With so many companies working remotely during this pandemic, and so many think pieces talking about how work life will never be the same, Corel’s Draw Graphics suite is rising to the occasion. The company announced its 2021 update for the powerful illustration and design suite on Tuesday, and this year’s enhancements have a renewed focus on the demands of remote work.
CorelDraw Graphics Suite 2021 includes the usual apps, including CorelDraw, Corel Photo-Paint, Corel Font Manager, PowerTrace, and AfterShot 3 HDR. There’s also the CorelDraw.app browser-based version, and there’s also a new app for the iPad. The graphics suite costs $499 for a one-time purchase, or you can sign-up for the annual subscription at $249 per year or $20.75 per month. Corel also offers a 15-day free trial.
Some of the new features for 2021 include a multipage view that allows you to manage and edit a project’s digital assets in one spot. Corel says you can “move objects across pages fluidly, compare designs side-by-side, and freely move pages around to arrange them as you wish.” For working with others, Corel enhanced real-time collaboration with the ability to gather live comments and annotations as well as resolve feedback within the CorelDraw design file. There’s also a new dashboard for storing, organizing, and sharing cloud-based files.
Corel also added a multi-asset export feature with a reusable list of pages and objects to export items simultaneously in just a few clicks.
The day-to-day practical editing features include a new “draw in perspective” feature that lets artists choose from one-, two-, or three-point perspectives. Corel says that you can then edit your creation freely without losing the chosen perspective. CorelDraw also has an autofit page feature to resize content quickly. The feature can even specify how much space there should be between objects in the drawing and the edge of the page.
Moving on, there’s an improved color replacement feature that includes a new color wheel for enhanced range control to adjust hue and saturation. In Corel Photo-Paint you can make image adjustments non-destructively in real-time with the new docker/inspector that offers quick access to your most frequently used filters. Corel also added a new snap-to-self feature that prevents objects from snapping to their own snap points—the idea being that users can manipulate these objects more easily in complex illustrations.
One of the nice things about Corel’s suite is that it includes operating system-specific features. On Windows 10, for example, CorelDraw offers optimization for touch, pen, and Wacom tablets. It also offers specific support for Microsoft’s Surface Dial, and it’s optimized for use with discrete GPUs for added processing power.
On MacOS, meanwhile, the suite has been optimized for both Intel and the newer M1 Macs. It’s compatible with sidecar to use your iPad as a second screen, and it’s developed handy features that are accessible from the Touch Bar on compatible Macs.
CorelDraw Graphics Suite 2021 is available now.