I got this program for my son, who enjoys technical drawing and has ever touched a professional drawing application such as Illustrator. If you’ve used Illustrator for any length of time, then yyou know that it has a steep learning curve. What Adobe product doesn’t? I felt, based on the product description and the user reviews, that Corel Draw would be less intimidating for him to learn. Right off the bat, I was impressed by how user-friendly this program was. You can easily create a professional looking logo, business card and matching letterhead in under an hour. However, I wasn’t as impressed with the photo filters in the Draw program. Plus I couldn’t preview the filter result before I clicked OK, unlike Photoshop. That said, I liked how I didn’t have to mess around with a Lasso tool (or equivalent) to select objects that I needed to change. For example, if I wanted to change the white stripes on a zebra to purple, all I have to do is select the color in the color palette, and then click on a white stripe. Hoila! Instant change with minimal preparation. Other features I enjoyed were the ability to manipulate text with the drag of a mouse while previewing it in real time. Corel has a multi-page preview feature that Adobe doesn’t, which is wonderful if you have multiple versions of, say, a three-page flyer. You don’t have to open each file to see which one is correct with Corel Draw. As a designer, I really appreciated the Concept Tool because it allows you to gain feedback on your designs from other Corel users. The video tutorials are some of the best that I’ve seen. I recommend that you take the time to watch these first, although you can learn the basics just by poking around for a bit. Highly recommended for beginning designers. Recommended for experienced designers.

i had to run this on my newer computer. runs on a lot of memory. used it for comic book creating applications and photographs. really has a lot of great and creative uses. never had a program like this before and really don’t know how i got along without it. it was a little intimidatig at first. still getting to learn my way around it. love it.

I have been impressed by Corel’s programs, of late. My recent experience with their Painter Essentials 4, a home art studio that offers a full suite of artistic media in a well designed program, replete with every digital art technology you can imagine, has been a lot of fun. What distinguishes that program are the extensive tutorials and videos and an informative companion guidebook. Although there are an enormous number of techniques to learn, help is never far away. The CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 is a much vaster program, with a manifold of graphics applications. If it involves illustration, layouts, design, photo-editing, tracing or a panoply of digital images, fonts, clipart or royalty free photos, it is probably somewhere in here! There simply hasn’t been enough time to sample everything available in this full-featured suite, but whatever I have tried has been comparatively easy to learn. Once again there is extensive help available: with comprehensive learning videos, tutorials and interactive hints as assistance in getting started using the suite’s many powerful tools. One notable aspect of this program is the ability to preserve the quality of your photos with RAW format support for hundreds of cameras. If you own any of the commonly used digital cameras, RAW support is probably available. The photo retouching and enhancement image-editing tools are effective, although you will have to consult those video tutorials if you intend to get the most out of the program. This is a superb Graphics Suite. It will take awhile to master it, but given the enormous number of features and their effectiveness, it will definitely be worth it.

I’m still trying to get the hang of all the nuances of this program, but I find the CorelDRAW program to be quite useful for making funky art. I had been using Corel Painter Classic (a freebie program that came with my Intuos several years ago) and Microsoft Expression for working on “paintings,” drawings, other types of original digital art, and this is quite good. I was never able to make proper curves using Expression but with CorelDRAW it’s quite easy. Still, it’s pretty darned expensive for someone who merely dabbles in digital art; if I were going to spend this kind of money, I’d opt for Painter X, the latest full release which incorporates all the Painter Classic features I like, plus more. I rarely want to manipulate or touch up photos (all I usually do is crop them), so I haven’t explored the PhotoPaint portion.

