[unobeavfan]

Trying to find out about choosing between getting photoshop or CorelDraw and one of the things I have read (most post a little older) is that Corel can be unstable and quirky and wondering if that is a thing of the past or is it still this way? I have downloaded both to try the free trial . I first did photoshop and it downloaded and worked with out a hitch. I then downloaded CorelDraw and had trouble getting it downloaded and after downloading twice and getting everything on the computer I had trouble with it just crashing without really doing anything on it. I got a little busy and had to leave for a few days and when I got back around to it the trial version was up. I downloaded again and everything went smooth but could only do a couple of lines of text and when I went to upload something the whole thing would just go off. Don't know if that is because the trial period was up or ???

I called support and asked if I could please get the trial one more time so I could have an honest shot at trying it and was told nothing they could do so this is the reason for my question. Is it stable and I just had a bad deal for a one off and is support good or they don't really bend over once in awhile to help a guy.

I am pretty raw and new to all of this. My computer was a Dell laptop with i7 6 gigs of ram and plenty of hard drive space so from what they say you need to run in the specs I think that was ok.

I KNOW lol that should tell me which way to go but CorelDraw does look more user friendly thus still wondering ...And the cost. Will be doing mostly design for shirts and that kind of stuff and will not be into big graphic type business things but do want a good software and yes I am aware of some of the free stuff.

Sorry for being so long winded and Thanks

 

[TABOB]

CorelDraw can be a headache! My sister is using it and she is having a lot of problems.


Photoshop and CorelDraw are different type of software though... maybe you mean Adobe Illustrator


I personally use Inkscape which is free. Works perfectly, but you need to be a bit of a computer geek to configure it to open .eps and other proprietary files.


Also if you are into painting... there is Krita. You can do amazing things with it...skill required though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr7OPBxh5_o
Website: https://krita.org/

 

[dcbevins]

You are comparing apples and oranges. If you want to evaluate something, evaluate CorelDraw against Adobe Illustrator, (and maybe Adobe InDesing also,) not Adobe Photoshop. CorelDraw and Illustrator are vector graphic programs. Photoshop is a raster graphics program. You can't buy CorelDraw. You can buy CorelDraw Graphics Suite. It includes CorelDraw, Corel-PhotoPaint, a Font Editor, AfterShot, Corel-Capture, and a less than useful web creation tool. You would compare PhotoPaint to Photoshop. Photoshop is more feature rich and powerful than PhotoPaint. PhotoPaint though is capable. AfterShot is a tool like Adboe Light Room. CorelDraw supports multipages and paragraph formating so it is like Illustrator and InDesing together.

I like CorelDraw over Illustrator. I could list, but just say I find it faster to get things done. I don't have any significant stability problems. I might get a crash once a month. I have an older PC in todays world. It still does fine. Your have a much better cpu, but I have more memory. I bog down only when dealing with very complex things with ridiculous node counts. Then it is just slow not unstable.

 

[NoXid]

As others said, vector vs raster. That said, I prefer vector for most of my work and prefer Corel. If it comes to doing real work with raster, then PhotoShop. For occasional or light raster work, the raster part of the Corel package may suffice, or one of the free options.

As to stability. PhotoShop has more annoying quirks than Corel, at least for the versions I have and the way I use them. I'm running them both on Win 7 64-bit and have plenty of ram. I suspect the Mac PhotoShop is more stable than the PC version, but don't know for sure. One very annoying thing is that their product is not designed to work with network drives. And this is the professional product from the professional company? BS. All of my content files live on a UNIX server under the ZFS file system. I have never lost a file, even when drives died. But PhotoShop randomly stops working after opening and closing a random number of files. Corel has no such problems, but there is the occasional quirk, just not as often or intrusive as the ones I encounter with PhotoShop. YMMV depending on what you are doing and what you are doing it on. I worked in the software industry for 20 years; all software has bugs. Some versions are better than others. Never buy a X.0 release of anything!

Professionally, I have used many products that have been gobbled up by Adobe. They manage to put a shiny new face on the products, but the pre-existing bugs and nuciances remain year after year. Personally, I detest them for buying and ruining so many previously independent products.

