CorelDRAW X4

The Balloon Goes Up Again

Corel have updated their flagship suite with the release of version X4 (14). (And, incidentally returned to a balloon logo; Lewy the chameleon must have croaked at last!) The graphics suite contains both vector and bitmap editing applications, along with screen capture, bitmap tracing and a large collection of fonts (with a fonts manager) and clipart. At Professional Imagemaker we always have several version of CorelDRAW mounted on our workstations and frequently make use of the fonts and clip art for our page design. Being naturally cautious we have tended in the past to clip board any Corel illustrations into Adobe Illustrator before moving to InDesign to ensure colour fidelity across the applications. The latest version of CorelDRAW has an in-built version of the Adobe Color Management Module (CMM) which should ensure compatibility across applications and platforms. However, it remains a Windows-only application, one reason why it is generally spurned by the professional graphics design community, but no bar to its popularity in a business environment. The suite is comprehensive in its abilities and you can progress from image manipulation and processing RAW files right though to multi-page, graphics-rich documents with industry-standard pdf output. Its cost and relative ease of use make it attractive to the occasional ‘designer’ for whom graphic design is not a major part of their work mix.

To test the program we carried out a few simple tests and compatibility trials along with some testing of the new font-finding utility. We then set up the colour management and designed a multi-page document for Tom Lee. As you will see it was not all plain sailing but we got there in the end!

Fonts and Font Finding

CorelDRAW comes with 1,000 high-quality Open Type fonts, many of which include comprehensive glyph sets (fractions, swashes, foreign language characters, etc). Sadly they seem to be without visible means of support – we had to go to InDesign to take a look at what was on offer. Searching for ‘glyphs’ in both Help and the manual did not return a result. Bitstream Font navigator is also provided for keeping everything under control and it enables the installation of a font without having to reboot the application – much appreciated. A new feature is the direct web link to MyFont which accesses ‘WhatTheFont?!’. Detecting the font used in a publication you wish to match can be a pain and often you cannot find out which font was employed on a project. With ‘WhatTheFont?!’ you highlight the text in question, make a couple of mouse clicks and the utility starts to offer you possibilities to make a visual match. It is simple to use but a little unreliable on small, difficult or poorly reproduced characters. In our tests it failed to find Arial initially but found Caliph without a hint of effort. It nailed Gil Sans Ultra Bold Condensed first time which was impressive. Overall it is a useful utility which we employed in anger on Tom Lee’s project later in this review.

Clip Art

The clipart provided changes with each version of CorelDRAW. This is a benefit, providing you retain the older discs – the medieval sets we like for our calligraphy have been dropped from the latest version but many other sets have been modernised. Finding the clip art you want remains a bit of a slog through the near four-hundred page catalogue. Some of the offerings seem a little bizarre – why would most users want a choice of 400 cars and buses, especially as they have no way of telling which is which? On the plus side there are some attractive floral and abstract backgrounds that are newcomers to the lists.

Colour Management

This is set up from a central dialogue box and enables the allocation of different profile sets for different output options. It worked well and CorelDRAW could ‘see’ all the relevant profiles for the various devices. The screen profile and ‘look’ of the screen was updated instantly which was pleasing. However, searches for both ‘proofing’ and soft proofing’ did not return any information.

It would have been nice if Photoshop and PhotoPaint images matched on screen, sadly they did not.

Bitmap Tracing

CorelTrace was one of the original bitmap to vector tracing programs and has been built into CorelDRAW for some time now but carries the name PowerTRACE. Like all these utilities it has its limitations but faced with cleaning a web-derived logo it will often provide a good start. As reported later, we attempted to use it to vectorise a map for the Tom Lee project and failed. We did have success with the signature.

CorelDRAW

CorelDRAW now allows individual layers on each page of a multi page layout. This gives tremendous flexibility when designing and you have to keep some page objects out of the way for a while! CorelDRAW is quite different to the Adobe approach in this aspect, as you need to use both Illustrator and InDesign to acheive this approach to your pages. The new version also allows for ‘pdf commenting’, useful for work-groups collaborating on a design. The Tables function has also been strengthened. Tables remain the bane of the designers life, they are always fiddly and any help is always appreciated. We successfully brought Microsoft Excel tables into CorelDRAW as either objects or Rich Text tables. File linking is also available. This would be a boon to photographers making up price lists with a bit more style than can be provided with Excel.

Compatibility

Unless you are a sole operator, outputting only to your desk top printer, you are almost certain to come across compatibility issues when moving around different programs. The whole concept of Adobe Acrobat is to provide a platform to alleviate these issues as it is both application and platform independent (generally!). We started our tests by making a simple business card in CorelDRAW and then exporting it to other applications. Transfer from CorelDraw to Illustrator via the clipboard was imperfect, as was exporting as an Illustrator file. The main issue was the gradient applied to the background and a defaulting of the text to black. The file transferred well when pdf was used and the resulting file preflighted without any flagged issues.

The business card was built using the new CorelDRAW interface (below left) but was corrupted by both saving as an Illustrator file or transferring via the clip board. However, the 'publish as pdf' command created a pressready file (below) which preflighted perfectly.

Corel PhotoPaint

As a direct rival to Adobe Photoshop, PhotoPaint has many similar features and can perform almost all of the same basic tasks. As with any feature-rich application it takes some learning to extract the best from it. We contented ourselves initially with looking at the RAW file handling, so important in today’s work flows.

