don’t know if I’m getting old or it just seems like that but considering the fact that I’ve been using CorelDRAW since Version 3 it seems as though a long time has passed. This is especially true with the release of version X3 which,

by the time you read this review, will be available to buy. The U.S. retail pricing released for the product upgrade is $179 and $399 for the initial license. You can purchase X3 online at www.corel.com or at retailers such as Comp USA, Office Depot, Staples-Canada, amazon.com, PC Mall and buy.com. One thing that I can tell you about CorelDRAW is that it has committed itself to the engraving and awards industry. After many years of targeting Illustrator and Photoshop customers, they have shifted their focus to more core industries such as ours. They are now looking at how CorelDRAW can solve a number of issues that we find in our industry. It’s nice to see them listening to our recommenda-tions. We can now make useful suggestions that they will consider when making upgrades and changes. It’s hard to believe that CorelDRAW is 20 years old. What started out as a so-lution to desktop publishing and creating graphics has today become one of the defacto programs in the creation of graphic inspired designs. Fortunately, I've been able to test the beta as well as the alpha versions of CorelDRAW X3. I must admit it has been hard to keep my mouth shut for the last 6 months. Some of the new features that I’ll introduce you to are very high-end and will make you want to run right out and purchase the new version TODAY! This review of CorelDRAW X3 will be my third Corel upgrade review. In my previous upgrade reviews I’ve been rather lukewarm on recommending that R & I professionals upgrade to the newest version. I must admit that with this version you will be hard pressed to not run out and buy a new version right away. Corel has spent a lot of time on “application stability, speed and ease of use …resulting in dramatically improved performance. Corel has also increased . . . compatibility with other industry–standard software and formats, such as Adobe Illustrator, Portable Document Format (PDF), PhotoShop, CorelPaint Shop Pro and Microsoft Office.” As was true in previous version upgrades, CorelDRAW has had the majority of the feature upgrades while PHOTO-PAINT has had less. Considering DRAW is the flagship program, this would seem normal. Okay enough of my rambling. Let’s take the new version of CorelDRAW for a test drive and show you its new and improved features.CorelDRAW Suite X3 Included in the suite are the two main applications that have been a part of the suite for almost the entire life of the product—CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT. For those who aren’t familiar with the suite, I’ll outline the applications and the accessory applications that are included. CorelDRAW: CorelDRAW X3 is a graphic design and page layout appli-cation. Although other programs can run your laser machine or a sublimation printer, it’s this program that many of us use to create our designs on to send to our lasers. The application can create both vector as well as bitmap images. You can work with photographs and create quite complicated drawings very quick-ly. Whether it’s text or a combination of graphics, text and photographs, Corel-DRAW is the application of choice for our industry.

I

Figure 1: A new feature, the Hints docker, automatically pops up to help you use this new command.

Figure 2: The Trace function has been vastly improved over previ-ous versions and it alone makes the upgrade worth the price.

Figure 3: To use the Trace feature se-lect your bitmap and then click on the Trace button located on the Property bar.

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Corel PHOTO-PAINT X3: The sister application to CorelDRAW is Corel PHOTO-PAINT. This program is similar to Adobe PhotoShop and although, not as powerful as Photo-Shop, it’s a close second. I use this program mostly for color correction, sharpening and knockouts on photos. If you’re doing any work on photos besides cropping, I’d suggest you look at this program. Not only are the tools more intuitive, but they’re also more powerful and you can see your photo in its proper state on your monitor, un-like CorelDRAW which gives you a low resolution representation of your photo.Supporting Applications Corel PowerTRACE X3: A ven-erable stand-alone program, Corel-TRACE was always a distant second to other trace programs that we use in the industry. Well, not anymore. The new Trace program is excellent and is now accessible through CorelDRAW. You can take a bitmap image and trace it into a vector object. CorelCAPTUREX3:Corel CAP-TURE is a screen capture program that allows you to capture a number of different areas of your screen. Al-though an excellent program, it’s not something that’s needed often in our industry.

Figure 4: The Fillet/Scallop/Chamfer feature allows you to easily create scalloped or rounded corners, like these, for your plaque plates.

Figure 5: Quickly and easily create per-fect stars with the new Star Tool flyout.

