Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 365 also includes ‘smart’ photo grids that resize to fill the rectangles as photos are added or deleted. Also new are Cross Process Photo Effects that allow the user to create ‘dramatic contrast and saturation effects’. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 365 costs £49.99. Upgrades cost £24.99, as part of an introductory offer. For details visit www.xara.com.
Press release
Xara announces a new release of their creative design and photo editing software, Xara Photo and Graphic Designer, that comes with a new and unique Update Guarantee which provides regular updates during the year.
Xara Photo and Graphic Designer is an easy-to-use program that provides all the tools needed for a range of graphic design and photo editing tasks. The new release provides some exciting new photo tools and SmartShapes, significant text enhancements and some great new content.
There are two new types of photo grids. ‘Static’ Photo Grids are simple, fixed, visually attractive grids of photos onto which users can drag & drop their own photo. ‘Smart’ Photo Grids smartly resize to fill the rectangles as photos are added or deleted, and users can swap the positions of the photos, adjust the number of rows and columns and the border / gap between all the photos.
Applying popular effects to photos is quick and easy with the new Photo Filter Pre-sets. There are almost 30 of these ready-made effects in the Content Catalog. Users can also create some dramatic contrast and saturation effects with the new Cross Process Photo Effects that simulate a traditional photographic effect created by mixing up the chemicals.
The Effect Painter tool is a new way to paint effects directly on the photo, such as, brighten, dodge and burn, saturation changes and a growing range of other effects.
The photo editing tools have also been enhanced with two new W3C standard transparency blend modes and a new ultra-easy way to rotate, scale/pan and crop (which is great for horizon straightening). The photo editor provides vector based, editable, non-destructive photo editing so the user can return to the original image at any time.
Flexible text handling is one of the strengths of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, yet Xara has still found room for some improvements. The popular Font Awesome collection of symbols has been updated, and is now supplemented by a collection of Google Material Design Icons providing more than 1500 symbols in total. To find the required symbol there’s a quick search function.
The Xara SmartShapes are an amazingly quick and easy way to create and edit some of the most commonly required shapes. Xara has also evolved this concept to include more complex objects, such as smart charts for percentage ring, bar chart and column charts. There are new smart text panels and photo panels and an enhanced version of the popular Spiral SmartShape.
Xara’s Update Guarantee means that users will no longer have to wait a year between releases to access new features and content. Users will have access to new features and content as Xara develop them, at any time during the year after their purchase. An enhanced Online Content Catalog will also be included free for one year as part of Xara’s new Update Guarantee. The catalog will provide access to a new free library of over 500,000 quality royalty-free, high quality, high-resolution stock photos.
Charles Moir, Managing Director said “Xara Photo & Graphic Designer has evolved into being a supremely capable non-destructive photo editor. The under-pinning vector graphics are the basis for everything resulting in vector editing of photos, which is pretty unique. It remains the fastest vector graphic editor available – and with new features such as SmartShape charts, inclusion of Font Awesome and Google’s Material Design symbols fonts, gives searchable access to more than 1500 great quality vector symbols.
“Photo editing now includes the ability to paint enhancements or effects onto images, new pre-set filter effects, new ways of cutting images out of backgrounds and more. This really is the greatest version of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer we’ve ever released.”
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 365 costs just £49.99 (inc VAT).
Upgrades from v11 to Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 365 cost £24.99 (inc VAT) in the intro offer.
System requirements are Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10 and it requires a minimum 500MB of RAM and 300MB hard-disk space.
