Corel Draw or Illustrator

[quickcut07]

I am looking for advice on which program would be better or easier to use in the engraving field.
I currently have Corel Draw, and Corel Painter IX. I have heard alot of talk about Adobe Photo Shop and
Illustrator. Since I haven't really used either program I was looking for advice from someone who has used
either program.

My son wiped out my computer so I have to install a new photo program anyway. Just curious as to what is being used and why.

Eric

 

[Andrew Biggs]

Hi Eric

You've just asked question that has no simple answer...............................

It all depends on what you want to do with them.

Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw are both vector programes. In other words they deal with lines. Photoshop is a photo manipulation programe. All of them are top of the line products. What it generally boils down to is personal preference by the user.

Corel Draw is good value for money as you get Corel Photo Paint with it. Sort of two programes for the price of one. MY personal preference is for Photoshop and Corel Draw simply because I've used them for so long that I can't be bothered learning anything else. They also do everything that I need both at my day job and my engraving.

For engraving purposes I mainly use Corel Draw to take outlines of the part to be engraved. Size them as big as possible on a letter size piece of paper and start drawing with a pencil. Scan back into the computer and down size them to the required original size. Also for tracing photos, drawings etc and placing them on the part to be engraved. You can also do basic scroll development.

Photoshop I mainly use for manipulating my engraving photos etc.

The main issue is that all of these programes are bigger than Texas. You will ever only want to use a small part of them.......................However............there is a really big learning curve on these things. If you are unfamiliar with these type of programes then they arn't the sort of thing that you can just pick up, fiddle with for a while and then start producing credible results. Each one has it's own quirky way of doing things that isn't always obvious and can drive a novice to distraction (not to mention large amounts of swearing!!!). The easiest way is to take a night class or get a friend to show you how to use the programe.

Cheers
Andrew

 

[quickcut07]

Andrew you are deffinitely right about the learning curve. I've been playing with Corel for a few years, not that I'm any good at it, but it's an easy way to add new frustrations to your day. And a few months ago just to add some more interest and a new twist I added a wacom tablet. The biggest reason for asking is I hear a lot of people talking about Illustrator and what they do with Photo Shop. I didn't personally see where Photo Shop added to the drawing element or possibly I had missed something.

I thank you very much for the information. Seeing the last drawing you were doing with your cat, prompted the inquiry.

Eric

 

[coincutter]

Illustrator is my choice
Better range of plugins and less of a memory hog
interfaces with photoshop and a dirth of other programs.
much better file preview and especially for old eps files with no existing internal preview file freeware plugin exists to up date files and you can see everything corel pukes on. Corel is buggy and spend a lot of cpu power doing very strange things.

I use CS2 but the older versions are all fine.
But if you are money conscious there are many fine vector programs outt there in open source
these will run on windowz and linux and cost you absolutely nothing. And they are just as powerful and efficient.

check out sourceforge and see what you can get

real draw is a nother nice proggy
thumbsplus is a great file view/edit program and if you install ghostscript it will handle everything you can throw at it, lots of built in filters
convert a picture to a bullino sketch in a split second.
habve fun