General
Speed
Xara Designer has the world's most sophisticated, highest performance vector rendering engine. For the user this speed means less wait, and a more satisfying working environment. It also means more productivity and the ability to create more complex drawings, in less time.
Many graphics packages will keep you waiting a few seconds while objects are drawn on the screen. In a complex document that can mean you waste a significant amount of time. With Xara Designer , when you create an image it appears instantly on the screen.
Speed isn't just restricted to creating and moving objects though - any time you manipulate an object by using one of the Direct Action Tools or the Color Editor for example, any changes you make also appear instantly. This constant live-preview of all actions contrasts dramatically with other programs where you typically have a 'try it - wait - try it again until you get it right' approach.
Import and Export
Xara Designer is used by many different types of customer in a spectacular range of uses - for drawings, text and photos, for print and the web - so we understand how important it is to offer compatibility with other products and users. Designer offers support for a very large range of file formats, making it easy to exchange your work with other users and programs.
Xara Designer supports all the common graphics formats, including bitmap types like GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and PSD, and the import of photos as RAW or the new Photo HD (Designer Pro only). Plus it supports the key vector types like PDF and AI (Adobe Illustrator)/EPS, EMF (extended metafile) and WMF (Windows metafile), SVG (export only);early versions of CorelDRAW CDR and CMX and many others that are not so well known.
For text Xara Designer supports RTF (Rich Text Format). You can import and export text in RTF format so it includes style information such as font, font size, color, margins, special and foreign characters (Unicode supported).
If you're working on the web, then Xara Designer also offers integration with Adobe's Dreamweaver and can export HTML pages, and for animation can export Flash, Animated GIF and AVI.
Plus there's clipboard compatibility with the common Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Word.
PSD Support
Xara Designer offers full support for importing and exporting Adobe Photoshop® PSD files including layer support (Designer layers are exported as PSD layers and PSD layers are imported as Designer layers), including alpha channel and (in Designer Pro only) 16-bit color and CMYK layer conversion.
Adobe Photoshop® is the industry standard bitmap editing solution, and for many professionals Designer is their standard vector graphics tool. Now the two are more closely integrated than ever.
PDF Support
Xara's PDF export tool creates super-clean, very compact PDF files. This includes support for graduated color fills, for flat transparency and graduated transparency. And when you export as PDF everything remains pixel perfect, resolution-independent vector graphics*.
The PDF exporter has also been designed to allow the files to be opened by Adobe Illustrator®, so providing significantly improved Illustrator compatibility which means that vector artwork including graduated color and transparency can now be imported cleanly into Illustrator versions 9 onwards.
Xara Designer also offers reliable PDF import.
*PDF can only support the basic Xara graduated fill and transparency types of flat, linear and radial. Other graduated types are automatically rasterized (flattened) to any required resolution on export.
Direct Action Tools
Xara Designer's Direct Action Tools allow you to create effects such as transparency, bevels or gradient fills by selecting the tool then dragging over the image itself to affect the required change. For example you can drag across an object to apply a graduated color (in the fill tool) or transparency (in the transparency tool), or drag on a shadow to position it (in the shadow tool), or drag on an object to rotate it in 3D (in the 3D extrude tool).
Traditionally, to apply these sort of effects you would need to enter values in a dialog box and they are transferred to the drawing. With Xara Designer's Direct Action Tools, you can apply all these effects on the object itself - without having to enter any numbers in a dialog box! And the changes take place instantly - it's as close to using your hands as you will get with a graphics package.
This is a BIG advantage, because it not only saves time, but also keeps the creative work and the image itself at the center of your focus. It makes experimenting with effects and settings much easier too.
Direct Action Tools include the Bevel, Shadow, Transparency, Fill, Contour, 3D Extrude and Blend tools.
Drag and Drop
Many tasks in Xara Designer benefit from being able to use the drag and drop principle, which is more intuitive and a great time saver.
For example, when changing the color of an object, you can just drag a color from the Color Line and drop it onto the object, or its outline. And with color gradients, you can drop colors along the gradient path and make multi-color fills.
Drag and drop also comes into play when using the galleries. You can place any gallery item on a page simply by drag and drop.
Designer also supports drag and drop import of files, such as photos.
Solid Object Editing
Xara Designer offers one of the world's first live solid dragging, scaling and rotating of objects, for the ultimate in WYSIWYG editing. That means that as you reposition, resize or rotate an object the whole object moves, rather than just an outline, making it far easier to judge the effect of your edits in real time.
V6 extended this to object creation so you see a solid line or quickshape as you draw it, complete with line and fill colors and other attributes, not just an outline. Completely WYSIWYG drawing.