Although I’ve designed everything from book covers to web sites, I have limited experience with high priced graphics software. If I ever used Photo Shop, it was only because a trial version came with my computer. Once the free trial expired, I relied on Microsoft Paint and, later, a program packaged with my digital camera. Mainly, though, I relied on my own ingenuity. It was my ingenuity, and many painstaking hours of tedious work, that really saw me through, however. So, I was very excited when CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 arrived. Surely, it would make graphic design easier and give me more exacting professional results. Boy, did it ever. I have yet to explore all of this program’s capabilities, but the tools I have used are impressive, indeed. Editing and enhancing images, which are two of my ever present needs, can be accomplished with a speed and precision that wasn’t possible when using other, less sophisticated programs. Converting poor quality bitmap images into sharp, clear reproductions was another task that CorelDRAW can accomplish with results that I did not believe were even possible. You can even generate barcodes with this program! And you can draw – I mean really DRAW (providing, of course, you already possess that skill). I have only touched the surface but one of the advantages of this program are the tutorials and training videos included. They effectively provide answers to whatever questions may arise. Whether you’re a professional or an amateur, or somewhere in the middle, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 will probably serve your needs. As someone who is more in the middle but still more amateur than pro, I recommend this program to anyone seeking professional quality in their graphics projects. Brian W. Fairbanks

CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 is a very solid program. It does most of what Adobe Illustrator does (vector-based graphic design) and much of what Adobe InDesign does (desktop publishing) in one handy application. CorelDraw would be an ideal solution for a small business or organization that does a fair amount of advertising-creation and publication design in-house. With one application (well-priced when compared to buying both Illustrator and InDesign), the content creator can achieve very professional results. The app is also friendly to first-time users. It offers more than 80 customizable document templates that will be useful to newbies. While there is still a learning curve for new users, the app has an intuitive interface that will help get the user up and running relatively quickly. The problem for CorelDraw is that Illustrator has become the default vector app in the design/pre-press community. Professionals should still start with Illustrator and Quark and/or InDesign — they’re the industry standards. While CorelDraw is very good, it would need to be awesome to unseat Illustrator, and that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. CorelDraw has new file formats that enable docs to be shared between CorelDraw and Adobe apps. This is handy, but also shows which format and apps are the most common — Adobe’s. If you’re in a design situation where you’re going to have to worry about your files working in Adobe formats, you should just go ahead and use Adobe products. Another thing: Because the Adobe products are the standard, there are numerous training DVDs and books to purchase that can help you get the most out of your apps. With CorelDraw, not so much. I feel bad for good apps like CorelDraw. I wish I could talk just about the app itself and not bring in a discussion about Adobe’s competitive products, but given the way the design industry works — or any technology-based industry, for that matter — you always have to bring the front-running application into the mix. That being said, if you’re not a graphic designer or a pre-press operator but are instead a multitasking, Windows-based employee at a company or organization who has been put in charge of creating brochures, pamphlets and the like, CorelDraw will answer your needs very well. If you’re someone who doesn’t need to share files often with design colleagues, publishing clients or service bureaus (who are most likely using Adobe apps almost exclusively), then you have no worries. BTW, if you’re already using CoreDraw, it’s worth the upgrade. The font-identifying tool alone makes it worth it, at least for me.

Not having used Corel products before put me at a disadvantage, but from what I can tell it seems like it does everything advertised.

