Corel CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3

I've been a Corel user for 10+ years and am quite familiar with the product. CorelDraw is a vector based drawing program similar to Adobe Illustrator, whereas Photo-Paint is their raster (bitmap) graphic product used for digital imaging. Think CorelDraw for creating graphics from scratch and Photo-Paint for editing them. The suite also includes Corel Capture, a program to perform custom screen captures.

Corel PhotoPaint X3 (13) is an easy to use program for light-to-moderate photo editing. It loads quickly and uses relatively little memory compared to PhotoShop. I've never used Elements but it may be comparable to that app in many ways.

CorelDraw X3 is great program when you need to create images from scratch. Vectors are usually the way to go with this because you can always save and edit the objects with ease and then export them to JPEG, GIF, etc at whatever size you would like.

Corel Capture X3 - A handy utility for capturing screen images in whatever geometric way you would like. Can set the trigger button, resolution, and so on. Note that the X3 version doesn't seem to work quite right with Windows Vista..

Corel Photo-Paint
--------------------

Sharpening - It's Adaptive Unsharp function is incredible and provides a slider bar to set the percentage of sharpening. The program also includes several other sharpening tools including an Unsharp Mask, but I haven't seen any reason to choose these over Adaptive Unsharp.

Local Equalization effect - This incredible filter creates crazy-like effects similar to HDR. Includes several controls which dramatically change its effects. Only downside is that it's a tad slow and that it works differently on different sized images.

Can use Photoshop plug-ins - Install PS plug-ins at will.

Pretty good masking capabilities - Can invert, feather, grow, reduce, save, etc, your masks. It's magic wand works pretty well. Invert used to do weird stuff in previous versions but it now seems to work quite well.

Cost - much cheaper than Photoshop: you can get the entire suite for about $400, or about $200 for the upgrade. Compare this to about $600-$700 for just the raster (bitmap) editor Photoshop (doesn't include Illustrator).

Image Adjustment Lab - I like PhotoPaint's simple do-it-all-here Image Adjustment Lab screen, which allows you to adjust temperature, tint, saturation, brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows and midtones. (The temperature and shadows are especially useful.) PS CS2 also has something similar, but it's quite clunky by comparison.

Easy to use interface, but since I've been working with it for so long, this may simply be because I'm so familiar with it.

Corel Photo-Paint
--------------------

No HDR function - Not sure if X4 has this. Note that Photoshop's is pretty lousy anyway, so it's not like PS has a big advantage here.

No Spot Healing Brush as in Photoshop. I'm pretty impressed with PS' spot healer, so that's one advantage to PS.

X3 doesn't support RAW image formats.

Can't lock a mask to a ratio the way you can in PS, which hurts.

You can't create layers as you do in Photoshop. Depending on how you like to work, this could be a big deal. Note that X4 may have this capability and X5 is soon to be out.

Adobe Photoshop CS2 - Great product, but sometimes it's like using a tank to drive a block down the street.

Many earlier versions of Corel.

Have never contacted them.