Product Description

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 helps students and teachers deliver graphically rich school projects, transforming their ideas into professional results. This suite produces everything from presentations to posters. With enhanced illustration, page layout, photo editing, and bitmap-to-vector-tracing, it deliverse a combination of design capabilities, ease of use and affordability that cannot be matched. With this comprehensive graphics suite, students and teachers can confidently deliver graphically rich school projects, personalizing their work and transforming ideas into professional results — fast! CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 delivers the ultimate combination of design capabilities, ease-of-use, speed, and affordability that cannot be matched by any other graphics software.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3604 in Software
• Brand: Corel
• Model: CDGSX3MPCDVDST
• Released on: 2006-02-01
• Platform: Windows
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: Spanish, English, French
• Dimensions: .30 pounds

Features

• Not for Commerical Use

Amazon.com Product Description
With this comprehensive graphics suite, students and teachers can confidently deliver graphically rich school projects, personalizing their work and transforming ideas into professional results -- fast! CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 delivers the ultimate combination of design capabilities, ease-of-use, speed, and affordability that cannot be matched by any other graphics software.

Corel PowerTRACE is the most powerful and accurate bitmap-to-vector tracing application on the market. You now have complete control and flexibility for editing vector images, including color merging and interactive color mode selection. See it in action.

The Image Adjustment Lab is a 'one stop shop' for adjusting photo colors and tones while the ability to create snapshots of your adjusted photos with one single click makes photo comparison simple and easy. See it in action.

Powerful new illustration tools help you transform your ideas into results faster and more beautifully than ever. See it in action.

Also included: Images, fonts, and 10,000 hand-selected, professional clipart images. You also get 35 new WGL4 fonts and 1,000 royalty free photos. See it in action.

Its now easier than ever to learn and work with CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3! See it in action.

Included Applications

• CorelDRAW X3: An intuitive graphic design and page layout application that meets the demands of today's busy design professionals and occasional business users. It delivers results fast, whether you're creating a company logo or working toward demanding production schedules.
• Corel Photo-Paint X3: A professional image-editing application that lets users quickly and easily retouch and enhance photos. It is specifically designed for use as part of a graphic workflow.
• Corel PowerTRACE X3: Professional designers often receive poor-quality bitmap images from clients and face the challenge of turning these into high-quality vector images for business cards, brochures, promotional items, or signs. The new Corel PowerTRACE solves this problem by letting users quickly and accurately convert bitmaps into editable vector graphics.
• Corel Capture X3: A one-click screen capture utility that lets users capture images from their computer screen.
• Pixmantec RawShooter essentials: This raw workflow tool provides the highest-quality output and fastest conversion time of any raw converter on the market today. It gives designers and business users excellent results with minimum effort.
• Content: More than 10,000 clipart and digital images individually selected to meet the needs of design professionals and business users; 1,000 OpenType fonts, plus 35 Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) fonts; and 100 creative templates.

Quality Layout Results
CorelDRAW X3 provides significant improvements to text handling that make it easier for users to select, edit, and format text. New controls have been added for alignment, drop caps, tabs, bullets, and columns. For more flexibility and accuracy in design, users can now specify text size in inches and create hyperlinks for specific characters. In addition, the application works better with text from other sources.

The new Character Formatting docker makes formatting artistic and paragraph text easier than ever before. This convenient new docker includes easy-to-use controls for adjusting kerning, changing the angle of selected characters, and applying character effects, such as Underline, Strike-Through, Uppercase. Meanwhile, an enhanced Interactive Fit Text to Path tool now makes it easier than ever to attach text to a path with precision. A common effect for creating logos and signs, this new tool lets you interactively control text placement in order to get your desired results.

New Tools for Illustration
With CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3, designers can take advantage of tons of new tools and features that increase their productivity without compromising on their creativity and flexibility. For instance, the new Star tool lets users quickly and easily draw perfect stars, while the new Complex Star tool makes it easy to create complex stars that have intersecting sides and produce unique results with an applied fill. You can also specify the number of points and can sharpen the points of a complex star.

A significant time-saver, the new Crop tool quickly lets you remove unwanted areas in objects and imported graphics -- both bitmap and vector. This handy addition to the CorelDRAW X3 toolbox eliminates the need to ungroup objects, break linked groups apart, or convert objects to curves. Meanwhile, the unique, new Smart Fill tool lets you apply a fill to any enclosed area by creating a new object from an enclosed area. Unlike conventional fill tools that fill only objects, the Smart Fill tool detects the edges of an area and creates a closed path so that the area can be filled. For example, the Smart Fill tool can fill the loops of a freehand line that crosses over itself. The Smart Fill tool creates a path around the area, so the filled object can be moved, copied, or edited.

