I thought perhaps I’d been a little hard on Corel in a previous post. So, having heard nice things about Draw X5 (I’m currently using version 8), I decided to take the newer version for a spin.

OK…

You can probably guess where this story is headed. But just in case…

I plunked down my upgrade money, installed the program, and spent a day getting all the shortcuts and commands lined up so I could operate it quickly (this ability to customize the program is one of the big selling points of Corel products, to my mind). I was pleased to see that the upgrade had lots of new features, some of which worked much faster than with my older version of the program, thanks to tailoring the software to multi-core processors.

By the end of the day, I was set to work fast and smart.

Or so I thought.

The first picture I pulled into Photo Paint went well — until I tried out the smear brush on a layer. Instead of smearing both outward from the edge of the object and inward, the smear brush only worked outward, leaving an ever growing blob wherever I tried to gently coax pixels into place.

I’ll leave out the several minutes of angry cursing. (This may explain why the ears of everyone working for Corel burned during that evening.)

Since about half of my artwork chores are done with a smear brush, this glitch in one of the major tools in PhotoPaint basically made my new investment worthless.

Talk about disappointment and anger.

I did some checking. The program was released early in 2010. I purchased it mid-July 2010. And still this major part of the X5 Suite doesn’t work.

According to a reliable source I contacted, apparently Corel has been aware of the problem for some time (even though a search of the company’s “knowledge base” turned up not even a tiny mention of the fact).

No one knows whether or not it will be addressed in the first Service Pack out at the end of August. Maybe. Maybe not.

So, once again, to those wanting to work smart and fast creating digital illustrations, I recommend Corel Photo-Paint for producing your bitmap art projects. But not the current version.

Instead, buy an older version, download and install the various Service Packs to bring it up to speed the way it should have been when first released, and ask yourself why in the world Corel keeps doing this to its loyal users and potential users. Why would anyone want to upgrade if they knew the truth?

Heck of a way to run a business, Corel.

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When not acting as an unwitting beta tester for Corel, Duncan Long is a freelance book cover illustrator for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See his cover illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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