Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: CorelDRAW Essentials 2
A Cheap Way to Get Top Software?
| Product | CorelDRAW Essentials 2 |
|---|---|
| Company | Corel |
| Web | www.corel.co.uk |
| Price | £56 |
| We like | CorelDraw, some good photo effects, training materials, PDF output |
| We don't like | Photo-Album very basic |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
CorelDRAW Essentials 2 bundles CorelDRAW with PhotoBook, a photo manipulation package and Photo-Album, a cataloguing and outputting tool. For good measure the box includes 100,000 bits of clip-art and some tutorials on CD. It's an odd combination though. On the one hand, anyone who is used to tools of the calibre of the core product CorelDRAW will find the other parts of the bundle rather lacklustre whilst those who will appreciate the other applications i.e. digital photographers will probably find CorelDRAW overkill for any drawing needs they may have. Let's look at each item in turn.
CorelDRAW
The most important part of the package is CorelDRAW itself. Whilst the full version of CorelDRAW is currently at version 12, the version supplied here is the earlier although still highly capable version 9. You have a choice of starting from a blank canvas or using one of a number of templates such as calendars, awards and so on. CorelDRAW is hugely powerful and can take a long time to get proficient at. Corel have wisely included some CD based training from Lynda.com as well as the usual online help and some additional online hand holding. However, total beginners may benefit from buying a 3rd party book to get to grips with all that is here.
It's impossible to do CorelDRAW justice in a short review. Suffice to say, it features almost everything you would want in a vector drawing package and then some. The range of tools and options is legendary. Even this slightly older version is fully capable of truly professional results. Most effects are real time so you can adjust things to see how they would look without having to wait for any rendering.
As well as drawing, it can be used as a capable DTP package taking multicolumn layouts in its stride making it ideal for newsletters, stationary and the like. The 250 supplied fonts help provide interest here. On the output side you can choose from a range including such industry standards as EPS and PDF. Usefully there are optimisations for producing images for web pages to help produce compact files.
Photobook
Photobook is less clear cut. It's all too easy to compare it to Adobe Photoshop Elements which is in a similar market and is superior in many respects. Photobook does have a few tricks up its sleeve though. We managed some quite nifty special effects using Photobook which would have been far harder work with Elements. We particularly liked the Light Studio function which uses a range of presets to create some truly creative effects. After some experimentation we'd say that Photobook definitely has something to offer people who may already own similar programs. A bonus is that it appears to work with most (all?) Photoshop Plug-ins which expands its capabilities hugely. We tried a few and they all worked fine.
Photo-Album
Photo-Album is really not too good. It allows you to select a series of images and then perform some basic adjustments before outputting them in various ways from CD to web slide show. The slide show has one layout only and that's pretty dull. We got marginally excited by the option to create a screen saver. It even had a few options to play with. The finished result was a jerky and unattractive horror that went straight in the bin though. Our advice would be to ignore this program and get the free version of Adobe's Photoshop Album.
Conclusion
CorelDRAW Elements is very much a mixed bag. The main program, CorelDRAW itself is superb and will delight all who use it. Experts will enjoy the wide ranging tools whilst beginners can get going via the usable set of templates. Photobook on the other hand does have some weaknesses but does include some neat functionality that will appeal to the more creative photographer who wants to give their images some real interest. Finally, Photo-Album. Bin it. If you need to upgrade an old version of CorelDRAW and fancy some extra tools for your digital photos then CorelDRAW Essentials 2 is the bundle for you. If CorelDRAW itself is of no interest then you should strongly consider buying Photobook on its own which at £25 is very good value for money.