Undo / Redo
Being able to change what you have done is vital in a graphics package. Xara Designer allows you to easily Undo your most recent changes to a document.
Undo allows you to get rid of changes which you've applied by mistake, those which went wrong or ones which you simply don't like the look of. Undo is a very powerful tool when combined with Redo because it gives you the freedom to experiment with a drawing, secure in the knowledge that you can always undo any changes or if you eventually decide you do actually like the changes, to redo them again.
Some graphics packages only let you undo a limited amount of actions, but Xara Designer has an unlimited undo so it remembers everything you've done.
Zoom
The Zoom Tool allows you to alter the magnification of the current document, giving you a closer, or more distant view.
Using the Zoom Tool you can zoom to the whole page, so you see the complete document, you can zoom to the drawing, which magnifies just the drawn image as opposed to the whole page, or you can select an object and then zoom to that selection.
Another method is to zoom to a particular area by clicking and dragging the tool over the area.
The Xara Designer Zoom Tool is capable of zooming in to 25,601% - that's over 25,000 dpi (dots per inch).
Anti-Aliasing
Xara introduced the world's first vector anti-aliasing to bring maximum screen quality. It still pioneers with the fastest, highest quality anti-aliasing available in any drawing program.
Anti-aliasing improves the quality of on-screen images by smoothing the edges of objects. It does this by blending the edges with the background. This has the effect of smoothing lines and edges and of appearing to improve the resolution of the display. Anti-aliasing is particularly useful for web graphics.
When you do use anti-aliasing in Xara Designer, it works in real-time so you can see the effect straight away. You can use anti-aliasing when working with vector images and bitmap images.
Color support
Xara Designer has a comprehensive color system which enables you to alter the colors of objects directly or create your own colors, with names, which you can apply to multiple objects.
With Xara Designer unique Linked Colors feature, it is very easy to create a drawing containing many shades of a color and with one alteration, immediately change the color of the whole picture. Simply pick a new master theme color and all linked shades and tones adjust automatically.
You can work in CMYK, RGB, HSV, greyscale or Hexadecimal RGB web color mode.
There is also a color sampler which, like an eye-dropper, you can use to select the color of any object on the screen, even in other applications, and easily apply it to other objects. Or just drag and drop colors from the color line onto an object to change its colors.
The fill tool allows you to quickly and easily apply color graduations to any object, simply be clicking and dragging across the object, so like many features in Xara Designer, color editing is interactive and immediate.
Text handling
The Text Tool allows you to enter as many lines of text as you want, at any place in your document. And Xara Designer's industry leading screen rendering makes it easier to read text on screen, especially at small sizes or rotated.
You can enter your text at any angle and you can also set your text along a path - so you could draw a line or curve and make the text follow it, curves and all. Additionally, just like any drawn object in Xara Designer, you can grab hold of the corners of the text object and resize it on the page, and apply any of the effects, such as transparency, fills, molds and so on - and yet the text remains editable.
Like any word processing program, you have full control over the text style - you can change the font, size, color and justification of the text, alter the line spacing and kerning, and have bold, italic, superscript or subscript. Recent improvements to the text tool provide high-end DTP-like features, such as margin and tab control (left, center, right and decimal tabs), 1st line indent or outdent control to provide support for hanging indents, word and character count of text stories, a full spell checker, and support for bullets, numbered lists and full indent control.
Designer supports three types of text object: Simple text, text columns and text areas. You can have linked flowing text stories across text areas and columns, in any order or direction. And it also supports multi-page documents, automated text flow around objects and anchored graphics. This brings Xara Xtreme well into the Desk Top Publishing arena. Along with the lightning fast screen update, Designer is now perfect for producing documents such as brochures and flyers.
Multi-page documents
Xara Designer includes support for multiple page documents, which makes Designer a great option for producing leaflets, newsletters and more. Pages can be single or double page spreads (left and right sides). Flexible controls include the ability to change individual page sizes and, via the Page and Layer Gallery easily re-order, add or delete pages in your document. Combined with the powerful text controls this makes Designer a great choice for any DTP task.
Designer's ultra-fast rendering means you can scroll through pages quickly and smoothly, even on large documents.
In Designer Pro, multi-page documents can also be used in combination with the HTML feature to create multi-page websites and presentations.
Printing
Xara Designer provides a wide variety of options for printing your documents. For example, you can choose paper orientation, how to fit images on the paper (including 'best fit' and 'automatic fit'), which layers to print and so on. You can display print borders and there's also a useful 'simulate print colors' option to give you guidance on how your printed colors might look (compared to on screen colors).
