Best Graphic Design Software for Commercial and Home Use

This is a Suite, meaning that having bought it, you get not one app but a number of graphic design programs. Namely, the following:

• CorelDRAW Home & Student 2018, the main app designed for creating vector illustrations and page layout.
  
• Corel PHOTO-PAINT Home & Student 2018, a raster graphics app for when you need to tweak photos and pixel-based images; its full version is even considered by some user to be close in capabilities to Photoshop.
  
• Corel PowerTRACE, an application to convert your bitmaps into vector images by tracing.
  
• Corel CONNECT, a simple and intuitive content finder that syncs CorelDRAW and PHOTO-PAINT and allows you to search the necessary images on your PC, in your local network, or on the Corel's content DVD.
  
• Corel CAPTURE is, as the name suggests, a screen capturing tool. Admittedly, there are a couple of simpler screen capturing apps throughout the Internet, some of them even free, but it is still nice to have it included in the Suite.
  
• The built-in WhatTheFont engine that will help you identify any fonts you see using a MyFont website. This one easy, you don't need to go to the website specifically, just click the feature in the Font menu in CorelDRAW and it will send you to the site in no time. (Note that you do need an Internet connection for that)
• Barcode Wizard, a tool to, yes, create barcodes. Pretty useful and also fun, for some reason.
  
• Duplexing Wizard will help you do the back-to-back printing.
  

Add here more than a thousand of clipart and digital images and hundreds of other useful content for just about any needs. This suite is definitely a good buy.

CorelDRAW Home & Student 2018 Suite offers a selection of features that would be useful for amateur photographers. Have you ever made a photo where everything was stunning except for the crooked perspective? Like the roof of the building you were photographing or the horizon in the distance looked distorted? Not parallel to the edges of the photo? Now there are a number of ways to fix this issue even in Photoshop, for example, but most of them a somewhat tedious and fussy. Not in CorelDRAW. With the straightening bar, this will take no more than a couple of seconds and the picture will look just perfect.

Here's another example of a great feature: the CorelDRAW software for graphic design is really great when it comes to adjusting perspective. Be if the task of making an in-perspective image looks like it was taken head-on, or aligning the picture for real-world "distance" look, the tools here do it with ease you would never suspect. It does not take a genius to master a software that does so many things automatically.

The suite is able to work with 4K monitors, multi-monitor set-ups, and it supports stylus work, design students and enthusiasts will benefit from it tremendously. And it has an Upload to WordPress feature built-in, which is a feat for bloggers.

The newest update, issued in October 2017 (Adobe CC 2018) and then expanded just recently in March (within the Adobe CC 2018.1 edition), brings to our table quite a feat of upgrades to the existing features as well as some completely new ones.

First of all, the Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 now launches faster than before. That was always one of the complaints with all Adobe graphic design software for Mac and Windows alike, as well as their video editors—it takes time to load all the overwhelming range of tools they offer. Little by little, every new release takes less time to launch and we can't help but notice it. But that's not even the cap of the huge iceberg that is the 2018 edition of the Illustrator CC. Here are the two we find to be the most notable, though the list is way more extensive.

The new and smart Properties panel

This is pure convenience. In the new CC software for graphic design, Illustrator and Photoshop included, the properties panel now reacts automatically to you selecting a tool, an object, or a layer on your image and shows you exactly the controls you might need to work with it. This saves a lot of time and speeds your work tremendously, let alone makes it simpler and less stressful.

Puppet Warp

This is a completely new feature and it will be deeply appreciated by animators and character designers. What you previously did using single anchor points and paths, you can now do faster and make look more natural with this tool. You can set points that you wish to move as well as those you need to stay fixed and then you twist, transform, rotate all you want. The feature comes in handy when you need your character move their hands, for example, or it will also be useful for customizing text shapes.

Another notable addition to the Adobe graphic design software this year is the support for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar. If you are already used to this in other apps, your working speed in Illustrator will most likely go up, however, it takes some time to master for those who did not use the Touch Bar before so for them, this addition might be not that significant.

The software improved greatly in ways of font manipulation by adding SVG OpenType fonts support, where you can manipulate just about anything without distorting the style. You can now make a thousand artboards on your canvas (that is if your computer is powerful enough to handle this load), reorganize and align them without fuss. The adjustment of handles and anchor points size deserves a mention as well: although minor and insignificant at first glance, it adds great comfort to work process. There's more: DropBox browsing and PDF import improvements, data merging, style sets, text management, etc.

It's hard to mention all the benefits of the newest Illustrator update, we do encourage you to check it out yourself with the week-long trial. By the way, there is a sort of mobile version of Illustrator, too.

