โœ๏ธ Corel Draw๏ƒ

CorelDraw is a Windows environment application for graphic design which uses vectors to represent shapes instead of bitmaps. It was created in 1989 and has been evolving through 21 versions to this day. The current version is CorelDraw 2019, and it includes a bitmap editing application, Corel Photopaint, a very complete program to work with photos or any other bitmap image, as well as some other apps. Corel 2019 was released, for the very first time, for Apple macOS as well as for Windows.

Vectors: digital images can be stored as grids of colored points (pixels) known as bitmaps, so even the best quality picture, when you expand it or take a very close look, will show these colored pixels and smooth lines will become saw lines that look like stairs. Vectors do not use bitmaps, but mathematical functions to represent shapes. A function can work with very small numbers or very big numbers all the same and will always be precise, so you can look at a vector image from a distance or very close, and it will always look perfect, no pixels, smooth lines all the time, and has the advantage of requiring far less memory to be stored than bitmaps.

Another good point for vectors is that images can be translated into bitmaps with as much quality as needed, while the inverse conversion is far less efficient and will produce worse results. CorelDraw has become a very professional tool for the graphic designer, including a huge variety of working alternatives like basic shape drawing (lines, squares, circles and ovals, polygons, stars, spirals, grids, curves), shape editing (weld, trim, intersect shapes), text tool, text into curves conversion, node editing, interactive fills (flat color fill, gradient fill, pattern fill, bitmap fill), translucent shadows and glows, translucent shapes, and basic bitmap editing.

CorelDraw has the capability to manage bitmaps together with text and vectors to produce complex compositions like magazine pages, so itโ€™s a great alternative for publishing composition, multi-page files, bitmap tracing, effects like perspective or shape distorting, and dozens of other tools.

The user interface of CorelDraw is very intuitive and friendly, and digitizing tablets can be used with the program, allowing the designers to produce artistic and lively images. To help users, there is a wide support net which includes blogs, videos, tutorials and chat communities. These are some links:

About the Author๏ƒ

Jorge Araica is a Graphic Designer with technical background, an old school pro with some knowledge in the engineering and programming fields and also a promotor of critical and rational thinking as a way to spread a scientific attitude towards knowledge. Freedom is his other passion, and he will stand for it at every opportunity he gets.