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Corel Vs. Adobe....

Rodi

Rodi

New Member
Circleville Signs said:
Adobe's new pricing structure is flat-out ludicrous,
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So true when there is no competition. They have it all pagelayout, raster, vector, acrobat. YOU NEED THEM THEM!

Illustrator is a real dog since CS2 (type cabilities are a joke) and keeps getting to be less and less of a program. Compare all their programs to when they had competition (Quark, Freehand, Corel all on PCs and Macs) and they are all kinda lackluster.

All their upgrades are now from marketing, not market driven, but until someone creates something better, there is little choice.

If you are a loner (you create all your own documents) you can use Corel pretty well. In the offset world, you might get laughed at, but so what~ you create good dependable PDFs and they will never know!
 
Techman

Techman

New Member
Adobe is the best and it's also industry standard.
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No it is not. There is no "Industry Standard" never has been never will be.
No it is not the "best". There is no "best".
If illy was the best there would be no need for all the plug ins it requires to do the same work that corel draw does without all those add on plugins.


Try grabbing a node in illy. See how much of a ral pain it is. See why you need the Xtreme path plugins too.
 
Bly

Bly

New Member
GAC05 said:
On the other hand if you have to deal with editing clients files most of the day Corel is going to come up short. Nothing reads AI files better than Adobe products.
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This is the reason I have the latest version of CS.

If you only ever have to work with files you create yourself, go to Corel.
 
Custom_Grafx

Custom_Grafx

New Member
Give more details on your majority of work.

Do you create all your files from scratch? Do you do work for companies who send you print ready files? and if so, what do they use?

List your most used tools and functions in Illy and PS, and ask if the same things are easy to do in Corel - or ask for the steps involved.

Joe made a good point about having to create most of his files - when that's the case, program makes no difference in this case really.

Functionality wise, they're both great (I use both, but now mostly illy because of my customers).

Explain a little about how your work comes in, what type of people send you files and in what format etc and I'll (or someone else) give you a more detailed answer.
 
WildWestDesigns

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
Bly said:
This is the reason I have the latest version of CS.

If you only ever have to work with files you create yourself, go to Corel.
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I have never had a problem with Corel on reading Ai files up to CS5. However, I have had problems importing CDR files in Ai.

I will add this though, most of the files that I get are EPS files (or jpg if I'm just doing embroidery work), so I can open it up in either.
 
Circleville Signs

Circleville Signs

New Member
Probably 80% of what I do is created from scratch, or else I am having to trace and recreate poor client provided work.

I use PS for photo retouching and editing.
 
JoshLoring

JoshLoring

New Member
Joe Diaz said:
kind of like not using the standard. It makes me feel like a rebel, dare I say a "maverick". :Big Laugh
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Joe, you are a rebel! And... Nobody sends you vector files because they don't want to embarrass themselves to the Jedi Master.
 
Custom_Grafx

Custom_Grafx

New Member
Circleville Signs said:
Probably 80% of what I do is created from scratch, or else I am having to trace and recreate poor client provided work.

I use PS for photo retouching and editing.
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In that case, I'd say you're 80% ok if you go to Corel. What are the other 20%? Do they send you files? If yes, what files do they send you?

Next question...Do you need to ever send files out to offset printers or other printers who use Adobe? If so, how often?

My basic assessment, is that you'll be ok for the most part. Especially if you know the fixes of usual compatibility pitfalls and the such, and you are dealing with people who know how to work around these issues. For people who know what they're doing, it's really not a big deal either way.

If you make the switch, the thing you'll miss most is opening PDFs and EPS files from people using Illustrator, without some kind of hiccup or adjustment needed (most of the time is ok, but it has its moments).

Second, you may also miss being able to send a file without issue to other people who only have illustrator (again, most of the time it's ok, and if you know what you're doing, all good).

I reckon you'll be ok overall, and you'll save quite a bit of money, and you'll find some features in Corel which you're gonna find time saving and easy to use. There are some features/dialog boxes in Corel which make you go... "why doesn't illy have that?" (and vice versa I'm sure).

You're ultimate option would be to have both in my opinion, but that's not gonna be saving you any money, so nup.
 
CES020

CES020

New Member
How much money are you trying to save? How much is your time worth? If you have to spend time learning all this, isn't that billable time you missed out on? If you spend 3 hours a month on it, trying to learn, didn't you just lose money, since you lost out making products you could sell?

If your shop rate is $80 per hour, and you spend 3 hours per month for a year, that's 36 hours, or $2,880 of lost revenue. I think you can buy a lot of Adobe products for $2,880. And that's only figuring 3 hours a month, which you know is going to be much more than that.