 

[TABOB]

I guess all of them have bugs after all, and different versions have different bugs. However, my sister is always complaining about CorelDraw in particular.



NoXid is right, you need both vector and raster.
Personally what I do is raster, and the vectorise... its faster, for me at least.


@NoXid
UNIX server? Are you sure it is not OpenSolaris?

Also, I'm suspecting your PhotoShop freezing issue is bandwidth related. You need 1Gbit stable connection... Wireless will not do. If you already have this, then maybe a bad network card.

 

[ProSeparatorNJ]

Go with Adobe for a trouble experience but be prepared to pay handsomely for the privilege. Go with Coreldraw to save some money, but be prepared to waste plenty of time with things that don't work, and with regular crashes and glitches. And ads. Corel spams you with ads after you've paid them $500.00 for their software. They spam you with ads when you open the program. Spam you when you close the program. They spam you with ads inside the program! They spam your notifications area on your desktop. And Corel even made the ad spamming retroactive. If you have an ancient version of CorelDraw that was released a decade ago, suddenly, it starts spamming ads!
Wonderful people those Corel guys they are. There are years worth of users complaining on the Corel forum and people trying to figure out how to stop the ads. Obviously, Corel has no intention of making it easy to defeat the ads. But at least it's cheaper than Adobe.

 

[dcbevins]

I got an add on Corel, check never show again. Haven't seen it since.

 

[NoXid]

I guess all of them have bugs after all, and different versions have different bugs. However, my sister is always complaining about CorelDraw in particular.



NoXid is right, you need both vector and raster.
Personally what I do is raster, and the vectorise... its faster, for me at least.


@NoXid
UNIX server? Are you sure it is not OpenSolaris?

Also, I'm suspecting your PhotoShop freezing issue is bandwidth related. You need 1Gbit stable connection... Wireless will not do. If you already have this, then maybe a bad network card.

My net is 1Gbit wired. I do not believe in magical invisible network connections

OS Is actually a flavor of BSD geared toward file servers: NAZ4Free. Calling it UNIX is simpler, as most people think everything that isn't Windows or Mac must be Linux

It still amuses me that Macs ended up running UNIX.

 

[TABOB]

Good stuff...
Looks like I'm not the only geeky guy here.

 

[webtrekker]

Give me Photoshop alongside VectorMagic any day. Never needed anything else. Any tweaking of vectors is easily handled in my cutter software, SCAL4.

 

[ProSeparatorNJ]

I got an add on Corel, check never show again. Haven't seen it since.

If it were that simple, there wouldn't be years worth of angry customers on the Corel forum complaining about it with all manner of advice on how to get rid of it.


https://community.coreldraw.com/tal...-graphics-suite-x8/54257/why-am-i-getting-ads

 

[dcbevins]

If it were that simple, there wouldn't be years worth of angry customers on the Corel forum complaining about it with all manner of advice on how to get rid of it.


https://community.coreldraw.com/tal...-graphics-suite-x8/54257/why-am-i-getting-ads

I hang out on the Draw forums frequently. There are not hordes of angry customers around this. You can disable them. There are always people that can't figure it out. The thread you linked too had three or four people with the problem. The Welcome Screen shows promotions, but is not a pop up and can be disable too. That thread is an X8 thread, two versions old.

Keep in mind, the "two top checkboxes" allow you see notification and to auto-download our updates as they come out. Leave them on if you want to continue seeing those types of messages.

Once you set your preference for the third option to "Don't show me messages for this applications", you should not receive anymore of those pop ups.​

The ads use the IE javascript engine. Some had changed it settings effecting the ads. Some people had multiple products installed and didn't change the setting in each one.

Your over blowing this issue by a large factor. After disabling, I don't ever get ads. When a new version comes and I install it, I will get the ads until I disable it again. Are you getting ads?

 

[Steve Mosier]

If you are comparing CorelDraw to an Adobe product, you want to look at Adobe Illustrator. I use both programs and have had no problems with either.

