the same effects. The options to customise the program are mindblowing, as you can set all your own shortcuts, add and remove certain tools and even re-design the look of the icons if you wish. There is also a setting to make Corel look like the Illustrator workspace so that anyone stepping over from Adobe will not feel out of place. Corel have always had easier print options than Adobe. The seperation and prepress tabs are easy to follow and change. Luckily this hasn’t changed since previous versions. It also has a wide range of file supports, including EPS, JPEG, Adobe Illustrator and DXF. The other programs that come in the suite easily compete with the Adobe CS suite. Especially Corel Trace, which does an excellent job of tracing bitmap images to Vector. Unfortunately I have come to realise that Corel 12 has lost certain small features that all the previous version have kept. When you use a program everyday you get used to shortcuts and methods of designing. But now Corel 12 makes you go the long way round. Small things like not being able to edit an object if its grouped to others, and not being able to make simple changes to nodes without accessing it with the shape tool. These are all minor things that otherwise make for a great design program for the fraction of the price of Adobe CS. I highly recommend it.

Yikes. Where to begin? Import/Export functions are totally whacked (I dare you to try to import Word tables or use Adobe formats with this release). DRAW still has major problems handling text and, unbelievably, the pdf powers of this app are woefully inadequate. Corel has also set a new level for disaster by making this product incompatible with not only Adobe and MS formats, but also with previous versions of CorelDRAW (text distortion is a big problem here). No wonder professional designers and service bureaus shun all things Corel. This product should have been released on April Fools Day.

I’ve been using Corel products since version 2 or 3 (I just don’t remember), when the whole program (Corel DRAW those days) could fit in three 5 1/2 inch floppy disks. Every upgrade since then has been amazing, and they fulfill every niche that’s left unexplored in the previous one. A very easy-to-use interface and a very user-friendly application is what you’ll get with the graphic suite 12. Of course, it demands a lot from your hardware (and I mean A LOT), but with the right configuration of hardware and operative system, you’ll be almost as crash free as with a Mac (well, not quite… ). The integration between the components of the suite is seamless and very easy to implement. The automatic updates keeps your software up and running with the latests releases; and the portability of objects to Office and other Windows based programs results in optimizing my time. I use Corel for everything, from page layout (leaflets, magazines and newspapers), to image editing, to pre-printing jobs. Taking in account the cost and the frendliness of the application I always wonder how people still buys Adobe. Just buy this and you wont regret it

And I know it’s hard for Illustrator die hards to hear, but the new Corel is still easier/faster to use. The new linked symbols has been a real bonus too. After experiancing frustrating problems with Adobe Illustrater version 9 interfacing with other programs (even within it’s own suite) we have are now back to Corel 12. The simple ability see selected text in different fonts in a flyout makes it worth it’s weight against Illustrator, never mind the ability to have multiple pages in one file. As for Photopaint versus Photoshop, we switch between the 2 for different effects so price is the only consideration for us on comparing those two. Can’t comment on Rave, haven’t played with it yet.

Despite the silly negative comments regarding this release, the product is as solid as ever. Corel once again exceed the expectation for a graphic package priced under $300.

I downloaded a version of Corel Graphics Suite 12 to check it out before I bought it. I’ve been using Corel since 7 and have a copy of Draw 11 but did’nt get the Graphics Suite and was really looking to upgrade my Photo Paint to 12. I took some screen captures and when I created as new image in Photo Paint 12 they were all dim and blurry. I thought maybe this was my capture (alt + printscreen) that was the problem so I used the Corel Capture in the Suite and it was the same. Nothing I did seemed to aleviate the dimness and slight blur to the image. I tried opening the images in Windows Paint and they looked fine, so I requested help on the Corel site to see if the service pack fixed this problem with the Screen captures. They said there is no fix for this in the patch. So I started checking more and saved the picture in Windows paint as a .jpg and opened it in Corel Paint and it was blurry. I took a different screen shot and opened it in paint and saved it as a .jpg and then opened it in Windows Paint and it was fine. When I updated my problem ticket with the new information the guy just re-iterated that there was no change in screen captures in the patch. I would have waited for them to fix it to buy it but with irritating tech support that’s obviously not reading the whole help ticket I will be avoiding Corel from now on.