If you want to learn it on your free time, that's another story, but if it stops you from working, or causes your work to take longer while you do learn it, this "savings" you're after may actually cost you a whole lot more in the end.

Just something to think about.
 
Joe Diaz

Joe Diaz

New Member
CES020 said:
How much money are you trying to save? How much is your time worth? If you have to spend time learning all this, isn't that billable time you missed out on? If you spend 3 hours a month on it, trying to learn, didn't you just lose money, since you lost out making products you could sell?

If your shop rate is $80 per hour, and you spend 3 hours per month for a year, that's 36 hours, or $2,880 of lost revenue. I think you can buy a lot of Adobe products for $2,880. And that's only figuring 3 hours a month, which you know is going to be much more than that.

If you want to learn it on your free time, that's another story, but if it stops you from working, or causes your work to take longer while you do learn it, this "savings" you're after may actually cost you a whole lot more in the end.

Just something to think about.
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Adobe Suite Design Standard. $65 per month= $780 a year.
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5 $400 the first version, then $160 every upgrade. Corel upgrades about every other year. So, lets do the math.

So for arguments sake let's assume that neither program will increase or decrease their pricing. So we'll start at the $2,880 figure you came up with: $2,880 - $400 (corels first two year) = $2,440. $2,440/$80 (the cost of the upgrade every year IF you upgrade every version) = 30.5 years. So, if you add the first two years It will take you about 32.5 years to spend $2,880 using Corel... or $88.60 a year to use Corel over a 32.5 years.

Now take Adobe's $780 a year and subtract Corel's $88.60 a year and you get $691.40 a year savings. $2,880/$691.40 = 4.2 years, which is how long it will take based on your estimated cost to learn Corel, before you will start saving money by using Corel.... after which you will save $691.40 per year.

Now I'm assuming prices will go up, but historically adobe has been increasing their price at a faster rate, so the time it takes could be less than 4.2 years. Also, because Corel dosn't force you to upgrade, the amount of money you spend a year on Corel could be significantly less if you upgrade every other version.
 
Circleville Signs

Circleville Signs

New Member
And there you have it folks - Joe just made my decision an easy one :)

Actually, I'm gonna DL the 30 day trial and see how I like it. Then we'll see what happens :)
 
Terremoto

Terremoto

New Member
Circleville Signs said:
Actually, I'm gonna DL the 30 day trial and see how I like it. Then we'll see what happens :)
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Give it a chance. Once you know your way around CorelDraw you will soon realize that you can be a lot more productive than you can with AI.

That'll put more loot in your pocket as well.

The first frustration you'll want to get your head around is CorelDraw X5's color management. Download and read the following PDF:

http://coreldraw.com/wikis/howto/designer-s-guide-to-color-management.aspx

The information contained in the PDF is CorelDraw X5 specific but the color theory is global.

You say you do a lot of tracing? Once you get used to CorelDraw's node editing you'll realize how clumsy AI's is.
 
CES020

CES020

New Member
Joe Diaz said:
Adobe Suite Design Standard. $65 per month= $780 a year.
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5 $400 the first version, then $160 every upgrade. Corel upgrades about every other year. So, lets do the math.

So for arguments sake let's assume that neither program will increase or decrease their pricing. So we'll start at the $2,880 figure you came up with: $2,880 - $400 (corels first two year) = $2,440. $2,440/$80 (the cost of the upgrade every year IF you upgrade every version) = 30.5 years. So, if you add the first two years It will take you about 32.5 years to spend $2,880 using Corel... or $88.60 a year to use Corel over a 32.5 years.

Now take Adobe's $780 a year and subtract Corel's $88.60 a year and you get $691.40 a year savings. $2,880/$691.40 = 4.2 years, which is how long it will take based on your estimated cost to learn Corel, before you will start saving money by using Corel.... after which you will save $691.40 per year.

Now I'm assuming prices will go up, but historically adobe has been increasing their price at a faster rate, so the time it takes could be less than 4.2 years. Also, because Corel dosn't force you to upgrade, the amount of money you spend a year on Corel could be significantly less if you upgrade every other version.
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Must be the new math I keep hearing about. The 3 hours a month was a LONG way off. I don't think one's going to become proficient in Corel in 3 hours a month. You can probably multiply that by about 10 times, so your math is about as accurate as my example. It wasn't meant as an exact number to be picked apart by you, it was meant to show how one could start to figure out if it made financial sense to do it. Many people will step over a $1 to save a dime and I was illustrating that this might be one of those times. It might not. I have no idea, I didn't do a cost analysis on it.

I own both and will continue to own both because are needed for our business.

Unlike you, I have no vested interest in anyone picking one product or another.
 
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