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 The Unleashing: The first thing you’ll notice when you get this is the fact that it’s a very compact box. What could be in this thing? For starters, there’s a huge descriptive spiral manual which lists in alphabetical order every single font, background, etcetera that you could ever possibly use. This is immensely helpful if you are a better reader from paper, or feel it’s easier to read from the format of the book (due to its spiral binding) instead of the library database from the program. Next in the box comes a graphic user guide for when you need any help on any of the thousands of tools at your disposal. The 458 pages that are included will be sure not to leave you puzzling when you need something specific done. Fortunately, unlike most other products, the book is easy to navigate and won’t force you to end up reading a full chapter to get one piece of knowledge on how to use a programs feature properly. For newer people (and some intermediates/experts) the box comes with a handbook that includes insights from the experts. Just from a quick gaze, anyone can tell these tips, in synergy with the user guide, will lead to an extremely easy time using the program. The tips that you can find in there are detailed to a point where anyone can understand them and moreover include tricks for shortening your time that you spend on projects. The final kicker is that the box comes with a Quick Reference Card. This isn’t a card as much as it is a four-page laminated medium-sized chart. Each page contains shortcuts and enlarged icons for people who need help finding them or, as originally intended, for reference. In short, perfect for people who like lists. Installation and extras: The CD that comes with the product is extremely easy to find, comes in a durable paper sleeve, and has its serial key on the back of it (a perfect design for people who are used to not finding the key buried inside one of the thick manuals). When you insert the CD, it will go to a menu describing what you would like to do. All that’s needed is to click the installation button and install it, which takes little time to complete, and is only about one gigabyte of hard drive space. This is amazing for computers with not much hard drive space, and is definitely small in size compared to the hulking higher size (up to multiple gigabytes of memory) programs you may see. If interested, after installing, you may go back to the other options included with the menu. In total, including the installation option, there are 4 menu selections you may make. There are the installation extras which include a huge library of selectable graphics and fonts, which is mainly for experimentation, outgoing designs, and overall perfection of detail. Next, you may watch as many as 18 training videos, which is useful for describing and to help people who learn visually. Finally, there is a nice screen saver and wallpaper for people who enjoy the look of, or otherwise use CorelDraw. Lastly, there are other programs that you may install with it if you deem necessary. All of these are useful and used for different things. Definitely helps organization. The program itself: For a program that is so immense in library database and tool amount, it is actually relatively easy to navigate through any of the menus that are at your disposal. The program has been set up in a way that is unique, making things fast and simple. The most enjoyable aspect is that you end up doing very little of the work, because most of the tools will do it for you. All that’s required from you is that you guide the program on what to do, and it’s almost as if it completes itself. Even drawing something manually becomes easy with the tools, especially when you want to shade, color, darken, brighten — mostly anything. The tools are seemingly endless and customizable, meaning that if applied correctly, you will never be without an automatic ability to adjust objects, text, drawings, layers, and etcetera. Final impression: Ultimately, most of the knowledge you will learn comes from experience, and this program is definitely not something that will leave you learning nothing. The books are only there to help you and advance you along the way when you’re stuck. Moreover, learning how to do the things in the program itself can be helped along with the books, but with such ease of use, you will find yourself having more fun than it being a chore. Just from a few days, even as little as a few hours, you can feel you have learned more and gotten more experience from this program than from many of the the others available out there. Rating: This program deserves nothing less than a 5/5. It’s easy to use, has a well-made interface, and finally, can lead you to the perfecting of your technique.

I’m going to do a short review here and say that Corel has some advantages over Photoshop for photomanipulation or editing. Where Photoshop Elements (a fine piece of software) has you estimate or use your monitor and judgment for fixing photos, CorelDraw’s Photo suite has an Integrated Image Adjustment Lab –and it tells you how you are going to affect the data on a RAW image, losing image quality by various adjustments. Instead of eyeballing what you are doing, you can retain maximum detail in highlights and shadows using their sliders and suggestions. When you exceed the limits and start to lose detail, an exclamation point crops up on the slider, showing you that you have degraded the photo quality. This is probably the best photo editing software I’ve used for that reason. While I like the competing PhotoShop Elements for ease of use and the fun effect, CorelDraw has more professional features and the interface for photoediting is full of information yet easy to use. Big thumbs up.

The product offers similar features to Adobe’s Illustrator but lacks in special effects such as easy type warping and 3-D objects. It did not allow me to save as a pdf file. This software was easy to use even for a beginner. It has some of the same tools you would find in a vector program i.e. pen, line, shapes, selections, etc. Building new color swatches was a snap too. When you needed to look for a feature or option, they were also easy to find, and you did not have to waste a lot of time digging. Overall a very good product.

