Corel follows Adobe, makes most of CorelDraw X6.2 update for subscribers only

Corel has released CorelDraw Suite X6.2, but many of the new features are available only to users who have signed up for its Premium Membership, which costs £79.50 plus VAT a year. This follows the subscription path offered by Adobe's Creative Cloud and Autodesk's Subscription programme for tools such as Maya and 3DS Max.

Users with a free Standard Membership - ie, everyone who doesn't mind passing Corel their registration details - get 'performance and stability improvements'. Premium Members get a new Alignment and Dynamic Guides panel, and improvements to the Color Styles panel - plus a new Guidelines panel in the Photo-Paint photo editing application. There are also six new colour harmony rules and more preview options that Corel says aims further simplify the design process.

The new alignment and dynamic guides (above) allow you to view, set up and modify alignment guides and dynamic guides more easily. As adjustments are made, the custom Dynamic Guides updates in real-time.

The new Guidelines docker (above) adds the ability to precisely position, rotate and edit guidelines.

Users can now Apply a rule to a colour harmony to shift all colors according to predetermined logic and create various colour combinations. This includes six harmony rules and the ability to create a colour harmony from scratch.

A page-sorter view and hint view are now available in the Color styles docker to work with styles more easily. Users can choose what style or style set to apply to an object by pointing to them in the Object styles docker and then preview the object attributes that will be applied

In Photo-Paint, the new Alignment guides docker helps to align objects as they're created, resized or moved in relation to other nearby objects. Also, rulers can now be displayed by default on new documents.

Premium subscribers also get additional clipart, digital photos, vector patterns, and fonts.