Figure 6: There’s also a Complex Star Tool located in the flyout, for complex stars with intersecting sides and special fills.

Figure 7: The new Boundary command creates a boundary around your selected object.

New Pixmantec® RawShooter es-sentials:This raw workflow tool pro-vides the highest quality output and fastest times for converting raw imag-es (from your camera—if it supports it) to editable files within PHOTO-PAINT.Content In addition to these new features, you’ll also get: • More than 10,000 clipart and digital images • 100 OpenType fonts, plus 35 Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) fonts • New: 100 creative templates • New: CorelDRAW Handbook: Insight from the experts: This book provides insights from individuals from different industries—yours truly is included for the engraving and awards industry. • User Guide • Digital Content Guide • Quick Reference Card • Help FilesTraining • Training videos by lynda.com included on CDMinimum Systems Requirements • Windows 2000 with the latest service packs, Windows XP Home, Professional, Media, 64 Bit or Tablet editions. • 256 mb of Ram—I’d suggest at least 512 or more • Pentium 3 600 MHz processor • 1024 by 768 or better monitor resolution • CD ROM • Mouse or TabletHints Docker Included in this new version, which is a real bonus, is the Hints dock-er. Select a command and the Hints docker appears to the right side of the workspace. Figure 1 shows how the Hints docker comes up for the Com-plex Star Tool. This is very useful, as so many times a command is new and you don’t know how to get help us-ing it. Now there’s instant help from Corel’s Hints docker.My Top Pick Commands for EngraversNewPowerTRACE Why leave the best for last? Let’s look at the best new feature available in CorelDRAW. I must admit that af-

ter wishing for this feature for I don’t know how long, it has finally come to fruition. CorelDRAW has improved its trace function. And what an up-grade it is. This feature alone is worth the upgrade—and trust me, no one paid me to write this. I’ve run a num-ber of traces with this function and I’m impressed every time I use it. Figure 2 shows you the Trace function. The image on the left is the original image and the image on the right is the vectored image. All you need to do is select your bitmap and then click on the trace button located in the Property bar (Fig. 3). The Trace function not only works on black and white logos but also on colored logos. One new feature added into the command is the ability to de-termine how many colors you want to use in the trace. This allows you to eliminate slight variations in color from logos. One place where this re-ally helps is in vectoring JPG files that have been compressed. Typically, compressed images have variations in spot color during compression (which is why, if you have a spot colored image, you should save it as a GIF file instead of a JPEG). Traditionally, when you vector these areas, separate objects are created from the different colors. This means you will have to go back and delete those extra objects, which means extra time when work-ing with logos.

Figure 8: This new Step and Repeat docker allows you to quickly set hori-zontal and vertical offset preferences for objects that you need to repeat.

Figure 9: Unlike a normal fill tool the new Smart Fill Tool detects the edges of an area and creates a closed path so that the area can automatically be filled.

Figure 10: This text shows a “before andafter” example using the new Bevel Tool.

NewFillet/Scallop/Chamfer Well it’s about time. No longer do we have to regress by creating circles and working with the trim command to create notches and rounded corners. CorelDRAW has now given us a quick and easy way of creating scalloped or rounded corners. All you need to do is draw a rectangle, select the rectangle and then choose your desired radius. This is just one more reason to spend the money. Can you say yippee?NewStarTool The new Star tool lets users quick-ly create perfect stars. Figure 5 shows the Star Tool flyout. Along with the Star Tool there’s a Complex Star Tool. This allows you to create complex stars that have in-tersecting sides and produce unique results with an applied fill. With this Tool you can specify the number of points you want on your star and you