 

[ProSeparatorNJ]

I hang out on the Draw forums frequently. There are not hordes of angry customers around this. You can disable them. There are always people that can't figure it out. The thread you linked too had three or four people with the problem. The Welcome Screen shows promotions, but is not a pop up and can be disable too. That thread is an X8 thread, two versions old.

Keep in mind, the "two top checkboxes" allow you see notification and to auto-download our updates as they come out. Leave them on if you want to continue seeing those types of messages.

Once you set your preference for the third option to "Don't show me messages for this applications", you should not receive anymore of those pop ups.​

The ads use the IE javascript engine. Some had changed it settings effecting the ads. Some people had multiple products installed and didn't change the setting in each one.

Your over blowing this issue by a large factor. After disabling, I don't ever get ads. When a new version comes and I install it, I will get the ads until I disable it again. Are you getting ads?

My advice for anyone reading this is to google CorelDraw ads and decide for yourself if this is minor and overblown. Personally, I can't stop the ads in my old copy of CorelDraw. The people around me using CorelDraw also can't stop the ads. Even die hard CorelDraw users who have been supporting Corel for decades are furious about this. If it were just a matter of a checkbox or two, I'd give them the benefit of doubt that they could do that and never have to say anything about it. I've been able to uncheck nags in any and every software I've ever had and I can't think of any other situation where a company has sold you software, then continues to spam you with ads. Normally, you buy the software to stop the ads.

 

[TABOB]

Let's be honest... corelDraw is not so great. You'd expect better from paid software.


@webtrekker
It looks like you are doing what I'm doing Just different software.

 

[gardenhillemb]

I use Corel X19 and have used them all since Version 9. I have a crash about 2-3 times a year running Windows 10. I also have Illustrator and Photoshop. I use them for specific tasks but Corel does 95% of the work I need to do and it's easier for me than Illustrator. I have never gotten an add in Corel in any of the versions I've used. Must be lucky!

 

[TABOB]

What you already know how to use well, is always easier. This doesn't make it better.
My sister is still using it, so it does get the job done...but I don't like it, because I'm the first line of support when she has a problem.

 

[gardenhillemb]

Obviously, Corel is liked by enough people that they continue to buy and upgrade. Just because someone doesn't like it doesn't make it a bad product. You know what they say about opinions, "just like ###holes, everybody's got one"

 

[TABOB]

Liked?... I doubt it. People just use what they've been taught how to use. Big software companies invest millions to promote their products in schools and universities. Nothing wrong with this ... They do what they have to do.

 

[sben763]

Corel has quirks and bugs just as well as adobe products. The annoying ads are easily turned off by turning off messages on the welcome screen, as well as a few other places. Corel included particle shop which also has to be turned off. if you have previous ver of Corel they all have to be shut off. Or one can shut off the Corel messages in the task manager and this will take care of all the corel products for the most part. Particle shop has to be done separately.


Stone is a long time Corel hater and the thread he shows id 2 years old with a few recent post by some who are clueless.


A lot of Corel user choose this 1, because of price and they cant afford adobe @ $50 monthly. This usually indicates they have an older computer. Or a computer that is full of junk from trying free or hacked software. My laptop intel T6600 4 gigs ram SSD hard drive ran Corel X5 pretty well. Where it fell short was complicated files with tons of nodes. Illustrator handled it much better but still had some small hanging issues where Corel froze and sat for 5 min. Fast forward to newer desktop a Intel corei7 940 64 gigs of ram 3 intel SSD in raid 5. Running Corel X8 without issue, ad free. Adobe also runs fine with one exception. after being open for a day or 2 there is a memory exception and crashes. It has something to do with ram because I can take out 16 or 32 gigs and it runs without issue. I also run CS6 because I refuse to pay a monthly subscription and Adobe simply tells me sorry we don't support CS6. So maybe the newer version wouldn't do this.


It all comes down to this, YOU.... can I learn the software? How much time do I want to spend learning the software? What are MY needs? How much $$$ do I have to invest? As you can see everyone has their own opinions. There are some facts Like you can do some stuff in Adobe that you cant in Corel, this also goes the other way but just a few things.