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Subject:Re: Graphics Apps - Adobe vs. Corel From:Brad Anderson <brad -at- FALCONMEDIA -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 4 May 1998 12:51:07 -0400
>I have decided on Framemaker for authoring and now need to purchase a
>graphics application. Although we have an illustrator here, he stays
>pretty busy doing Marketing stuff and I know I will need to create and
>tweak illustrations from time to time. I have used Corel Draw & Corel
>PhotoPaint in the past and am fairly familiar with them but am wondering
>how they compare to Adobe Illustrator and Adobe PhotoShop, which I have
>never used. I am leaning toward Corel simply because I am familiar with
>it and our illustrator here uses it, but I would like to hear some
>feedback from folks who have used both Corel and Adobe.
Chris,
Here's my two cents. Corel sucks--period. Not to start program wars or
platform wars but this is VERY important.
The headaches we've seen from Corel's products (especially Draw and
Ventura)--especially from PS problems--warrant not using the programs. The
only retraction of this policy--I'll grant the use of Corel if you are only
printing from your local machine to your local printer--then go ahead and
use Corel. If you're sending your documents to pre-press, film, a
DocuTech, or PDF--don't touch Corel.
1) Photoshop is THE standard for image editing (Photoshop 5.0 will ship 25
May). It is the best option available for editing bitmap images on the Mac
and PC platforms. Photopaint doesn't even come close.
2) Corel Draw has some neat features, but Corel doesn't do
postscript--period. You'll be playing "Russion Roulette" if you decide to
use Corel and saving EPS file from it. For those of you that haven't had
problems--your time is coming. Corel doesn't generate the proper
postscript for pre-press or for PDF files.
3) Illustrator is a good program and the interface is fair. The neatest
feature is the ability to open/extract into/edit PDF files. Other than
that, the interface is difficult to use and not intuitive at all. My
recommendation is to use Macromedia's Freehand, it has many more features
and is fairly easy to use and learn, plus it is cross-platform (mac/pc).
The final word--Use Photoshop for bitmaps (save as EPS or uncompressed
TIFFs with IBM previews)--FreeHand or Illustrator for vector art (save as
EPS with IBM previews). Using these standards will remove 90% of your
headaches when finally going to print.
