| Tim Carden 15th November 2002  Visit the Corel website or read the back of the new-look box design and you will be presented with a brand new slogan: "Enjoy What You Do". As a long time Graphics Suite user I must say that, although not always the case, this is perhaps the most accurate positioning statement Corel's marketing team have ever come up with — the reason why users refuse to switch is because for them CorelDRAW is generally a more enjoyable experience than most of the other competing illustration apps. From the intuitive interactive tools to the customizable interface and multitude of projects the Graphics Suite is capable of pumping out, Corel has always presented an exciting solution.
Version 10, pushed prematurely out the door under financial strain, was met with wide-spread criticism. Many users cried they certainly were not enjoying what they do. Version 11 represents Corel's assurance that stability and quality are now top of the agenda. Stop by the Draw user groups and you will still find the usual posts by users in trouble, but you will also see ex-BETA testers, Corel development staff and other users testifying to the quality of this release. The Package Right from the first "out of box experience", Corel have done a lot of things right with version 11: - The printed digital content manual is back. Every photo, clipart image, font, photo edge, object, tile and symbol is documented in a high-quality ring-bound manual that stays open and lies flat for easy reference. And it's in color!
- Two full manuals are included: a 450+ page one for Draw/R.A.V.E. and a 250+ page one for PHOTO-PAINT.
- The new corporate branding of the suite (splash screens, package design, manual covers etc.) is clean, slick and simple.
- For the first time ever Macintosh and Windows versions are shipping in the same box, at the same time. Corel was actually the first major graphics application vendor to ship Illustration applications for MacOS X. This [finally] represents a demonstrated commitment to Mac users.
- A total of 5 CD-ROMs are included: Applications, Extras (includes bonus OCR software), Clipart, Photos, Premium Photos
CorelDRAW 11 CorelDRAW is Corel's powerful do-it-all vector based graphics application. Draw is renown for trying to do everything and this latest version is no exception. Mouse through the toolbars and menus and you will see features for everything from Flash-compatible mouseovers, HTML form components, paragraph text boxes (complete with irregular text wrapping and bullets), grammar-checker and thesaurus and of course a huge array of graphics creation tools including effect tools such as 3D extrude and realistic bitmap-based drop shadows. Practically though DRAW really can't do everything and in recent versions Corel is realizing this and trying to focus on core strengths. Version 11 development has focused on speed, stability, tweaks to help you work better and a handful of new tools designed to help you draw better. CorelDRAW 11 looks completely different. There are not just new opening screens and a new welcome box as per previous versions but new program icons, new button icons and new tools in the toolbox as well. The new buttons are purple and designed to look at home with MacOS X and WindowsXP. However, from a practical point of view old users have to learn new icons, and they are harder to distinguish between, particularly at high resolutions. The new look does grow on you though, particularly those new "ink-spot" style program icons :) 
New Drawing Tools Draw 11 introduces 5 new drawing tools. There are 3 new 3-point tools that let you draw ellipses, rectangles and curves by defining 3 points. The other two tools, the polyline tool and pen tool do nothing that you couldn't already accomplish with the existing freehand, shape and bezier tools. Corel have added these mainly to provide familiarity for users switching from other programs. However, it is nice to use the pen tool as the curve is previewed as you define points—including the next point you are about to define. And of course if you are coming from, for example, Freehand you should feel a lot more at home manipulating and adding nodes, and creating new curves with the one tool. 
Draw 11 adds two new brush effects to the shape edit toolbox: smudge brush and roughen brush. Both are optimized for pressure sensitive tablets and allow digital artists to achieve freehand creative manipulations of curves. The smudge tool carries the curve out with the brush as you drag through the curve. There is a dryness setting that shrinks or grows the brush (it can be negative) over time. The roughen brush adds zig-zag spikes to a straight line. The flakey feel to these tools I experienced using the BETA has gone and these two brushes should enhance many user's creative toolbox. 
Symbols CorelDRAW 11 finally introduces the concept of Symbols. Symbols allow you to create a design once and then place duplicates of it anywhere in your drawing and any updates to the original is reflected throughout the rest of the drawing. This is great for keeping file sizes down, particularly when exporting to Flash as only one copy is stored in the file. It is also great for making global adjustments throughout a document to items such as logos: define the logo as a symbol and then whenever it changes simply update the original symbol and all instances will be updated. 