then sharpen the points of the complex star. Figure 6 shows the Complex Star tool located in the flyout.NewCreateBoundaryCommand This new tool allows you to create a boundary around selected objects. Figure 7 shows a number of selected objects with a boundary created. This is a good command for rubber stamp people who need a cutline around a stamp.NewStep&Repeat The new Step and Repeat docker allows you to more easily and precise-ly create a series of objects for mul-tiple setups. This new docker (Fig. 8) allows you to quickly set horizontal and vertical offset preferences where repeated objects are placed when you need to repeat objects on a page. InteractiveContourTool The Interactive Contour Tool has been enhanced so it’s easier to contour objects. The tool is now better at opti-mizing curves.NewSmartFillTool The new Smart Fill Tool lets CorelDRAW X3 users apply a fill to any enclosed area by creating a new object from an enclosed area. This tool is unlike a normal fill tool in that it detects the edges of an area and creates a closed path so that the area can be filled. For example, if you draw a rectangle and fill it, the object automatically fills (Fig. 9). With Smart Fill you can extract the fill as an object figure. The tool will even detect the edges of the image in the figure and when you remove the fill the edges are also removed from the fill.NewBevelTool It takes a lot of time to create bold text using a bevel effect but adding a bevel can greatly enhance the look of the text. This new tool speeds up the creation of a bevel and is a lot easier to use than the earlier versions of Corel. The new Bevel Tool dock-er gives users quick access to bevel styles and to controls that determine the effects intensity. Figure 10 shows text before and after the Bevel Tool has been utilized.NewCropTool The new Crop Tool not only al-lows you to crop a bitmap, but now you can crop a group of vector ob-jects. This is a significant time saver

Figure 11: The Crop Tool, located in the toolbox, can crop a bitmap and also a group of vector objects.

if you have a piece of vector artwork (clip art) and you only want a part of the image. Figure 11 shows where the Crop Tool is located in the toolbox. EnhancedOptimizeNodesInExistingObjects A more convenient Optimize Nodes Tool along with new options make this tool more enhanced than in previous versions. There are times when you get a vectored object that has a lot of “extra” nodes. Extra nodes cause a number of things to happen. First of all, more nodes means you’ll need more memory. Secondly, hav-ing more nodes complicates “clean-ing” up a logo with the Shape Tool because you have to move more nodes. Thirdly each node typically means a directional change by the engraving machine. This movement usually means your edges won’t be as crisp as they would if you had fewer moves. The new enhanced Op-timize Node Tool smoothes out the nodes on a curve (by deleting them) while still maintaining the shape of the curve. This is important since de-leting nodes in older versions meant a seesaw battle trying to find the mid-dle of the road setting that still kept the shape of the curve, but removed as many nodes as possible. EnhancedShapingCurvedObjects With this enhanced tool you can now shape objects much easier than before. The newly designed control handles help you select and edit nodes. Also included in this tool is the abili-

Figure 12: New controls for enhanced text handling include alignment, drop caps, tabs, bullets and columns.

Figure 13: You can now specify font size in inches.

ty to select nodes with a new freehand marquee selection.EnhancedChangingTheOrderofObjects Users can easily change the “stack-ing order” of objects on a layer or a page. For this release Corel has added the ability to move objects to the front of the page (in front of all objects) or the back of the page (moves the se-lected object behind all objects on a page). You can also move an object with the order command to either the front or the back of the layer. These controls reduce the need to access the Object Manager.EnhancedMiterLimitPerObject The Miter Limit determines at which angle a pointed corner becomes a blunt end. For example, if there were only a 0.5 degree separation between two corner lines the outermost point could extend halfway across the page. In previous versions this was part of the Option menu and wasn’t consistent across any open program. To increase the flexibility of this tool, users can now set a miter for each object. This means that text and graphics can have different miter limit settings.

EnhancedEPSFilter No longer will you have to worry about picking the right EPS filter when editing an EPS file through the Corel-DRAW’s import command. Figure 15 shows that the standard dialog box that comes up now defaults to importing an editable file. This should greatly de-crease the confusion that a lot of users have had with this filter. EnhancedPDFSupport Corel has added improved support for the PDF file format. Corel now of-fers full transparency and spot color support. In addition, users can convert text to curves if they so desire.NewUpgradestoPHOTO-PAINTNewPixmantecRawShooteressentials This new workflow tool allows

