In February 2010, designers were greeted with a brand new version of Corel’s graphic design software CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5. CorelCAD 2021 – Education Edition (Windows/Mac).
CorelDRAW Technical Suite 2021 – Education.
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At the very least, download the free trial – you get to try the full feature set for 30 days, and we think you'll wish, like us, that every CorelDraw release was this good. In short, while the new features will hook you in, you'll be discovering and enjoying the hundreds of small improvements for months to come. There are new image sprayers, new photo effects, smarter tooltips, more brushes, a fresh selection of graphics freebies (Helvetica, Garamond and Futura, anyone?), a redesigned object docker, and a new pixel preview mode in Draw that finally brings it up to speed with Adobe Illustrator 9. Now, you get to control the colour weighting with a live preview, so you can make your black-and-white work look extra punchy. How about converting images to greyscale? Previously, this was a one-click operation that left you with a flat average of the colours and was pretty much guaranteed to leave things looking washed out. What's more, it seems that Corel thought it would push the whole thing further while it was at it, so corner rounding has been joined by scalloping and chamfering too. In X5, the rounding is preserved and can even scale to auto-match the size of the rectangle you're working with. Take rounded corners on boxes, for example – these have always been simple to do, but changing the size of the rectangle later would warp your rounded corners and they would stretch out of shape.
Yes, this functionality was in Fireworks from its first release and so is long overdue, but we're still grateful.ĭozens of other niggles are fixed too. This means that even the most complex transparencies get saved perfectly every time. Those problems are gone: Corel seems to have thrown away its PNG and JPEG support and rewritten it from scratch, so you now get a super-sized export window that gives you full control over your files. It irked us no end that CorelDraw X4 and earlier 'supported' PNG – a decade-old graphic format – but would insist that it couldn't possibly retain alpha transparency when saving, laying waste to our attempts at smooth edges and drop-shadows. And, boy, is X5 chock to the gills with them. If you already push the software to its limits, it's the day-to-day changes that will impact you the most. So, those are the triple-A features that you'll find plastered all over if you pay it a visit, and indeed the new colour system is a huge improvement: profiles are loaded and saved uniformly, mismatches are clearly flagged, you can soft proof from a docker, and there's no better way to show all that off than by playing around with the freshly added support for Pantone's Goe colours.īut even though these new features are great to have, they just scratch the surface. Corel Connect might just make us think again.
What Connect lacks in Bridge-like scriptability, it partially makes up for by being available as a standalone app, or as a docker in CorelDraw and Photo-Paint – we ended up ditching Bridge because it took up too much screen space.