Powerful, Accurate Tracing
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 provides a more streamlined, integrated tracing solution that delivers accurate and optimized bitmap-to-vector tracing results.

Integrated with CorelDRAW X3, the new Corel PowerTRACE allows users to quickly and easily convert bitmaps into editable vector graphics. Design professionals typically face the challenge of turning bitmap images into high-quality vector images to create logos for business cards, brochures, signs, and promotional items. For control and flexibility, Corel PowerTRACE generates a color palette that lets you easily pick which colors appear in the traced result and quickly convert them to the appropriate color mode, including spot colors. You can also choose from several preset tracing styles, color modes, and background options. With three different preview modes -- Before and After, Large Preview, and Wireframe Overlay -- Corel PowerTRACE makes it easy to analyze the result and adjust the settings used to trace your image.

Efficient Photo Editing
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 puts the focus on providing design professionals with more efficient, intuitive, and accurate photo editing.

Corel Photo-Paint X3 is now significantly faster when working with large images and applying photo effects, resulting in better real-time feedback and improving overall workflow efficiency. Improved object handling gives designers more precise control in rotating, skewing, or distorting objects. For large images, improved use of image cache provides significantly increased response time for previewing most effects and for manipulating objects.

The new, integrated Image Adjustment Lab saves designers valuable time and is accessible from both Corel Photo-Paint and CorelDRAW. Design professionals often work with files that have poor color balance and contrast, and they need to use multiple tools to make adjustments. The Image Adjustment Lab addresses this problem by uniting a number of manual and automatic controls for common color and tone corrections, providing an intuitive and fast way to achieve professional image adjustments. The Image Adjustment Lab also lets users create snapshots of their adjustments with just one click. The snapshots appear below the working preview, which lets users easily compare each snapshot against the original and choose the best result.

Built on the power of Corel KnockOut, the enhanced Cutout Lab includes new controls to simplify the process of cutting out image areas and to improve accuracy. The new Add Detail and Remove Detail tools make it easy to refine the cutout area. For easy reference when defining the cutout area, users can preview their cutout against the original image, or transparent, white, gray, or black backgrounds. For maximum flexibility, users can choose to save the cutout object and discard the original image, save the cutout object and keep the original image, or save the cutout object as a clip mask added to the original image. In addition, the Cutout Lab includes Undo and Redo buttons to quickly correct any mistakes.

Enhanced Compatibility
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 provides enhanced compatibility for more than 100 commonly used file formats, including Adobe Illustrator, Photocells, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Office, JPEG, and PDF. Users can now seamlessly edit and exchange files in those formats. Outstanding support for spot colors has been added for Adobe Illustrator, PhotoShop, and PDF.

Student and Teacher Edition Purchase Information
To purchase education versions of shrink-wrapped software, purchasers must be: accredited schools, faculties, full- or part-time registered students, academic supervisory organizations, hospitals, libraries, museums, and nonprofit charitable and religious organizations.

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Customer Reviews

Improvements made software worse than previous versions
If you are accustomed to using other versions of CorelDraw, you may not want this version. Fact is, they have made many so-called "improvements" which I find are incompatible with other software that I have used in the past. It does not convert to encapsulated postscript (eps) files properly, and will crash programs that traditionally work well with eps figures. By contrast, CorelDraw 11 worked well. Hence the "improvement" has rendered the software a nuisance. If you are accustomed to pasting figures into other software, forget it. CorelDraw X3 will not retain the integrity of the original figure, and it will look distorted and crummy. Any prior version of CorelDraw worked well. Again, the "improvement" has made the software a nuisance. On top of that, it crashes a lot.

I contacted their "customer service" about a year ago when I first discovered these differences. I was assured that they knew about the problems and were working on them. Well, a year later, with no patches to correct these differences, I am now being told that it is everyone else's fault (software manufacturers) that CorelDraw is not compatible. I was also told that they have no intention to correct these problems because they do not consider them problems. There is an example of their customer service for you.

I have been using CorelDraw for a long time, starting with 6, then 9, then 11. This is the worst of the bunch by far. I am going back to a previous version.