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 is amazing. Whether you are touching up photos, or drawing graphics, it has everything you need. I use Adobe Illustrator CS3 at work as I am a Web & Graphic Designer. When I had the opportunity to get this software for home, it was a great opportunity. I must say that I like CDGSX4 as much or even more than Illustrator. But, I’m not here to compare. I like the way that CDGSX4 can trace a scanned or bitmap graphic and create a vector version which can then be later manipulated. This is a very useful feature. I used this software to design plans for a room addition we are doing and I found it easy to use all the tools to accomplish this in a relatively quick time. In fact our contractor says he is looking to buy this software. It also lets you export your drawings in a number of formats including .PDF. It also lets you import many different formats such as Adobe Illustrator. I highly recommend this software to anyone who is into graphics. It’s easy to use, a lot of tools and the suite also comes with photo software that supports RAW format. I haven’t found anything about this software that I found hard to use, or didn’t work correctly. The installation was very quick and easy. I have Vista Ultimate. No problems with it whatsoever. If you are in the market for a graphics program. This is one to seriously consider.

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 is an amazing thing – it can get someone like me, computer challenged, where the creative, graphics and visual aspects are needed – I can visualize what I want, but have found it hard to put those thoughts in a file like I want them. This product helps to just that – with remarkable ease. This is a must for anyone who does a lot of visual creations with the computer, and Corel is one of the premier names in computer quality products. An excellent product.

I just received this software a few days ago and installed it, so I’m still going through it learning how to use it. But the photo editing software is pretty cool. I think it’s better than paint. The features are definately easier to use and the book that comes along with it helps you out if you get stuck along the way. Again, I just received it a few days ago, so I’m still going through it learning how to use it. But the program I’ve used first was Photo-Paint. What you can do with a photo is pretty amazing. I cannot wait to see what else I can do with the other components of this graphics suite. Pretty impressed so far.

I was so excited about trying this new drawing program since I do a lot of images on my blog. But imagine my surprise when I opened the box and popped the CD into my hard drive to find out that I need a DVD-Rom drive. UGH! Hopefully I’ll get one of those soon and try this software which is amazingly packaged. Like I said, it’s probably cool, but I didn’t read the fine print requiring the DVD-Rom. FYI!