Xara Designer also supports PDF and PostScript output. Xara Designer Pro offers full color separation support for commercial printing.
The Designs Gallery
Xara Designer includes a Designs Gallery full of useful clipart (3000 items), photos, ready-made templates (such as cards, stationery, newsletters, postcards, photo albums, web graphics etc) and inspiring example illustrations.
The example illustrations include inspirational drawings and photo work offered by existing owners of Xara Designer to demonstrate techniques and possibilities and the sheer variety of styles achievable. The gallery is updated regularly and new images can be downloaded directly to the Gallery at any time or you can add your own. Simply doubleclick to load a Galley item or drag and drop it on to your document.
Xara Designer also includes a font and texture fill gallery including 250 TrueType and PostScript fonts and 500 textures.
Designer Pro only: Designer Pro includes additional web design features, and so the Pro Designs Gallery includes a large selection of web page and website templates and a library of Widgets.
Spell Check
Designer includes a multi-language spell checker offering check-as-you-type, word suggestions and a user-dictionary. You can even mark different regions as being in different languages.
Supported languages include English (US and UK), German (Germany, Swizterland and Austria), Italian, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish and Turkish.
Templates
Xara Designer is ideal for creating your own designs from scratch of course, but the Designer CD also includes a large and varied collection of professionally designed, ready-made templates which can be simply drag and dropped on to your document and are an absolute snap to customize with your own message.
Templates include greetings cards for every occasion, business stationery of every sort (letterheads, business cards etc), text panels, certificates, calendars, brochures and flyers, presentations, scrapbooking, photo frames, photo albums, newsletters and newspapers, useful web graphics such as buttons, headings and icons and a large selection of photo gallery layouts, and many more categories. If you have the Designer trial, you can see a small selection of the total set in the Designs Gallery (click Get Designs to download them) and we also have some previews on our site.
Simply enter your own text and/or drop in your own photo (enhanced in the integrated photo tool if necessary) and you can have professional looking results in minutes. And it's just as easy to change the colors using Xara Designer’s unique Color Linking feature (just change the master theme color and all linked shades and tones adjust automatically). All templates are designed using Linked Colors and also make good use of the Linked Stretching feature.
Page and Layer Gallery
The Page & Layer Gallery is a powerful and flexible tool for viewing, re-ordering, hiding and locking not just layers, but everything from individual objects on the page to pages in your document.
Everything in your document is presented in a heirarchical, expandable list. At the top level are the pages, and inside each page are the named layers of the document. In Designer Pro you can go to the next level which shows all the objects on the page. The Gallery provides thumbnail views of all objects.
The Page & Layer Gallery makes it easy to find, select, lock or hide objects inside complex drawings, or objects inside groups or even hidden under other objects on the page.
The Page & Layer Gallery also includes a 'Solo' mode option which allows a specific layer to be viewed and worked on in isolation, and a 'Layers' mode which adjusts the Gallery to show just the layers for the current page. Plus there is a 'Find' mode which automatically adjusts the Gallery to find and show the currently selected item in the tree structure, collapsing everything else.
Shortcut key configuration
Users can configure the Xara Designer Pro key shortcuts and save / load custom configurations (for example to achieve compatability with another program).
PANTONE® color support
Xara Designer Pro includes PANTONE® color libraries for use as both spot color and PANTONE® process color equivalents.
Color Separation Support
Xara Designer Pro offers the ability to produce CMYK color separations. This includes on-screen preview of CMYK and spot color plates, PANTONE® color support, spot colors, on-screen printer gamut preview and a lot more. Designer is now able to produce professional CMYK print results either via PDF/X support or via direct four color and spot-color separation via the print dialog.
Both options include crop and printer's marks. The direct separations printing includes control over print screening and screen types, emulsion side down and other advanced settings.
PDF/X export
PDF has become the industry standard way of transferring documents of all types from one person to another, ensuring exact WYSIWYG fidelity.
Xara Designer Pro offers class-leading PDF support including these features:
- Choice of PDF version from version 1.3 through to version 1.7, as well as PDF/X-1a 2001, x-1a 2003, X3-2002, and X-3 2003 standards.
- Full support for vector transparency (PDF version 1.4 or later)
- Font embedding and font subsetting options
- Export any selected page range
- Optional down-sampling of large bitmaps (reduces the size of PDFs for designs containing large photos)
- Full control over bitmap embedding options and compression (native, Flate, JPEG)
- Full control over bitmap transparency flattening, bitmap effect rasterization, to any required resolution and compression type
- Embedding of native JPG files for lossless JPEG transfer
- Support for Adobe Reader Layers. For PDF 1.5 and above you can now output and control Designer's layer visibility in Adobe Reader
- File embedding. You can embed .xar files into your PDF and launch them from Adobe Reader
- Full pre-press PDF/X support including:
- Embedding page crop and printer's marks
- ICC color profiles, including all the common paper stock options (e.g. US Web coated, ISO, etc)
- Embedding of custom ICC profiles
- Document encryption, with full control over document permissions:
- Password protect any PDF file, with 40 or 128-bit encryption
- Control over exact permissions, e.g. allow / disallow printing or commenting or text copying or extraction.