CorelDRAW's implementation is very intuitive, you simply drag items from the drawing space into the library docker to create a symbol, then drag out again to create an instance of that symbol. Ctrl+click on an object to edit the symbol definition. Unfortunately you can't share libraries between documents. It would be good to be able to load just the library from an external document as in Macromedia Flash or import/export libraries for sharing common elements between documents. Minor Enhancements As far as major new features go, that is it for CorelDRAW 11. However, there are numerous smaller enhancements that you are probably more likely to use on a regular basis and therefore help justify a purchase. There are enhanced snapping modes: you can now set snap based on nodes, areas between nodes, centre and bounding box. Take a look in the arrange menu and a new menu item "Close Path" gives specific close-path options. Previously, auto closing a shape was unpredictable so this will be a welcome update for anyone who regularly needs to close curves.  
The object align box is no longer modal (i.e. it can stay open while you continue editing) but users who regularly use keyboard accelerators with this dialogue will be less impressed with this enhancement because pressing "ENTER" no longer activates the apply button. There are two simple but very useful updates to text features. If you copy or import some rich text from an application such as a web browser or word processor and paste it into a text object, CorelDRAW will now show the box below asking whether you would like to discard formatting and just paste the raw text. To achieve this previously I had to paste the text into notepad first then copy it out of notepad to remove the formatting. This is going to be one of those features you are going to appreciate everyday. 
The second text enhancement comes in the form of a new "convert to curves" option for paragraph text. Previously, to convert a paragraph text box to curves you would firstly have to convert the paragraph text to artistic text. There are some paragraph text features that are not compatible with artistic text and thus you would loose some of the formatting in the process. Corel have focused on fixing the speed and stability issues introduced in CorelDRAW 10. Generally CorelDRAW 11 does feel faster and more stable, I have only counted a handful of crashes in months of testing. One project I tested in v10 and v11 of CorelDRAW had a screen fresh rate many times faster in v11. However, users of v9 may still find their existing version faster for many operations. There are substantial updates to import/export filters (now over 100 included with DRAW). DRAW finally maintains layers when you export to PHOTO-PAINT; CorelDESIGNER's DSF format is supported; SWF (Macromedia Flash) now makes use of DRAW's new symbols support; and there are substantial updates to DRAW's SVG filter. SVG is an emerging XML-based open standard for graphics. By the time SVG becomes popular, DRAW's filter will be very mature. Corel PHOTO-PAINT 11 PHOTO-PAINT is a capable and powerful tool for photo enhancement or bitmap-based editing of any kind. While not as powerful as competitors in some areas, PHOTO-PAINT does unique things of its own and in many other areas is actually stronger than competing tools. PHOTO-PAINT utilizes the same customizable interface as the other Corel graphics products and consequently buttons, shortcuts and menus are completely adjustable by simply right-clicking or alt-dragging. Corel have recently purchased Micrografix and having axed the Picture Publisher product, they have crammed several features from Picture Publisher 10 into PHOTO-PAINT 11. This means new effects and tools but also a lot of confusion for previous users as Corel have reorganized the interface. New Interface As with DRAW 11, all button icons have been freshened to a shade of purple. But the interface changes are deeper than this. The paint, paper and fill color swatches have been replaced with a standard color control area that is more consistent with Picture Publisher. There are now foreground, background and fill color swatches. As with previous versions you can drag colors from the color palette onto these swatches. 
The context-sensitive property bar that changes depending on the active tool has been updated to include an expand/reduce button. This hides advanced settings by default but can be expanded to show all settings. However, a number of toolbar buttons have also been removed from the toolbars (even when expanded) and for a while there I thought features had been removed. If you are upgrading be sure to dig deep into the menus before deciding your favorite feature has been disabled! This may be handy for new users but users of previous versions are sure to be doing a lot of customization before PHOTO-PAINT is back how they like it. 
