CorelDRAW Graphics Suite Lite 2022

Overview

This is the 2022 CorelDRAW Graphics Suite with the weight taken out. The vector application and the photo editor are both here in full, with every drawing, shaping, type and colour tool present. What has been removed is everything that surrounds them: the font manager, the tracing utility as a separate program, the clipart and template libraries that account for most of the download size, the stock content connector and the messaging and update components. The result installs in a couple of minutes and starts in a couple of seconds.

It is worth being clear about what lite means here, because the word is usually a warning. The applications are not feature reduced. A drawing made in this build opens identically in a full installation, uses the same file format, and has access to the same effects, the same colour management and the same print production checks. Only the bundled content and the surrounding utilities are gone.

The vector application

The drawing side covers the whole toolset: bezier and freehand drawing, node editing with the full set of node types, shaping and boolean operations, the blend, contour, envelope, extrude and distortion effects, transparency and mesh fills, and the perspective drawing tools. Documents are multi page with master pages, layers per page or across the document, and objects that can be pinned to either.

Type handling is the part that people stay for. The text engine supports OpenType features properly, including stylistic sets, contextual alternates and true small capitals, with a glyph panel for picking characters out of a face directly. Text can be fitted to a path, flowed into a shape, or set in linked frames across pages. Variable font axes are exposed as sliders where the font supplies them.

The photo editor

The raster application handles the work that arrives alongside a vector job: a supplied photograph that needs correcting, a scanned logo that needs cleaning, a texture that needs tiling. It does layers with masks and blend modes, adjustment tools with a histogram, healing and cloning, lens correction, and a raw processor for camera files. Effects run non destructively where the tool supports it.

The handoff between the two applications is direct. A bitmap placed in a drawing can be sent to the photo editor and returns with the change applied and its placement preserved. That round trip is the reason to keep both installed rather than pairing the vector program with something else.

Output and colour

Print production is intact: spot colours, overprint control, bleed setup, imposition, a preflight panel that lists what will cause a problem at the printer, and PDF export against the print exchange standards. Colour management uses proper ICC profiles with soft proofing to a chosen output profile, which is what makes it possible to trust the screen.

For screen work the export dialog previews multiple settings side by side with the resulting file size, and objects or pages can be exported individually or in a batch. SVG export writes clean markup rather than a wrapped bitmap, which matters if the artwork is going into a web project.

What you get

• Full vector drawing toolset with shaping, blends, envelopes, extrudes and mesh fills
• Multi page documents with master pages and per page or global layers
• OpenType type engine with stylistic sets, glyph panel and variable font axes
• Bundled photo editor with layers, masks, healing and a raw processor
• Direct round trip between the vector and raster applications
• Print production tools including spot colour, overprint, bleed and preflight
• ICC colour management with soft proofing to an output profile
• Clean SVG export and side by side export previews with file sizes
• Installs in around a gigabyte with no bundled content libraries

Inside the archive

• CorelDRAW 2022 vector application, offline installer
• Photo editor application
• Core colour profiles and print production presets
• A small default set of fills, outlines and palettes
• Language packs for the interface list shown above
• Notes explaining exactly what was removed from the full suite

System requirements

Installing it

1. Unpack the archive to a folder on a local drive.
2. Turn off real time protection for the install.
3. Run setup as administrator and choose the interface language.
4. Do not tick the option to install the messaging component if it is offered.
5. Launch the vector application once. No sign-in is requested and no trial counter runs.

Mirrors

Release history

Questions about this release

Comments

Comments are read before they appear. If a build stops working, say so here and it gets rebuilt rather than quietly left up.