- Spot color support
Thankfully for those that do not require such full control over PDF features, Designer Pro provides a simple choice of 4 typical PDF profiles for the novice user: Draft, Email, High Quality and Commercial Printing, as well as the option for custom settings.
XPS Support
Xara Designer Pro supports XPS export (and includes a beta import filter).
XPS is a ‘page description’ file format invented by Microsoft. The benefit of XPS format is that it’s vector based, and so is ideal as a resolution-independent portable document format. Fonts are embedded into the document and so you are assured of a very high quality WYSIWYG document. If you’re using Windows Vista or 7 you can view and print these documents directly. If you’re using older versions of Windows you can obtain a free XPS Viewer download from the Microsoft web site to provide viewing and printing of these files.
It should be noted that the Xara XPS export does not use the Microsoft standard XPS print system, but writes XPS files directly which ensures a far higher fidelity, and far smaller XPS files.
XPS supports advanced vector features such as transparency, CMYK colors and embedded fonts.
Multi-core processors
Xara Designer has always had by far the highest performing graphics rendering engine, up to ten times faster than Adobe Illustrator. V4 introduced support for multi-core processors in Xara Designer Pro making it even faster than before! Tests show approximate speed gains of 40% for a dual core processor with large screen images, and greater gains with more cores. Large full screen photos can render up to 75% faster on a dual core processor.
Photo
Photo Handling Overview
Xara Designer's photo and bitmap handling is faster and more powerful than you'll find in other graphics programs. Xara Designer uses compression techniques that means that Xara files including photos can be up to ten times smaller than equivalent images in other drawing programs, with enormous benefits for speed and usability. Plus Xara's unique non-destructive editing maintains the high quality of your original photo, however many times you edit it, and gives you the ability to undo any edits you've made to your photo, even after saving and reloading. As a result many people use Xara Designer as their primary, general purpose image composition tool.
Almost anything you can do to vector drawings you can also do to photos/bitmaps in Designer. For example, you can edit the shape, alter the transparency, including graduated transparency, use bitmaps as fills on any shape, add a drop shadow, feather the edges and a lot more - all in real-time.
Xara Designer also includes a fully integrated, very fast photo editing tool which offers all the common photo editing features such as cropping, rotating, enhancing, sharpening, red-eye removal and perspective correction etc with a fast, interactive, live-preview of all edits. Plus it includes an effective photo panorama creator. V7 adds a 'magic' photo erase tool which makes it easy to seamlessly remove unwanted objects from your photo. One sophisticated feature is the content aware scaling and zooming which allows images to be stretched or squashed while retaining the proportions of important parts of the picture.
Xara Designer includes a fast bitmap tracer to help convert bitmaps to vector shapes.
Xara Designer also supports third party plug-ins such as Adobe Photoshop plug-ins to expand the range of available effects that you can apply to your photos.
Xara Designer supports all the common bitmap formats, for both import and export. Add to this the ability to handle multi-layer 32-bit alpha channel (semi-transparent) bitmaps and Xara Designer is a supreme image composition tool.
Finally Designer includes a collection of professionally designed, fully editable templates that include photo frames and photo album layouts.
File Size
Xara Designer embeds your master JPEG in the Xara file, resulting in huge file size savings. A 5 Megapixel JPEG photo from a digital camera would expand to be typically 20Mbytes in other graphics programs. Use two or three such photos in your image, or make copies to edit and you've now got a file that might easily be 60Mbytes large. The Xara Designer file will be ten times smaller.
What's more you can make your files even smaller using Designer's new JPEG auto-optimization options, invaluable if you have lots of JPEGs in your document or (in Pro) your website.
This plus the amazingly compact nature of Xara Designer’s native file format means that such files are much faster to save and reload. The instant redraw makes working with photos a pleasure, even photos from modern, very high resolution cameras. And this is an added bonus if you are exchanging files via email with other Xara Designer owners.
Magic undo
By keeping track of the original master photo and a list of edits performed, Xara Designer offers the seemingly magic ability to undo changes to saved photos.
