CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 2021
Paint, photo and vector graphics suite
Extensive toolsets are accessible to newcomers; powerful and customisable for the more experienced
£599 (or £24.92 per month/£299 per year) FROM Corel Corporation, corel.com NEEDS macOS 10.15 or later
Whether you’re painting pixels, developing digital images or fairing Béziers, you’re spoilt for choice of apps. CorelDRAW is justly popular on Windows, but hasn’t yet become as widely adopted on macOS. This year’s version adds a host of new features from perspective projection to cross-platform remote working, but most of all is aiming to make a name for itself on M1 Macs.
It’s centred on two major apps: CorelDRAW is intended for vector illustration and page layout, while Corel Photo-Paint handles image editing and pixel-based painting. There’s also AfterShot 3 HDR which is a Raw image editor and HDR generator, the only component which doesn’t yet run native on M1 models, and Corel Font Manager for font exploration and management. Remote working is accomplished by the CorelDRAW. app accessed through a browser, and CorelDRAW.app for iPadOS.
To start you off, there are 7,000 items of clipart, 1,000 high-res photos, over 1,000 fonts, and hundreds of templates and fills. Corel provides multiple layers of help and tutorial material, starting with a handy Quick Reference Card, and running through to full training videos, as well as a buoyant market for third-party training software. Although the two major apps divide pixel and vector formats, they’re strategically interfaced too. Bitmap to vector conversion uses AI-based PowerTrace within CorelDRAW, which can in turn render vector graphics to bitmap format for return to Photo-Paint. Try applying Art Strokes effects to an image in Photo-Paint, then place that on a page in CorelDRAWfor vector conversion and distinctive posterisation, for instance. The same collection of Art Strokes effects is also available for fills in CorelDRAW, although they’re a hefty rendering task even for the M1.
Traditional and new
Both apps benefit from new features and many enhancements for this year’s suite. The most important new vector feature is linear perspective projection, which is reliable and highly effective, but can trap the novice into odd errors. The Object/Perspective/Draw in Perspective command offers one-, two- and three-point projections; you then select the plane to project an object on to, draw a line or shape, and it’s automatically projected on to the page’s perspective grid. Photo-Paint retains a more traditional approach when projecting its pixel images.
Both work well from an iPad in Sidecar mode, although there were occasional glitches, including failure to Undo, suggesting that this version still needs some maturing, at least on the M1. CorelDRAW even
beachballed once when manipulating very large lettering, but that seems exceptional. Sidecar is an ideal tool for painting in PhotoPaint as brush and other controls are sensitive enough to deliver almost any degree of responsiveness. If you prefer sketching very lightly to build forms, the iPad’s pressure sensitivity should serve you well, while tool controls can also be set to bold and flowing.
This suite remains primarily centred on single-page graphics, but additions and enhancements extend those to a more flexible design space, with multipage views, side-byside comparison, and export of multiple assets. Export and import formats are extensive, with photo import now including HEIC images from iPhones, and most camera Raw formats. PhotoPaint’s improved colour replacement tool is particularly easy to use, and gives excellent control over the range of hue, saturation and brightness to be replaced.
Despite their extensive and sophisticated tools, both apps remain accessible to the newcomer, while offering the more experienced user extensive customisation including Touch Bar support. While the suite is cross-platform, the macOS version is a proper Mac app, albeit similar enough to the Windows version to make swapping architectures painless. The only minor shortcoming here is that many pop-up windows don’t float freely, although that does at least keep them in order.
Corel collaboration
Corel Font Manager might appear little more than Font Book, but it has far greater functionality and flexibility. It also gives the suite’s apps access to large numbers of fonts which aren’t installed in macOS, including those on network storage.
CorelDRAW’s collaborative tools couldn’t be more timely. These support real-time comments from clients or colleagues, letting you change and tweak your design in front of their eyes, using shared design files. There’s also support for sharing work through cloud services. Because of their size, Corel has opted not to deliver these as Universal Apps, but made it so that the user can select what’s appropriate for their Mac, which should also minimise the size of updates. It’s possible to run these options on M1 models with only 8GB of memory, although that’s likely to use virtual memory when working with larger documents; obviously the 16GB offering is a better choice, both for performance and to minimise wear on the SSD.
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 2021 is an excellent choice for almost any graphic design work, and well worth evaluating over the free 15-day trial period.