Great Program ... if used in conjunction with others
CorelDraw was my first foray into vector graphics back when version 3 showed up on my desk at the small "Mom and Pop" screenprinting shop i worked at. Back then, Corel came with OODLES of free fonts, clipart, manuals ... not to mention FREE technical support via a toll-free number.

i stayed with Corel exclusively until version 10 ... enduring countless patches, bugs and the dreaded "odd-numbered" curse (if you tried version 5 or 7, you feel my pain). Adobe Photoshop was always my photo-editing program of choice ... CorelPhotoPAINT just never quite "did it" for me.

Industry demands eventually delegated that i delve into Adobe Illustrator. Being already familiar with Adobe Photoshop's features, tools and "look and feel", Illustrator didn't present a huge, overbearing learning curve. In Illustrator, i found the same robust features as CorelDraw ... which wasn't what impressed me about Illustrator. Adobe's intuitive programs, and their ability to interact with one another ... seamlessly ... THAT is what won me over to Illustrator. Illustrator's ability to edit/create PDF's in their native format? WOW! Exporting LAYERED vector files to Photoshop ... with layers INTACT??? WOW!!! (i could go on)

Now, that being said ... there are STILL things that i prefer in CorelDRAW compared to Illustrator. The EXTRUDE function in corel is MUCH easier to utilize. The PowerClip function is more user friendly than Illustrator's "make clipping mask" function. The ability to customize/edit/add shortcut keys is an amazing feature. (again ... i could go on)

In regards to importing and exporting files from other applications, CorelDRAW wins, hands down. It boasts a ROBUST set of import and export filters, my favorite being the .eps import filter which lets you import an .eps while converting the fonts to curves DURING the import. This is a MUST HAVE if you work with an .eps file created on another computer whose fonts you lack. If i had a dollar for every .eps that pulls into Illustrator with fonts blown out ... i'd be independently wealthy. WHY Illustrator has never implemented this is beyond me.

So, to sum it up ... CorelDRAW is a great program ... but i can't imagine it being my ONLY vector drawing program. Just like in real life, you need a great team. This program, paired with Adobe Creative Suite, meets my needs perfectly.

Corel Draw Suite X3
I have used Corel Draw since it was Draw 5 or 6, I can't exactly recall for certain so I guess some would consider me a software guru. I have also used other top level design tools and can tell you the fact is the Corel Draw Suite X3 is a robust design suite that has a very palatable learning curve.

The scope of what you can do with the software is amazing so certainly there is a new set of words to add to one's vocabulary however with terms like Pick Tool, Rectangle Tool, Ellipse Tool, and the like, I believe that it is pretty logical to get an idea of what the tools do just by allowing the mouse pointer to rest over the tool for about three seconds so the application can display the tool name and even the shortcut key to select the tool.

The icons also give a pretty clear visual representation of what the tool will do e.g. a capital A is the text tool and guess what you do with it ... it allows you to add paragraph text, and artistic text. After you learn a bit about the text tool you also see that it allows you to place text in your document on a path.

The text on a path is just that... text on any path in your document. This can be a freehand line, an ellipse, a circle, or any other shape you care to make. How many of you have ever wanted to put your text in an arch? In Corel Draw you simply make an ellipse with the ellipse tool, choose the text tool from the tool box, move the mouse pointer over to the ellipse and the mouse cursor changes to the text on a path icon and you click the left mouse button. Now you type whatever you want around the shape that you have created. If the text is not the size, color, font, or position you want you can change it, color it, or move it simply by selecting the pick tool.

I have developed a program to teach technology skills to middle & high school students with various disabilities in 46 sites throughout Oklahoma and the Corel Draw Suite is the first software application the students use. Do the students know how to do everything with the software after the first week, or fourth, or tenth? No, but if it took a week to learn it would not be a design tool in would be something like Print Shop Pro where almost everything is done for you and you just type in the text. There is nothing wrong with PSP but if you want to truly be creative, if you want to have the ability to design anything that you can see in your minds eye, then the Corel Draw Suite is the tool you want.

My program has a website that shows some of the work the students in the program have created. Just do a search for Tech-Now Oklahoma High School High Tech and you should be able to find the site. The section on weekly curriculum is a pretty good place to start but I encourage you to look around. Almost everything you will see on the site was created by the students using the Corel Draw Suite.

Corel Draw is a program that can be used in a matter of minutes but is as deep as you can possibly want to go.