Say you've altered the brightness of a photo and saved the result. If you load this in the future you can undo the brightness change. This does not take the saved image and alter the brightness (that would result in cumulative distortion). Instead it re-creates a new image, identical to the one just loaded, from the original master. Perfect copies every time, plus the ability to alter or undo any edit
Un-crop
Try this with any other photo editing software:
- Load a photo, crop just a small section and save this cropped image
- Quit the program
- Now load the cropped version back in and try to Undo or recover the cropped parts.
Maintaining Photo Quality
A fundamental problem with conventional photo editing software is that each time you load and save a JPEG image, it deteriorates slightly. Load and save an image more than a few times and this becomes noticeable. This cumulative distortion is unavoidable if you use JPEG format photos.
Xara Designer overcomes this problem by keeping a track of the original 'master' image, much like keeping a photographic negative. When you re-load any JPEG photo saved from Designer, it finds the original master and uses that as the source for all further processing, so Designer's photo editing is 'non-destructive'. It remembers all edits you ever performed to any photo and lets you undo or alter those at any time.
Xara Designer has another trick to help with photo quality - a new bi-cubic photo display that considerably improves the on-screen quality of scaled down photos compared with all other photo software. Simply select the 'very high quality' option on the View Quality slider.
Integrated Photo Tool
Xara Designer includes a fully integrated, ultra-fast, non-destructive photo tool, with instantaneous editing of even the largest digital photos. Features include a fast, live and interactive photo enhance tool for correcting brighness, contrast, sharpness etc, an interactive crop tool, photo panoramas, red-eye removal, an advanced brightness levels control, a perspective correction tool and the innovative content aware photo scaling and zooming tools. New in V7 is a 'magic' photo erase tool which allows you to seamlessly remove unwanted objects from your photo.
Easy photo enhance
Many photographs from digital cameras are under-exposed - too dark. Making individual adjustments of brightness, contrast, and color controls can be both time consuming and a confusing process for a great many users. The integrated photo tool provides an automatic single-click enhance which can instantly improve almost all badly exposed images.
You can also manually adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness/blur, color saturation and temperature individually if you wish to, and a handy Compare button allows you to compare before and after. For advanced users there is a Brightness Levels control.
You can apply any of these photo enhancements to a photo or a selected region of a photo using the 'mask' feature.
Crop & Rotate
The Xara Designer integrated photo tool offers supremely intuitive crop and rotate tools, and Xara’s unique photo handling technology means that it’s real-time, interactive and completely smooth.
To crop your photo simply select the Photo Tool, then click and drag over your photo to define the crop area, which can be subsequently repositioned or resized. And you can uncrop a photo later – even after it’s been saved! Rotating a photo is even easier - just click the rotate arrows.
Photo Panoramas
Using the integrated photo tool in Xara Designer you can easily create panorama pictures. The integrated panorama picture assistant helps you seamlessly attach the individual pictures of your panorama-to-be to one another. Simply import your pictures, optimize the picture transitions, and you're done. In just a few clicks you can turn your individual pictures into tailor-made panorama pictures. Designer Pro includes a more advanced version of the panorama maker called Panorama Studio.
Red Eye Removal
One of the most common requirements for anyone working with photos is red eye removal. The photo tool in Xara Designer offers an integrated, intuitive red eye removal tool that is fast and simple.
External Photo Editors
Xara Designer's integrated photo tool can handle all the most common photo requirements, such as control over brightness, sharpness and color saturation (including a one-click auto enhance option) photo panoramas, perspective correction, object erase and red eye removal.
However Designer also offers the ability to select an external photo editor - whether it's the bundled Xara Picture Editor or any external editor such as Corel Paintshop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. What's more, Designer monitors the photo file being edited, and detects when it's updated by the photo editor and then re-imports it back into Designer - and that means you can continue to have your photo editor open while working on the drawing in Designer. So whenever the image file is updated in your photo editor (when you click Save) your drawing is updated showing you the updated picture in context.
Content-Aware Scaling and Zoom
The Photo Tool includes innovative intelligent image scaling technology that allows 'content aware scaling', that is images can stretched or squashed while retaining the proportions of important parts of the picture.
This can provide a near miraculous ability to stretch and change the aspect ratio of photos, without apparently distorting the content of the photo.
Take this example of a photo of the famous Torii Gate in Japan. The first photo is the original, clearly the gate itself is the main subject of this picture. The second photo has been stretched in the normal way with the Selector tool. Even with moderate stretching it's obvious the proportions of the gate have been badly distorted. In the third photo we've using Content Aware Scaling - and now the gate proportions are in tact even at this extreme stretch, which is twice as wide as the original.
