This is one of those upgrades that will either grab you straight away or leave you wondering what all the fuss is about.

Like its predecessors, the CorelDraw Graphics Suite 12 is a collection of graphics software that contains three main applications: the veteran CorelDraw for vector graphics work, Photo-Paint for photo-editing and the often overlooked Rave, which is good for creating web animations.

All three programs have been upgraded, yet the list of new features is surprisingly brief. That's because the main new feature - the Smart Drawing tool - is designed to introduce a new way of working, rather than padding out a list of features.

Instead of simply recording your brush strokes on screen, the Smart Drawing tool has a degree of intelligence built in, which allows it to recognise the shapes you're drawing and convert them automatically into smooth curves and straight lines in order to create a more polished appearance.

You could use the program's existing freehand tools, of course, but creating freehand drawings on a computer screen is always tricky. Drawing accurately with a mouse is difficult and even with a good graphics tablet it takes only a slight shake of the hand to cause a glaring error.

The new Smart Drawing tool helps to eliminate these errors and enables even amateur artists to create smoothly finished vector artwork. There's also an option to adjust the smoothing level, so you can turn the smoothing right down to give your artwork a rough, hand-drawn appearance.

The Smart Drawing tool works pretty well, although you'll probably get better results from it with a graphics tablet. Your appreciation of this tool will also depend on whether you create a lot of hand-drawn artwork.

To assist in creating more technical drawings, CorelDraw 12 boasts improved snapping controls and 'dynamic guides' that can be customised to work the way you want. Also new is the impressive Eyedropper that, as well as sampling the colours by clicking, can copy object attributes, such as stroke and fill, or even the degree of rotation.

All these new features are also found in Rave, the suite's animation program, which is easy to use and can export Flash animations. It makes it a great alternative to Flash for anyone who isn't a professional web developer.

That leaves Photo-Paint, which unfortunately draws the short straw in this upgrade. Its only major new feature is the Touch-up brush. This works well enough, but by itself it makes for a pretty disappointing upgrade.

The other disappointing detail is the cost. Corel has translated the US upgrade price from $179 to £179 ex. VAT. But, to be fair, the full price of the complete Graphics Suite is still less than a single copy of Adobe Photoshop, so it's a good choice for a business user or technical illustrator looking for a good all-round collection of graphics tools.

Contact: Corel (01628) 589800
www.corel.co.uk

System requirements:

• CPU Pentium II
• Memory 256MB
• Disk space 256MB
• Operating system Windows 2000/XP