There are also a few nice interface tweaks in PHOTO-PAINT 11. For example, the eye dropper now previews the component color as you move the mouse over the image. Photo Editing There are numerous updates to PHOTO-PAINT's photo editing toolset. A new red-eye removal brush lets you paint over red eyes in a photo to desaturate the red from them. There is also an improved dust and scratch filter that can remove small imperfections automatically or you can apply it to a larger masked area for more extensive problems. Unfortunately this doesn't compare to the new healing features in Photoshop. For digital photo enthusiasts PHOTO-PAINT 11 can read additional data about the way a photo was taken from the digital camera EXIF format. Users will also appreciate enhancements to the image stitching feature that is used to combine individual images into a single panoramic shot. A major new tool called the cutout tool helps you mask objects out of a background by highlighting the border of the object with a high-lighter brush. The results can be impressive, and the cutout tool can even create feathered edges for objects without a clearly defined border. Of course results can also be unpredictable and many images still require the use of the old masking tools. The cutout tool is in an external window—I would love it to be fully integrated into the main editing window as a standard tool. Nonetheless this is a welcome addition and should save hours of cutout time for many users. 
Web Features If you have ever tried to use PHOTO-PAINT 10 to work with web graphics you will know there is a lot to be desired! PHOTO-PAINT 11 adds image slicing, mouseovers and support for the JPEG2000 file format. Unfortunately though even these new web features in PHOTO-PAINT still feel clumsy and incomplete compared with competitors'. For example, sometimes individual slice lines can only be erased in the order they were created and although individual slices can be optimized using a slicing docker, the individual palette settings for a GIF can't be set there, nor can you optimize slices in a 2-up view to compare various compression settings and file types. I still can't see any serious web developer using PHOTO-PAINT as their tool of choice for export and optimization of web graphics when such superior tools are available. 
On a more positive note, if you just want to quickly export the current image to disk in a web compatible format, the new "export for web" is easier to use than the standard export box as only web compatible formats are available. New Effects One of the key strengths of this release is the addition of several powerful creative effects. Corel has added the lens flare and spot filter effects from Picture Publisher (both killer effects), enhanced the drop shadow effect to include a guassian blur option (as one of the softening effects), and added another type of bevel effect that provides texturing of bevels and presets. However users will be shocked to find the selected KPT5 filters are not longer bundled with PHOTO-PAINT 11. KPT Shapeshifter is the most powerful beveling-type tool (an so much more) I have ever seen so it seems like a step backwards to remove this and replace it with a far inferior bevel effect. However, the other two new effects are incredible. The lens flare effect from PHOTO-PAINT 10 provided 3 fixed types of lens flares but the lens flare effect in PHOTO-PAINT 11 allows for almost limitless variety in the lens flares it can create and can build anything from star bursts to consistent pattern effects. There are some 5 screens of settings that can be customized. 
The spot filter was exclusive to Picture Publisher. It provides a type of radial softening that allows a subject to be highlighted. An area of focus is left sharp and the background is made progressively more blurry the further the pixels are from the area of focus. 
Frustrations Unfortunately aside from the inferior web export features, there are a handful of frustrations that have plagued PHOTO-PAINT for several versions and still remain in the version 11 release. Anti-aliasing of an object as you transform it is still compulsory. I was hoping that Corel would have made this an optional feature since the BETA—there is currently no way to transform an object without anti-aliasing applied to it. Although the anti-aliasing algorithm has been enhanced, there are still undesirable delays when transforming objects at high resolution. Additionally if you have ever wished PHOTO-PAINT's lighting effects could match those of Photoshop, you will still be left hoping. Surprisingly Corel has opted not to include Picture Publisher's advanced lighting studio in this release of PHOTO-PAINT. Many advanced bevel and other 3D effects can be achieved using a custom channel as a texture map and PHOTO-PAINT 11's lighting effect still refuses to provide this functionality. And once again, PHOTO-PAINT doesn't support nesting of layers into folders. Corel R.A.V.E. 2 Corel first shipped R.A.V.E. or real animated vector effects with Graphics Suite 10. Users were pleased with the idea of a familiar Corel interface for creating animations. Tweens were easily created by converting blends to frame sequences and several effects such as drop shadows could be animated. However the bloated file sizes created by the Flash export filter and the lack of sufficient tools for adding interactivity to animations meant few users took this first release of R.A.V.E. as more a preview of what direction Corel was heading in than a real product. If you use R.A.V.E. 1 then the upgrade to Graphics Suite 11 is a no brainer. R.A.V.E. 2 is [almost] everything that R.A.V.E. 1 should have been. Expect to find proper support for symbols-based SWF export, more behaviors, tweening of 3D extrusions and the new drawing tools from DRAW. 