A new option is 'content aware zooming', which works in a similar way but allows you to resize the object that is the center of interest without increasing the size of the total image.
RAW photo import
You can import RAW digital camera files (either using the Import menu option or just drag and drop the file onto the Xara Designer window).
Bitmap Tracer
Xara Designer's powerful bitmap tracer can convert your bitmaps – typically photos, line-art or logos – into editable vector shapes. The Tracer offers great flexibility, with control over the number of colors, the fidelity of the trace to the original and a useful ‘noise’ cleaner that can remove imperfections from your bitmap (for example caused by scanning photos). So if for example you need to edit your logo and all if you have is a bitmap, all is not lost!
Adobe Photoshop® Plug-ins
Xara Designer supports Adobe Photoshop plug-ins. There's already a huge range of such plug-ins available, both free and commercial, for creating a variety of effects that would take a lifetime to explore - metallic effects, color and image distortions, glows, water ripples, crumples etc etc.
These plug-ins can be used with both bitmaps and vector drawn images - check out the Live Effects tool. We have bundled a selection of the best plug-ins with Xara Designer, including examples from Redfield, AV Bros and Mehdi, plus more than 35 new plug-ins from MAGIX. Click here to view them.
Levels control
For the advanced user the integrated photo tool of Xara Designer now includes a Levels control to adjust brightness levels of images. This single controls offers:
- Histogram view of the brightness levels of the image
- Control over input black, white and gamma and output black and white levels. These controls provide a far more powerful way of adjusting brightness, contrast and gamma than the traditional simple brightness and contrast controls.
- Single click before and after compare
- Color correction e.g. to adjust for a color cast from using the wrong white balance settings
- Overlaid before and after histograms. As you adjust the levels you can see the original and the modified histogram (shown in red below).
- The ability to enter manual brightness curves for the ultimate level of control
Magic Photo Erase tool
V7 includes a complete replacement of the Clone tool, now called the Magic Photo Erase tool, which makes it quick and easy to seamlessly erase an object from your photo, by automatically copying parts of a photo from one place to another.
Simply draw a freehand line around the area you want to erase, then one click on the 'magic erase' button and the object is automatically erased and replaced with an appropriate background texture sampled from other parts of the photo. This can often work better than any manual clone (copy / paste) and can produce perfectly seamless object erasing.
EXIF info
Designer includes the option to display an EXIF dialog, semi transparent and configurable, which shows the embedded EXIF values of your JPEG photo.
Perspective Correction
The Perspective Correction tool offers a simple one-click way to automatically correct common perspective effects, like the one shown in this example photo.
HD Photo import
Xara Designer Pro imports HD Photo format, also known as Windows Media Photo. Files can be saved in this HD photo format by Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 plus Microsoft Expression Design.
Panorama Studio
Xara Designer Pro has a more advanced version of the photo panorama feature, called Panorama Studio, which offers:
- The ability to stitch together any number of images
- Advanced control over cropping, sharpening and enhancing of the resulting stitched image
- Create web based 360 degree panoramas, perfect for showing off your restaurant interior and that type of thing.
Illustration
Illustration Overview
Xara Designer originally made its name as a supreme illustration tool and still maintains its popularity among illustrators, as you can see from some of the awesome illustration work on display in the Xara Gallery. The key to its popularity is its speed, ease of use, uncluttered user interface and the intuitive design of its drawing and design tools. For example the interactive nature of the direct action tools, the use of drag & drop and solid object drawing and dragging all make experimentation both quick and easy.
Xara was a pioneer of vector transparency and still offers unique advantages such as graduated transparency, the new Enhance transparency type and Opacity (transparency) masks. Many of the other individual tools remain best of class, for example shadow, feather, fill, blend and 3D extrude. Other recent innovations include the Live Effects tool. V6 also saw a significant advance in the pressure support (Xara's pressure profile controls are particulary powerful).
3D Extrude
The extrusion tool in Xara Designer uses the 3D rendering technology developed for Xara's popular Xara 3D Maker tool, to bring high quality 3D extrusion capabilities to Xara Designer. It provides a fast, easy way of creating simple 3D shapes from any 2D shape or outline, rendered with high quality shading and light reflections. Creating 3D images couldn't be simpler: on screen dragging allows real time 3D object rotation, dragging of the extrusion depth, and adjustment of the lights in 3D space around the object.
Drawing Tools
Xara Designer uses two types of drawing tools: Freehand tools and Shape tools. The Freehand tools allow you to hand-draw lines or shapes on the page. You can simply drag on the drawn lines to convert them into curves, or 'push' and 'pull' them in a very intuitive way. You can choose in advance how closely you want the computer to follow your movements, or you can smooth out any minor bumps with Xara Designer's retroactive smoothing. You can even draw one shape, then add another bit to it by drawing some more and joining up with the original object. Plus there's an extra straight line tool giving a really quick and easy way to create single-segment lines, with easy arrowhead and tail control.