Affinity Designer uses boolean functions, which is good in and of itself when creating complex shapes but can hardly compare to the Illustrator's Shape Builder, for example. There are some tools we have gotten used to after the years with Adobe and Corel products that are absent from Designer, like the Knife tool, for example, or Mesh and Blend. There is no multiple stokes option yet as well. As for the raster graphics pixel persona, the Photoshop-available magic wand and cloning brush that can save a lot of time sometimes can be found in Affinity's other software, the Affinity Photo, but not in Designer. (Still, these two together cost less than a combo of vector and raster Corel apps, for example.)

The good news is that Affinity team is working on expanding the toolset and they promise the upgrade will be at no additional cost. However, how soon it will happen we can not say and right now certain tools some designers find irreplaceable are missing from this graphic design software for Mac and Windows.

Besides the price and the combination of raster and vector software for graphic design in one app, here are the things you might appreciate in Affinity Designer over any other software.

• Fast launch. According to the Affinity's developers, this was one of their main goals when creating their graphic design software for PC, and we must say they fared well in that, the app takes half the time Illustrator takes before it is ready for use.
• The collection of pre-prepared shapes is vast and all the possible tweaking options are easy to find and manipulate.
• The Constraints tool will be loved by UI designers. It was created, basically, to make it easier to produce designs adaptable to different screen sizes, like, when you switch from your iPad to your iPhone all the icons on the website you open don't shrink or go beyond the screen.
• Continuous export. We've all been there—suddenly, there is a blackout or the computer crash and you need to do everything from scratch since you've forgotten to save/export the last two hours of your work. Not with the Affinity easy graphic design software, this one offers you a feature where, when it's on, every change is automatically exported. Sort of like working with GoogleDocs or Evernote, but in graphics.
• History panel. Well, this one does not need an introduction, does it?

All in all, Affinity Designer is not the most powerful graphic design software right now but its creators certainly make some considerable efforts towards that ambition. Right now, this is software we'd recommend beginners and those web designers who are not willing to pay for features they don't use.

What Corel PaintShop Pro 2018 offers its users is over 100 backgrounds, 75 new patterns/gradients/textures, 30 new brushes, color palettes, and, what we've found even more useful, a scripting engine. What does it mean, in this particular case? The scripting engine in a photo editing software is a feature where, when you need to edit several photos with the same effects (for example, a series of photos in the same color scheme and with similar contents but at different angles), you create a script with the necessary changes and apply it to all the photos. You can create a script for almost every task you do often, or not often but sometimes it's just the best. There is, by the way, a batch processing option as well. With these two possibilities, editing becomes much easier and faster, which can be extremely useful at times.

There are two options for you to choose from right now: PaintShop Pro 2018 is a single app, whereas PaintShop Pro 2018 Ultimate is a collection of professional photo editing software and in addition to the main app it also includes Painter Essentials 5, Perfectly Clear 3 SE, and Corel AfterShot 3, all dedicated apps for certain tasks. With the Painter Essentials 5, you can take your photo and turn it into a drawing or a painting; it also offers tools to sketch from scratch and create stunning pictures. Perfectly Clear 3 SE is an intelligent app able to enhance images tremendously with a single click thanks to the collection of presets. Corel AfterShot 3 is an app designed for RAW editing, it makes photos from your camera look professional and it also supports batch processing, you can apply the changes to up to 1000 photos.

This software for graphic design has a layered workspace. This means that every adjustment you make, be it exposure, brightness, contrast, blur/sharpen effect, or gradient map, to name a few, they will be applied as a new layer on top of your original image. How is this convenient? Well, when applying a variety of changes directly to the image, you stumble upon a problem: if you need to dispose of one effect, you need to undo everything applied after it. On the other hand, with separate layers as effects and adjustments, you can just turn it off or delete it directly without affecting other layers. Now, this is possible to do in Photoshop as well, for example, but you'll have to first create the layers and then apply the effects to them, and that is purely inconvenient when Photoshop has other ways, complex as they are. The ACDSee Photo Editor 10 creates those layers automatically and you can come back to them at any moment to tweak that one parameter to enhance the image with consideration to all other applied effects.

Some users might consider all this layer collecting a bother and an additional load on the PC (hence, slower operation) but that is also not a problem since, first, this simple graphic design software does not require too much power from your processor and, second, it uses GPU-accelerated layers processing, making your work a breeze.

One of the greatest things Adobe offers today is the widest possible range of add-ons, presets, and plug-ins created by third-party developers. Those can be added to the specific software and used by anyone willing to pay (though there are free ones as well). Well, other software also sometimes has plug-in possibilities but rarely as wide a selection of plug-ins themselves, what with the Adobe graphic design software being the most popular one. So, here's another piece of great news: ACDSee Photo Editor 10 is fully compatible with Photoshop plug-ins. You can take advantage of them without paying the monthly fee for Adobe's products. Isn't that nice?