Sophisticated graphic design at a family-friendly price
Xara Photo and Graphic Designer is a one-stop-shop for all sorts of graphic-design projects. Its vector-illustration tools are ideal for logos, diagrams and drawings. Its bitmap tools can manipulate photos by adjusting colours, applying effects and performing edits, such as removing unwanted objects from a scene. It can handle desktop-publishing tasks too, because it has comprehensive text-formatting tools and support for multiple-page documents that lets you create newsletters and party invitations, for example. It can even turn its hand to designing entire websites or just specific web graphics, such as banners and buttons.
Xara has definitely improved colour correction for photos in this update, with the ability to reveal details otherwise hidden in shadows or washed out in highlights. It’s now possible to enhance a limited range of colours with just a couple of clicks (make grass greener or turn a red car blue, for example). There’s also a superb new suite of one-click creative effects which Xara calls Magic Bullet Looks. They look very stylish and you can, if you want, customise each effect extensively.
Oddly, the program makes you import photos into a document rather than opening them directly. While this is fine when you want to incorporate a photo into a project, it’s unnecessarily long-winded for simple photo-editing tasks. The very basic support for RAW camera files is another notable weakness when compared to dedicated photo editors such as Adobe Photoshop Elements. Even so, Xara’s photo-editing tools are still useful because they cut out the need to jump back and forth between a number of programs when working on a graphic-design project.
The illustration tools are relatively simple compared to rivals like CorelDraw (see our review of the latest Home and Student edition, issue 436), but they’re extremely precise and quick to use. You can create complex illustrations by drawing freehand, creating and combining simple shapes, and producing smooth curved lines using the diflicult-to-master but very precise Bezier tool. Version 10 introduces SmartShapes, a selection of pre drawn arrows, speech bubbles and text stickers that can also be edited for your needs. We hope Xara adds more SmartShapes in future, but it’s a great start.
Elsewhere, there are hundreds of new' stock symbols and icons covering everything from play and recycle graphics to logos for major companies, including Facebook, Skype and Android. However, the new Content Catalog is disappointing. It hosts a huge range of free downloadable templates, clip-art, button designs and so on, but with no search facility it can take ages to find something suitable.
Overall, this is an impressive suite. The uncluttered interface is straightforward to use and the software is extremely responsive, with the exception of the Magic Bullet Looks. Still, with a price that’s well within the reach of home users, it’s a great program for a wide range of creative design tasks.
VERDICT
Lots of powerful, easy-to-use tools for all sorts of graphic-design projects.
REQUIREMENTS
Windows XP SP3 or later • Intel Celeron «AMD Sempron processor or faster • Minimum 500MB of memory • Minimum 300MB of available hard-drive space