Symbols Like DRAW 11, R.A.V.E. 2 has support for symbols and has a corresponding library docker for managing these. This provides the same functionality as the library docker in DRAW — you can drag objects onto the docker to create a symbol and then drag them off again to create an instance of the symbol. As with DRAW I couldn't find any facilities for sharing symbols between documents. R.A.V.E. 2 provides an additional type of symbol called a sprite. Sprites allow animations to be stored in symbols similar to Flash's movie symbols. More tweening options You can now tween text on a path, perfect shapes and extrusions. This means simple 3D animations (of rotating 3D extrusions) are possible from within R.A.V.E. 2. 3D extrusions were buggy in the BETA I evaluated but from my initial evaluation appear to be relatively solid in this final release. 
More behaviours R.A.V.E. 2 adds many more behaviors. Behaviors can control the playback of the main movie or the playback of embedded sprites (similar to Flash's TellTarget features). You can play, stop or jump to a specific frame in a movie. There are also global behavors (such as stop all sounds and toggle high-quality) and show/hide behaviors for setting the visibility of objects. R.A.V.E. 2 can now potentially be used for many interactive project types—far beyond the simple animations R.A.V.E. 1 was capable of. 
Minor Enhancements - R.A.V.E. exports text as text for smaller Flash files.
- Flash preview in browser exports the current file as a SWF and HTML and opens your default browser for immediate preview.
- There are more warnings supported in the Flash export preflight dialogue box.
- You can create custom character-based text-effects with the create sequence from text feature. This breaks the current text object into characters and places each character on a separate frame. From here you can use R.A.V.E.'s other tools to apply effects on a character by character basis.
Bugs? Unfortunately R.A.V.E. 2 is still slow and buggy. My first two very basic animation projects consisting of just 2 symbols failed to export correctly to Flash. Additionally even simple transformations require R.A.V.E. 2 to do a lot of processing whenever keyframes are modified as it regenerates all the tweened frames. Conclusion CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 11 is certainly a much more enjoyable experience than the first release of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 10. CorelDRAW 11 contains several new creative tools. Many of these are targeted towards specific groups of people and therefore will not be applicable to all users. However there is also a multitude of well-implemented small enhancements to existing features that will be appreciated on a daily basis. The work done on stability and speed will be well-received. PHOTO-PAINT too has been refreshed with plenty of new tools and effects. Although the new interface will be confusing for users of previous versions and some classic frustrations still remain, the additional tools such as cutout and stitch expand an already powerful arsenal of bitmap editing tools. And the new lens flare effect is simply breath-taking. R.A.V.E. is a good idea and version 2 shows us Corel is committed to bringing this product up to a professional level feature wise. R.A.V.E. 2 is a much more capable product than R.A.V.E. 1 and if you have taken a liking to R.A.V.E. 1 you should definitely upgrade. However, my initial experimentations with R.A.V.E. 2 show that there are still a few bugs to be ironed out before professionals can feel completely comfortable risking using R.A.V.E. for major projects. With Graphics Suite 11 it really feels Corel is committed to ensuring new features are practical, releases stable and physical product professional. Version 11 will not cause any jaws to drop but all the extra things it does is sure to make what you do just that little bit more enjoyable. More information is available at Corel's website: www.corel.com System Requirements | For Windows
• Windows 98, Windows NT ® 4.0, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP
• Pentium ® II, 200 MHz or greater
• 64 MB RAM minimum
• 128 MB RAM recommended (required for Windows XP)
• Mouse or tablet
• 1024x768 screen resolution
• CD-ROM drive
• 200 MB hard disk space | For Macintosh ®
• Mac OS 10.1
• Power Mac ® G3 or higher
• 128 MB RAM
• Mouse or tablet
• 1024x768 screen resolution
• CD-ROM drive
• 250 MB hard disk space | Copyright 2002, Tim Carden, All Rights Reserved | 