This is an excellent graphics program which suits my needs well.

I am an amature photographer and painter. And I love using photoshop too. But I can’t afford photoshop. Adobe makes great products but they are overpriced. This is why I got Corel Graphics Suite. It supports all the plug-in’s for photoshop, does pretty much everything photoshop and illustrator can and all for a cheaper price. If you are just starting out with computer graphics this is a good alternative to Adobe. Or if you are a student with little or no money and need a legit image suite this is the way to go.

CorelDraw 12 is the best bargain in graphics today. It is reliable and very easy to use. You don’t have to pay the hefty ransom Adobe demands for Photoshop and Illustrator because CorelDraw can do most of the things that Adobe does with far more flexible and easier-to-master interfaces. This is powerful, first-class software. For about 1/2 the price of either Photoshop OR Illustrator, you get get top notch bitmap AND vector editing. You also get a slew of good fonts, in both Type 1 and True Type formats, from a variety font vendors including Adobe, Agfa, and Bitstream. These fonts alone are worth the cost of the program. About the only area where you would need Illustrator instead of CorelDraw is in prepress production, where the Illustrator’s ability to open and modify almost any Postscript file is unsurpassed. However, this is also Illustrator’s main weakness in that it is so tightly coupled to the Postscript language that the drawing metaphors are very complex and hard to use for creating new art. With Coreldraw, you can create complex graphics with powerful, wonderfully interactive drawing tools, and a clean, easy-to-master interface. Photopaint is no poor stepchild to CorelDraw, especially since version 8. It fully supports Adobe Photoshop layers, but Photopaint also supports a much more friendly object-oriented metaphor, where bitmaps can be stacked, aligned and rotated on each other just like vector objects in CorelDraw. Various filters and transparencies can be applied interactively to each object. This makes it much easier to experiment and often results in fewer trips to menus compared to photoshop. The import/export filters are just fine thank you. CorelDraw writes and reads a vast number of formats including Illustrator, Photoshop (.psd), postcript, pdf, and CAD files with good accuracy. I don’t know what is wrong with .pdf support because CorelDraw makes excellent PDFs with plenty of control, over font embedding, converting font outlines to curves, bitmap downsampling options, and color conversion. As a programmer, I love the VBA macro languages used by both Photopaint and CorelDraw. I have used them to automate the creation of web interface elements. The commercial sign industry uses CorelDraw almost exclusively. If it was as terrible as the Mac/Adobe bigots would have you believe, you would think these vendors would have found some other program by now. It isn’t, try the demo and see for yourself.

Are the fonts Corel includes the same high-quality Bitstream fonts they included back when the version number was in single-digits?

In Photo-paint when rotating 1-bit objects at increments other than multiples of 90 degrees anti-aliasing fails and the object edges become jagged and random artifacts appear in the object background. Version 9 of the software did not have this problem. This is a major problem for those working with black and white images. After much stonewalling the customer service admitted that they were aware of the problem but had no plan for a fix. I wrote (not email) to president of Corel complaining that they should provide a fix. I received no response. Version 12 is no great improvement over version 9, and in my case it is worse. The company no longer seems concerned with customer service and a quality product.

Hi, I’ve used CorelDraw on the PC since version 1 blew me away at a PC Expo. Since then I have upgraded at least every other version with the only regret being #6. To be fair though, that was the days of the 486 PC and I was asking a lot of the software. Bottom line, many of Draw’s standard features were long after appearing as “major” upgrades to Illustrator. CorelDraw always seems to be ahead of the curve not only feature wise but in ease of use. Even today editing nodes in Illustrator is much more awkward. There are many free resources, tutorials and help available as well as CDUG, one of the friendliest and genuinly helpful user groups around (no flames, newbys welcome). Yes, keep Illustrator. I use it as my most expensive import / export filter. FWIW

Corel offers a lot of functionality and advanced features for the price. Where it slips up is in the import/export arena. It has a number of quirks with Word tables, and export to Illustrator and other Adobe formats just doesn’t seem to work consistently. Service bureaus rarely support Corel so this is important. It could also use some more tutorials and more detailed walk throughs on how to do more advanced applications. With this it feels like trying to use Linux in a Microsoft world. With software, trying to save a few bucks or go against the mainstream comes with a cost.