This review is for the full retail version of Coreldraw X4. Reviewer Information: I owned and used Version 8 of Corel Suite for years until XP came out and incompatibilities made it unusable. I’ve also used version 10. Most of my experience has been with Photopaint, the image editing software. I have less experience with Coreldraw (the layout and design software) as it has less practical applications for what I do. I’ve also used Photoshop (the competing program to Photopaint), both in its full suite and Elements versions. The computer I used this software on is an Intel Quad Core processor with 4 gigabytes of RAM, running Windows XP, which is high above the specs required to run the suite. The software runs absolutely beautifully on my machine, though CorelDraw did crash to desktop (that is, completely shut down without warning) on one occasion when I had both it and PhotoPaint up. Package: Coreldraw X4 comes in a large box and includes the DVD-ROM, a manual, an insight handbook, a font and clipart reference book, a quick reference card and a CoralDraw sticker. The manual is quite beefy for manuals these days, and contains a great deal of information that would be useful to newcomers to the program. Of course, the manual is nice, but with the mass of detailed online help, tutorials and hint menus available in the programs themselves, it’s going to be mostly useful for the newcomer. The suite comes with a large collection of clipart and textures and fonts, so the book of clipart thumbnails and font samples is a nice tool as well. I was impressed by the wealth of information available in the programs themselves. Much effort has clearly been made to make the programs user friendly despite the obvious learning curve. It’s loaded with detailed help descriptions and the DVD has over 2 hours of video tutorials for the new user. Of particular use for me was the optional hint window that appears to the left of the screen of Photopaint and Coreldraw. Depending on what tool you’re using, it will provide information and tips on how to use it. Another helpful tool in the help menu is one that will highlight all the new features that have been added to the programs since older versions. New features will be highlighted in menus and toolbars in a light orange, indicating them as a new feature since the version chosen. Users may select versions as far back as 9. It’s quite a useful feature for people migrating from older versions. The suite itself also contains several programs beyond the main two. Bitstream is a program used to navigate through fonts. Since the power user will probably have a lot of fonts from elsewhere, Bitstream allows one to navigate fonts by type and style as well as create font groups for organizational purposes. Of course, CorelDraw itself also incorporates a real-time feature that updates highlighted text on the screen with the font shown as you scroll over different ones in the dropdown menu. Man that makes life easier. CorelCapture is a screen capture program designed specifically for screen capture (taking pictures of what is displayed on the monitor). It has numerous customization options for screencapping, including changing the DPI of the sceencap, the image type and even the scaling used. It allows the user to dump directly to a printer, to Coreldraw itself or to a file. Out of interest, I tested this with a couple games, and it seemed to work with all of the games I tried. The suite also includes a profiler program to create profiles for professional workflow, as well as a duplexing wizard to simplify double sided printing on printers that can only print one sided. CorelDraw CorelDraw is a graphic arts drawing tool with layout and vectoring capabilities, similar to Adobe Illustrator. I played with it a bit, doing a few drawing and graphics layouts with it. I’m not a power user by any means, but I found that some of the tools appear to not be as intuitive as they could be. Of course, that could be my lack of knowledge in this area. The sheer complexity of what it is capable of makes it powerful enough to do the complex vector based drawing that some professional users might need. PhotoPaint I was quite impressed with this iteration of Coreldraw. As other reviewers have mentioned, there will be a bit of an adjustment for people who move from Photoshop to Corel Photopaint. Menus are laid out differently and some things are labeled differently as well, though I found some tools easier to find in Corel as it has some of the obvious choices in the main menus, rather than forcing users to drill down into submenus. As a genealogist in the midst of a photo scanning project (which involves scanning 19th century photographs), I’ve spent the past few weeks using it extensively for both basic and advanced photo editing. It’s become my photo editor of choice, replacing the program I was using previously. Some features, such as the straighten tool, which puts images onto a grid background and then allows you to pull a slider to turn it with the grid, make life a lot easier when you’re doing a lot of photograph scanning and you photos are weird sizes. The various clone tool options are fantastic as well. Photopaint is a powerful image editing tool and as far as I can see, certainly has the capability of matching much of what Photoshop can do, from image painting to professional grade image editing and restoration. I personally found it a fairly intuitive program and not hard to use. Bottom Line: Coreldraw X4 is clearly designed as a mid range end competitor to Adobe’s products and from what I can see, it succeeds well in that regard. For the serious hobbyist or the semi-professional looking for a high grade, lower cost option over Adobe, Coreldraw Suite X4 is definitely a good value for the money. For the professional users, Adobe is still the way to go, but for the rest of us, Coreldraw suite is a great choice.

This sort of software comes with a significant learning curve, but Corel’s habit of including tutorials puts a dent in that difficulty. This title comes with a lot of design art; borders, clipart, design elements, fonts, etc. This is an excellent program for design layout and vector editing. If you’re new at this sort of software, work through the tutorials and you will be pretty amazed at what you can accomplish. I particularly liked the option to modify each individual portion of the image. For example, I tried painting a few Kanji (Japanese written language characters). Each stroke was individually adjustable, so if I flubbed the proportions a bit, I could fix the parts rather than start over. I also enjoy the option to work in separate layers for similar reasons.

I have to say that I am extremely pleased with this product. It is a pleasure to use. It has plenty of helpful tools, and, to top it off, most of the tools can be used intuitively. After stumbling around with many products where you have to keep using the help button, or purchase some expert’s manual, its nice to have software where the user can simply start using it. Highly recommended.

I have been using CorelDRAW for many years but I am extremely excited about the new Cut Out Lab with this new version. I highly recommend it.