EnhancedDuplicateOffsetControl This new tool makes it easier to precisely place duplicate objects. The first time you use the Duplicate com-mand (Ctrl D), you can set Horizontal and Vertical offset distances.EnhancedCloneCommand The Clone command has been add-ed to the EDIT menu, allowing users easier and faster access to the com-mand. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Clone command, any “cloned” object created from a “master” object is changed automati-cally whenever the “master” object is changed. For example, if you change the text color in the master object, the fill color and all the “cloned” objects will automatically change.TextUpgradestoCorelDrawX3EnhancedTextHandling Version X3 includes significant improvements in text handling so it’s easier for users to select, edit and for-mat text. New controls (Fig. 12) have been added for alignment, drop caps, tabs, bullets and columns. USERS CAN NOW SPECIFY FONT SIZE IN INCHES (Fig. 13)! There’s also better support for text created in other applications.New:VisuallyControltheFlowofText The text menu now includes the new insert Formatting Code menu. This menu allows you to insert special characters to help control the way your text flows. You can add characters such as em dash and em space along with other special characters.EnhancedFontMatching CorelDRAW now offers more ac-curate font suggestions for replace-ment fonts than previous versions. You now have the option to save the file with the original font.EnhancedFontSelection When you’re previewing fonts in the font pull down menu, you’ll see a sample of each font. This makes it eas-ier to select fonts.NewCharacterFormattingDocker There’s now a Character Format-ting docker which makes it a lot easier to format either artistic or paragraph text. This docker includes the ability to control kerning, character angle and character effects such as underline, strike-through and uppercase. Figure 14 shows the Character Formatting docker.

Figure 14: The new Character Format-ting docker allows you to format artis-tic or paragraph text easier than before.

Figure 15: It’s easier than ever to use the right EPS filter for editing an EPS file. Now the standard dialog box in the import com-mand defaults to importing an editable file.

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users to work directly with raw for-mat files from digital cameras. Hav-ing the ability to work with raw files allows you the ultimate control over the output of your finished digital photo. The RawShooter tool supports many digital camera manufacturers including Nikon, Olympus and Can-on. There’s also support for the Ado-be DNG standard.NewImageAdjustmentLab The new Image Adjustment Lab is designed to help speed up the work-flow of correcting images. Typically, when it comes to adjusting a photo-graph a number of tools may be need-ed. The Lab brings these tools un-der one control. You can also create snapshots of your corrections so that you can bring them back or view dif-ferent adjustments (Figure 16 shows a single snapshot at the bottom left of the screen shot). This tool is available in either CorelDRAW or PHOTO-PAINT.EnhancedCorelPHOTO-PAINTCutoutLab This new tool uses Corel’s Knock-

Figure 16: The Enhanced Corel Cutout Lab is now part of PHOTO-PAINT rather than the standalone product it used to be.

Figure 17: The new “Add Detail” and “Remove Detail” functions make it easy to cutout and “isolate” images.

Out engine that formerly commanded a hefty price as a stand-alone prod-uct. It has now been incorporated into Corel PHOTO-PAINT. The new en-hanced Cutout Lab includes new con-trols to simplify the process of cutting out images and improving accuracy. The new “Add Detail” and “Remove Detail” functions make it easy to re-fine those areas that you need to cut out. Figure 17 shows the image from Figure 9 cut out. The Add Detail and Remove Detail tools make it easy to “isolate” the image. Being able to quickly cut out the background of an image makes this tool invaluable.Conclusion All in all, Corel Graphics Suite X3 is a well rounded new release. I must admit that they have added plenty of new and improved features. There’s clearly an improvement in Corel’s perception of our industry over what it has been over the last six years. They are now committed to our industry and will be actively seeking to improve their program so that we can get more out of it. Fea-

tures such as the Fillet command and the Trace command prove this. There’s been a lot of work done in the Trace command and the results show it. No longer is CorelTRACE a distant cousin to some of the more mature sign making programs. The power of this tool is quickly evident when you go to vector a bitmap logo. The only thing that we need for the mechanical engravers is a half decent fill routine. There are a lot of upgrades and new features in this release that should satisfy most people. Whether you’re sublimating, laser engraving, sand carving or mechanical engrav-ing, there are features that you’ll find useful. In my opinion, unless you’re stuck on Windows 98, you should upgrade. I haven’t given this type of recommendation ever for any other CorelDRAW upgrade. So I am ex-cited to be able to make this recom-mendation. There are so many rea-sons why you should upgrade. Heh, just to be able to make a .25" filleted box in 5 seconds is reason enough in my book. In the next couple of issues I’ll be profiling these new and enhanced features in greater detail. These ar-ticles will help you understand more fully the power that you’ll have with this new release. So stop what you’re doing and get out and order Corel Graphics Suite X3—you won’t be dis-appointed. Oh, and by the way, when you get it, start practicing!

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