Would you think it unlucky to launch a product in version 13? Corel's obviously a bit sensitive, as its new drawing and illustration suite is called X3 instead. Despite its longevity the company is still innovating strongly, with several new drawing and editing tools and features not available in other products.

The suite consists of Corel Draw itself, Corel PhotoPaint (a heavyweight bitmap and photo editor), Corel Capture for screen grabs and Pixmantec RawShooter Essentials for editing RAW images from digital cameras. However, most of the new features belong to Corel Draw itself.

The most important of these is PowerTrace. It's always been important to be able to trace bitmap images and convert them into scaleable vector drawings. It used to be just the outline you could trace, but now it's a whole, full-colour photo.

For example, look at the screen shot which accompanies this review. You'll see a bitmap of a deer on the left and on the right a vector version of the same image. It's not just a cut-out from the bitmap; it's been traced, so every nuance in the colour, every speckle on the deer's back, is a coloured polygon. And they can all be scaled up to whatever size you like, while still maintaining their resolution - it'll never pixellate.

Which is not to say the cut-out in PhotoPaint isn't good; it's been improved using the engine of Corel's KnockOut program, so you can extract even complex images from their backgrounds. It could do with a vector tool for outlining the cut-out, as in Photoshop, for the initial cut, but it does include rub-out and 'rub-back-in' tools, which help tweak the final image.

Back in Corel Draw there's the Image Adjustment Lab which enables you to edit imported bitmaps within the drawing program, even if they've already been rotated, masked or manipulated in other ways. It provides most of the main adjustments, such as mid-tone and shadow, as well as colour temperature control. These edits are all available through sliders or numeric input and there's an auto function, too, which does a good job of correcting common photo problems.

The crop tool is also worth a mention, as it now works on vectors as well as bitmaps. Although you can only crop vectors to a rectangle, rather than masking with other shapes as you can when cropping bitmaps, the idea of being able to chop straight through all the overlapping polygons of a vector drawing to extract a part of it makes for a very clever new tool.

If you've ever tried flood filling parts of a piece of vector clip-art and had the fill flow to places you never thought it could reach, the new SmartFill tool will be a godsend, too. It closes off gaps between lines, so fills stay where you expect. It's not always perfect, but it's still a great time-saver.

These are just highlights of the new suite. There are over 40 improvements in all, including new text-to-path features, easier drop caps and support for WGL4 fonts, which include characters for all European languages.

According to Corel, Corel Draw's user base extends from individual freelance graphic artists, through small business and SME customers right up to large corporations. The creators of South Park are said to be big fans, too. It's hard to see how any of these groups could fail to be impressed by the improvements in Corel Draw X3.