I got this to make simple designs, for shirts, etc. I must say that it is extremely complicated. It’s way too picky about what you can do and how you can do it. Not user-friendly at all. I’ve gotten a basic understanding of it over the past several months, but generally, it’s just way too much. Too complicated. It did come with several other programs, such as a photo program, an animation program, etc. but all in all, I wish I had Photoshop.

I’ve used them all: Illustrator, Corel, Photoshop, Fireworks, MS Word (I know, I know..) Pagemaker; now Indesign. Since the 386 processor i’ve used these programs. Corel Draw has ALWAYS been easier to use. Yes they ALL have powerful features but for me, Corel Draw has been the vector based graphic program that I like and count on. I primarily use Corel Draw 12 and Photoshop CS. With these two programs you can do everything short of 3D animation. Theres is no easier way to create a poster or a flyer or a newsletter than Corel Draw! This program is awesome because it is powerful AND easy to use! My recommendation: Get Corel 12 and Photoshop CS. You’ll thank me!

If you own a copy of CorelDRAW 9 or later, there isn’t really any reason to purchase this product. Corel has done very little to the software, and some perennial Corel failings (poor text manipulation, large file sizes, slow redraw times and general bugginess) are still there. I’m actually not sure what they did to this suite that makes it markedly different from their other offerings. I think Corel RAVE has been improved, but seriously, who uses Corel RAVE? It doesn’t come anywhere near to what Flash can do. Corel PHOTO-PAINT is still okay, but who needs it when PhotoShop is still better and the industry standard to boot? So, until Corel makes noticeable improvements to its products, I see no reason to spend money on them.

I’ve been using CorelDRAW and PPT since version 4, and I must say that the latest version, whether it be because of the patch or not, is widly unstable. For instance, 5 minutes ago I threw together a texture for a 3D model I’d been working on and as soon as I switched to the “Brush” swatch, crashed. The App Recovery Wizard doesn’t even work correctly. It hangs and says the same thing each time. This crash happens often, reguardless of the operation you are doing and only seems to target certain machine setups. Tech support used to be good, however, they suck now and the sarcasm I’ve gotten from some of them made me want to punch glass objects. Please Corel, patch 12 so it works! AR

I have been a CorelDraw user since version 3, and have owned every version except 6, and even beta tested a couple. Draw12 is terrific. I use it on a daily basis for everything from technical illustration, to 4-color advertising, to landscape design, and beyond. This version is very stable. The snapping options alone are worth the price of admission. I output prepress PDF files with no problem. PhotoPaint is also a major player. Somebody complained that an object rotation of less than 90 degrees caused major blurring of the object. I found some blurring to occur, but running the unsharp mask clears it up nicely. All in all, terrific bang for the buck.

Hey, I’ve been a hard core user of CorelDraw since it’s inception, and people I have nothing but praise for this product, alas, Version 12 although with some terrific features it is the most bugged software I have ever used, I have found so many bugs that I have reported to Corel that I may as well be a QA tester for their future BETA’s. I’ve been a proponent of Corel and their products for the last 14 years, now I’m (finally) moving to Illustrator, considering that it has caught up with features and the usability of Corel. Hey If you want to whip off rinki-dink design, simple signs or basic illustration this tool is for you, but if you do anything complex, expect crash, after crash. I have a log of over 1300 application failures in 1.5 years on 3 different systems, that Corel Tech’s couldn’t figure out. Maybe it was with the Transfer of power at the company, who knows. I foresee the Draw product defunct within 3 years. Unless they truly tighten up the software issues that plague the product.