Shape tools, like the rectangle, circle/ellipse and Quickshape tools allow you to draw pre-set shapes very quickly and easily. Any object you create, either Freehand or Shape, can be resized or rotated by simply dragging its handles. Designer offers solid live line and shape drawing (instead of outlines) so you can see exactly what your shape and line will look like as you draw it.
Transparency
Any object you create (including text and photos) can be made transparent using the wide variety of transparency options. Like real-time anti-aliasing, Xara was the pioneer of vector transparency. Transparency can be used in a number of ways - one of the most common is to simulate glass, but it can also be used to create subtle reflections and highlights that are very difficult to achieve in any other way. Another common use is to overlay parts of your drawing with additional transparent objects which can then be used as filters to modify colors or contrast in your image, for example. Xara Designer also allows you to create textured transparencies by using bitmaps of your choice to give a special effect to any graphic or selection of graphics.
Transparency can be applied in a linear graduation or even a multi-stage graduation. Plus there's a variety of shapes such as diamond or conical transparency to get some very unusual effects. Since V6 you can even apply irregular custom shaped transparency using Opacity Masks. Another innovation is the new Enhance Transparency that allows you to create transparent 'floating' enhance shapes which enhance the brightness, contrast and/or saturation of the objects underneath them. Transparency can be applied in any direction and is independent of color - simply select the transparency tool and then click and drag on the image to apply the transparency, completely interactive and immediate.
Blend Tool
The Xara Designer Blend Tool allows you to blend or merge between any two objects. These objects can be any of the available object types (text, bitmaps, shapes), or even other blends. Using the tool creates a set of intermediate objects so you get a transition from the start object to the end object. You can change the number of steps in the blend and also have more than one stage so you can blend between several objects. Blends can be used to create complex highlights, blurred edges on objects, repetitive patterns and many other effects. You can even edit objects within the blend once you have created them. You can also set blends along a path, such as a curve. For fine tuning, blends also have a profile control for adjusting the rate of change of steps and other attributes across the blend. Xara Designer performs blending in a very quick and memory-efficient way compared to other drawing packages - meaning less waiting for you and less draining of your systems resources.
Soft Vectors
Soft vectors or 'feathering' is a technique of slightly blurring the edges of objects to help them blend into the background - until recently impossible in vector drawing programs. Simply by selecting an object - any object including shapes, text, photos and even clipviews - and moving the slider on the feather bar, it makes the selected object merge into background objects and avoids a sharp line at the boundary. This is particularly useful when overlaying bitmaps. Xara Designer allows you to change the feathering profile, altering the transition across the feather. You might want a regular rate of change or a more pronounced change towards one end or the center. Note that feathering affects only the object's edge and no other part of the object.
Shadows
Creating realistic shadows has commonly been the realm of the bitmap graphics package. Xara Designer's Shadow Tool changes all that and lets you apply, remove, and modify semi-transparent (or 'soft') shadows to any object, with a single click. The transparency of soft shadows increases towards the edge, which gives a very realistic effect. Shadows in Xara Designer are not bitmaps but remain vectors, the benefit is they are resolution independent, which means you can scale them without losing quality. There are three different shadow types to choose from - Wall, Floor and Glow. Wall shading produces drop shadow effects, the Floor option works like a sundial would and Glow creates a halo effect around an object. Any shadow you make can be manipulated in a number of ways, allowing you to change the color, blur, transparency and profile. Again, the Shadow tool takes advantage of the direct action feature.
Bevels
Bevels give objects the appearance of depth instead of being flat on the page. They are particularly useful when creating buttons or headings for web pages. The Xara Designer Bevel Tool allows you to quickly apply customized bevels to any object you draw. There are a range of set bevel types to choose from, such as flat, frame and rounded, and each one can be altered to make it unique. You can alter the depth, contrast and lighting elevation (unique to Xara Designer) and angle, and you can choose whether the bevel should be inside or outside the object. Xara Designer also allows you to treat a bevel like you would any other object in a document - so you can apply transparencies, color bitmap fills and so on. And again, the Bevel Tool takes advantage of Xara Designer's direct action feature. Bevels in Xara Designer are resolution independent, which means you can scale them without any loss of quality.