PhotoPaint successfully opened a Nikon D200 RAW file but failed to open the newer D3 files (a problem also suffered by Photoshop CS2). However, when timed against Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW, Corel took a pedestrian 19.3 seconds compared with about 0.9 seconds for Adobe. We also found the correction sliders very slow in operation, a simple exposure shift taking around 10 seconds to update on screen – it rapidly became very tiresome. The resulting processing image was different to that processed by Adobe RAW when the default settings were used in both instances. The Adobe image was almost twice as accurate as the Corel one (4.21ΔE2000 playing off 7.16ΔE2000). The Adobe-processed image was more neutral and slightly less noisy.

ABOVE: The PhotoPaint interface for RAW files was found to be a little slow in comparison to Adobe ACR.

ABOVE: PhotoPaint failed to open the new Nikon D3 RAW files, a failing common also to CS2.

ABOVE: The same, uncorrected Nikon D200 RAW file was processed without alteration in both Adobe and Corel. The results were different with ACR out-performing Corel by quite a margin.

Getting Down to Business

Full testing of a suite such as CorelDRAW requires every aspect of its facilities to be tested. This is impossible in the timescales involved, although we resolutely avoid some of the pitfalls that our rivals fall into, simply re-writing the press brief! The opportunity arose following discussions with Tom Lee, to have a crack at redesigning literature for his new training course. After the first, very successful, course Tom was anxious to update the literature to reflect the work done by the delegates and to utilise the ‘shoot the shoot’ images taken during the course at the delightful Inglewood Manor (and what a location that is – we coined the strap line ‘8 acres of Portrait Paradise’!). We started from scratch to build a six-page brochure for web delivery, with an option to take the front and back pages to make a flyer for possible offset litho output. It was to be an all-pdf output at different resolutions.

The materials Tom supplied were typical of this class of job and included:

1. A Word document of the essential narrative, listings, dates, locations, telephone numbers, web addresses, post codes, etc.

2. A map.

3. A trio of logos.

4. JPEG Files.

5. RAW files from various sources and cameras.

The complete document was to consist of the following:

1. An attractive, eye-catching cover using an image shot by one of the
delegates.

2. A description of the location, including photographs.

3. Location details and a map.

4. A bio of Tom and some detail of the course agenda.

5. A booking form on the back.

The front cover was date dependent and needed the flexibility to be updated routinely.

The Starting Files

Tom had already processed some of the files using combinations of Nik Filters and Kevin Kubota’s Actions. The pre-prepared files were supplied as JPEGs. RAW files were available and some had to be reprocessed at the correct resolution for the brochure (see comment earlier on RAW file processing).

The Map

There are a number of matters to consider when preparing brochures these days. The post code and possibly the satellite navigation co-ordinates are vital (it is also worthwhile checking them out if you have the time and your own satnav). The essential choice for a map is to take a variant from one of the web-based providers as a JPEG and put this on the page or to make a simplified map using a vector-based application such as CorelDRAW. If you read the advertising literature, you could be fooled into thinking that all you need do is use a bitmap-to-vector tracing program and the job is done. Not so! It rarely works and failed to do so in this instance. Eventually we gave up with Corel and placed the screen grab on its own layer in CorelDRAW and redrew the map by hand. This at least gave us the opportunity to cull unwanted detail. Do not underestimate the time that making a map can take. We spent about two hours on our very simple offering and it was still some way short of a ‘professional’ job! However, it did demonstrate that CorelDRAW is easily capable of delivering the goodies if you spend enough time at it. The ability to find and import a graphic of a Tudor mansion from the clip art collection was a bonus!

The one thing that defeated us was scaling the maps to size in CorelDRAW while simultaneously scaling the strokes of the lines. This has to be possible but the Help file and the manual’s index were both silent on the issue.

Tom’s Font

We were unsure of the font that Tom had employed on his initial scheme. While we could have telephoned him, this is not always possible in the real world situations and so we used WhatTheFont?! which found the correct answer at the first time of asking.

We schemed out a few pages and then published the files to pdf at two resolutions, one as a press-ready version and one for smallest size for web-delivery. The press version was 50MB, the web version was 473KB.

ABOVE RIGHT: The pages in build. Mixing bitmap and vector graphics is relatively seamless in CorelDRAW and gives the control of text required for quality designs.
BELOW RIGHT: Some of the pages that were built to show the various aspects of the suite.
FAR RIGHT: A version of the cover using Paul Duckhouse's shot.

OVERALL

We have only had time to scratch the surface of what CorelDRAW X4 can achieve. It offers a low-cost alternative to Adobe Creative Suite with similar, but not identical, features. It is certainly slightly weaker on colour handling but the user should rapidly get to grips with these variations. The RAW handling is disappointingly slow and not quite as accurate as we would like. This would not bother users who employ a JPEG-based workflow. Setting up the colour management and PDF work flows was very straightforward and the resulting pdfs passed preflighting without any issues against the industry standard PDF/X-1a:2001.

Regardless of your thoughts on the program itself, the number and quality of the fonts and clip art make the suite worthy of consideration. You would be hardpressed to get so many Open Type fonts for the price of CorelDRAW X4 – a mere £175 for upgrade £386 for the full version (both including VAT).

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