I well remember 1989 when a program called CorelDRAW! first appeared on the horizon. It was tremendously unique in one major respect – the first vector drawing program which was written from the ground up for the IBM computer platform.
   Oh, how we loved CorelDRAW! And as the product matured, Corel added so many plusses to DRAW that it was almost impossible to keep up. In the days when there was almost no clipart available, Corel had a bookfull; when you had to search for fonts, Corel gave you pages of them; when you needed to turn a raster image into a vector drawing, Corel gave you a program to do it for free.
   Then there was Corel PhotoPaint. A full-featured graphics editor for bitmap graphics.
   But, in the last few years, some of us have been concerned with Corel's expansion. The company bought WordPerfect, which was dying on the vine; they have flirted with Linix-based applications and a host of other things. During that time, many felt the core Corel products – Draw and PhotoPaint – got less attention than they deserved.
   Corel Graphics Suite 10 totally abolishes that cannard. In addition to adding some excellent features (which we will talk about soon) and really tightening up the code to make the product more robust, Corel has added an outstanding primary application to the suite, RAVE, which is an easy-to-use but extremely powerful animation creation program.
   There's a guy who owns a furniture store here in Kentucky who has the slogan "I'd give 'em away, but my wife won't let me." This could be Corel's advertising theme with Graphics Suite 10 – there is no finer value in a high quality graphics suite on the market. A superior package.
   I wish it were possible to detail every feature of the three major and numerous additional applications in Corel Graphics Suite 10. Not possible without increasing our storage requirements on this web site. That's only said with a half of a tongue in my cheek. There is so much that can be said. The "executive summary" for this review is in the paragraph right above: there is no finer value in a high quality graphics suite.

CorelDRAW!
   That being said, Draw offers a number of excellent enhancements and has enhanced all its drawing tools, text tools, fills, textures, patterns and the interactive tools which do thinks like make drop shadows. Incidentally, these things work generally the same across the primary packages, so once you learn all the ways you can make a blend work, you can do it in Draw, in PhotoPaint and in RAVE.
   Since I have been using Draw since '89, I do tend to focus on the new things which come in each release. And while there have been some super things in the past – text on a path comes to mind, we don't think of it much today, but when it first became a part of Draw, it was a real wow – none of them, I think, has been as darn useful as PerfectShapes.
   PerfectShapes are those jobberdos that you always need and usually send you scurring to your clipart to find something to work with. Arrows, stars, callouts and the like. But this is not just clipart put on a menu, because these shapes contain a glyph which lets you manipulate the shape to get the exact version you want. And, of course, you can use the same manipulation options as with a rectangle or ellipse tool – outline, fill, size, scale, rotate and so on.
   I happen to think the page sorter is one of the most handy things I have seen in many an age. One big problem many of us face is that we may design several different "documents" in the same project – say letterheads, envelopes, address labels, you name it. Hey, these are all different sizes. Well, you can combine these different page sizes in the same document (and move them around). What's that mean? It means you can have one file labeled XYZ Company and have all its stuff in one file.
   All the text, basic drawing and many interactive controls have been enhanced. A nice feature, too, is that you can pan across the screen by "knocking" against the edges. A truly neat option now gives you a numerical reading of curve properties using the bezier tool. Because of that, you can modify the curve numerically – and make exact changes to two curves to match one another easily.
   As we say on the internet, IMHO, the eraser tool is the most wonderful one of the lot when it comes to modifying clipart. How could you make this better? By allowing it to be used on bitmapped objects as well as vectors.
   Now that everyone has some form of drop shadow, the question is how does Corel makes theirs better? By allowing you to (control-) click on the drop shadow itself and manupulate it independent of the object itself.
   If you've used this program before, you know about "nudge" – the ability to move a selected object in tiny (you can determine how far in the program's options). Then Corel came up with "super nudge," which allowed movement in larger increments. Now, let's welcome "micro nudge," which moves in smaller increments than just plain old nudge.
   There are a host of other new things. Particularly, you can now apply distortions to paragraph text in addition to graphic objects; you can use an eyedropper to copy an object's shape to another object's envelope with the interactive envelope tool and the object and layer management docker has been significantly enhanced.
   Whew! And we didn't even mention using Draw to create and optimize web images, including rollovers, to which you can attach .wav files for sound effects with the "down" and "over" mouse states.

PHOTOPAINT
   Well, just suppose someone said "let's take some of the really great tools in Draw and make them work in PhotoPaint. Actually, that is what Corel must have done, since inclusion of a number of these tools – most notably text on a path – are included in PhotoPaint 10.Coupled with that, Corel has done some excellent tweaking to its antialiasing tools, which really help the text show up well in smaller sizes.
   We should mention the red-eye removal filter. It is one of the easiest to use I've seen. What's neat about this is that it not only makes it easy to replace color, but also makes it easy to choose the color that you use to replace.
   There are a goodly number of new and unique special effects filters. If you're addicted to these (I admit I am) you can spend a whole night just playing with these filters to see what they do. I did. It was fun, but, also, gave me some excellent ideas for useful applications for the filters which will serve me in good stead when a deadline is looming.

RAVE
   The addition of this animation package to the Corel Graphics Suite is a major bonus. The program is easy to use and intuitive and there are several good tutorials which show you how to do some pretty sophisticated things. Most of all, and really more important in the actual use than in the saying, Corel RAVE's interface is very similar to that of Draw.
   As I said, it works better than it sounds. But when you want to change the color of an object, the stroke weight of a line and so on, it is good to know how to do it already. It helps to have you concentrate on what you're really using RAVE to do.
   Which is animation, the controls for which are generally located in a "movie" menu and primarily use a timeline window. For all the sophisticated things you can do – like attaching animations to a path or create sequences from a blend – it is the "tweening" function that everyone will use most of the time.
   What is tweening? Let's just assume you have a green circle in the middle of an animation and you want to turn it into a red square. You set up one key frame with the green circle and another with the red square and tell RAVE to tween them. The program creates the intermediate steps to do this. If you've ever tried to create an animation the "old fashioned way," by drawing the intermediate steps, you know the ability to tween is worth the price of the entire suite.
   Finally, you can also attach audio files to your animations. We mentioned the ability to do this earlier with button states in Draw, but adding the ability in RAVE means all your animations can have sound. Very impressive.

AND . . .
   There is so much in this package one tends to concentrate on the main items and forget about what Corel calls "supporting utilities." I have already mentioned one of them, Corel Trace, to make vector drawings out of bitmaps, but there is also a capture program and a totally outstanding texture program which has been part of the suite for some time. Even though it has, texture is a real boon for those who want to create their own nifty textures just so. I have used it countless times.
   But new to this list of supporting utilities is a limited version of a program called Canto Cumulus. This is how you keep track of all the clipart that comes with the application – but it is also, and more importantly, a cataloging system for all your graphic files.
   Like the other supporting utilities, Canto Cumulus is first rate. The truth is you'll probably want to own the full version since, in addition to displaying graphics, it lets you annotate them and assign keywords. Once that is done, you can search and sort and even print out thumbnails of what you've found. If you're like me, what often takes the most time is the simple finding of the picture. Canto Cumulus makes this very, very easy.

   Corel has long been a leader in the PC design field. Graphics Suite 10 easily continues its rightful dominance. I have always been, and continue to be, astounded that Corel can pack so much outstanding software into a single package at such an attractive price.
   If you have used CorelDRAW or the components of the Graphics Suite before, this version is well worth the upgrade. If you never had, buy it. It is a treat in so many ways!

–Lonnie Falk

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