COREL VS. ADOBE... CLASH O THE TITANS!

[rich novak]

so... some of you have seen my topic at the gallery. i've narrowed my postwork program choice down to photoshop vs. coreldraw.

so what's so good about coreldraw? i'm mainly interested in artistic filters, but other stuff as well.

please help! if you have any opinion at all, please share it with me!
http://www.geocities.com/edensgate_2000/page1i.jpg

[Peter Clifton]

Rich

Difficult to compare a Bitmap package (Photoshop) with a primarily vector package (CorelDRAW)

However it is possible to compare Corel PhotoPaint (available seperately as V9 but has to be purchased with Draw for V10) with Adobe Photoshop.

In basic features the the two are broadly the same.

Where has Photoshop tends to lean towards straight forward photo-manipulation and pre-press functionality. Photopaint tends to lean towards more artistic type photo manipulation.

Out of the box I would say Photopaint comes with more artistic type filters/ plugins and effects, art brushes, especially image alchemy (turns photos into painting styles), it's fractal fills, and other similar features.

Most if not all the features that come with Photopaint as standard can be purchased as plugins for Photoshop.

Photopaint has some of the best third party Photoshop plugin compatibility, such that a lot of filters/plugins designed for Photoshop will work with Photopaint.

The thing with Photoshop is being the industry standard most tutorials in magazines deal with this package. Once you become familiar with Photopaint it is often possible to convert the tutorials but this will take practise.

I do not know much about Adobe Photoshop however if you use www.designer.com or www.unleash.com as a starting point there are some good jump off points for CorelPhotoPaint effects and add-ons and tutorials.

There is much more to say but hopefully this will be enough to be getting on with.

Peter

[ghi stecyk]

photoshop is by far one of the most powerful graphics apps around. just in it's sheer stability, large file support, large layer management and robust workable file integrity. in other words it's designed to work! photo-paint is another story. i hope that the new initiatives proposed by corel include the need for real serious software design. there must be plenty of programmers in the company who have been chomping at the bit for a 'go ahead' from upper management to begin working on a more powerful suite of progams. maybe under Birney their time will come.

stecyk66

[Erik Heyninck]

In Photopaint you have very fine working Photo manipulation, you have Kai's Julia set explorer, Alchemy and Terrazzo, I never met a plugin that I couldn't use, and what's more: you have the cutting edge plugin.
You also have the possibility to save as photoshop files if you want to.
You have DRAW, Trace to make vectors from a bitmap, you have the Bitstream font manager, and... lots of fun with a very stable programme. I like it.

[Erik Heyninck]

and then I alpost forgot the STITCH function, withwhich you can easily make symmetrical images and seamless tiles.

And Photopaint gives you the 4:2:2 AND the 4:4:4 Jpeg options. The latter is very interesting if it is not a real life photograph you want to save, because it gives the colour range the same place as the brightness.

[Celeste]

I use Corel Draw v9 and Photoshop v6 TOGETHER every day at work. I don't use Corel Photopaint. I have had the best results by initially creating the vector images in CorelDraw and then exporting them into Photoshop as it's native .psd format. I can work miracles doing this. I prefer CorelDraw over Adobe's Illustrator. I'm probably the only one I know who works this way, but I get the job done!

[CharlieR]

Well that's the way I work too.
My brain can only create with vectors after 12 years of CorelDraw and CAD, but a lot of multimedia programs require bitmaps so I tune them up in Photoshop, which I was required to learn, along with a crash introduction to Quark Xpress eons ago to do prepress work. I have Illustrator 8 still in shrink wrap. No one's tried to grab it yet.