Contours
Creating contours around objects is easy with the Xara Designer Contour Tool. Contouring is a special effect which adds evenly-spaced concentric rings inside or outside an object. These rings can be made to fade in to the background, or progress through a rainbow of colors. When you have applied a contour to an object, if you resize or alter the object, the contour changes with it. The contour itself can be edited and you can change any of its properties, including the distance between the steps, the number of steps, contour width and profile. The Inset Path button lets you convert your contoured object into a larger or smaller shape, removing the actual contours. This gives you more flexibility than simply resizing an object, as it deals with thickness as opposed to size.
Fills
You can fill an object with a color or multiple colors, or even with a photo, bitmap or fractal effect. Xara Designer offers a wide range of fill types - flat, linear, circular, conical, elliptical, diamond and three and four color fills. You can apply fills to Quickshapes, shapes and even text. If you apply a fill to a compound object (a blend, mold or group) it affects all the objects in it. Once you have applied a color fill to an object you can change its size, position, direction and the colors it uses as well as the way the colors change across the fill. With bitmap fills you can change the bitmap used and with fractal fills you can change the resolution and grain of the fractal. One of the strongest features of Xara Designer is the simple and interactive way that color fills can be applied and edited. Just drag a color from the color line and drop it onto the object you want to fill, then drag the fill arrow to adjust the position and angle of the fill or drop new colors onto the arrow to create a multi-stage fill. This direct action makes working with fills much easier than any other graphics program.
Live Effects
Live Effects are plug-in effects that can be applied to any object, including vector drawings. They are called Live Effects because the vector object remains editable after applying the effect - when you edit the object, the Live Effect is re-applied automatically to the new shape. Adobe Photoshop® plug-ins, both free and commercial, already exist for creating a range of effects that would take a lifetime to explore - metallic effects, color and image distortions, glows, water ripples, bevels etc etc. We have included a selection of the best Photoshop plug-ins that work as Live Effects in Xara Designer. Click here for more information.
Molds / envelopes
Molds allow you to distort any object you select according to a set shape - rather like a jello mold does. There are two types of mold - Perspective Molds and Envelope Molds. Perspective Molds are ideal for creating banners and three-dimensional effects. They distort an object by making it appear to have perspective. With Envelope Molds you can have curved sides and you can distort and warp a shape using the four corners of the mold shape. Molds and Envelopes can be applied to shapes, bitmaps and text, and all objects remain editable.
ClipView
Xara Designer has several ways of using objects to "mask" or "clip" other objects. You then see part of the objects through that mask. ClipView is one of these methods, but it is different from the others because it is dynamic. It lets you use an object as a 'window' onto other objects. You see only those parts of other objects that are within the window. We call this creating a ClipView. You can move the window object to change your view while the window object remains visible.
Brushes
The real-time brush feature of the Freehand and Brush Tool is a fun but extremely powerful feature. It enables you to create any shape, then use it to 'draw' with, giving endless possibilities. One such possibility is to create airbrush-like effects. There are also a number of pre-defined brushes that you can use. The brush feature's power lies in the fact that you have complete control over the way the brush paints to the screen. You can alter the size of instances, color, spacing, rotation and offset properties, and each of these has a randomize option which can give a less ordered look. When using brushes, you can also take advantage of Xara's pressure sensitive feature by setting the brush to adjust the scaling or transparency of brush strokes according to how hard you press with your graphic pen. Each brush you create is saved along with the document it's used in, so you can re-use them whenever you wish.
Pressure sensitivity
The closest thing to actually drawing for real comes from using a graphics tablet. With Xara Designer using a graphics tablet can be even more realistic if you take advantage of the pressure sensitivity feature in the Brush tool. The Brush tool gives you the option of relating the size and/or the transparency of the brush stroke to the pressure applied to the pen. You can choose whether you want the pressure to affect scaling or transparency - or both, or neither.
Profiles
When adding a blend, transparency, contour, fill or shadow to an object, you can change the attributes or properties of the effect by using the Profile dialog box. What the Profile dialog box actually allows you to do depends on which effect is being used, but in all cases, you can either choose one of the set profiles or use the sliders to create your own. With transparency and fills you can change the rate or shape of change from start to end, while with blends and contours you can alter how the steps are spaced and how attributes like the colors, line thickness and transparencies are used. With shadows you can change the rate of change of transparency across shadow. It's all about giving you that extra little bit of control over your effects that can make all the difference. Altogether, the Profile dialog box makes a very powerful tool to help get your graphics just right.
Opacity Masks
Opacity Masks provide an innovative and powerful way of applying transparency. Sometimes you need a more advanced transparency ‘shape’ than simple flat or graduated transparency can provide, for example if you wanted to apply a soft variable transparency around a central object in a photo - like the example on the right. Opacity masks are a way of defining irregular transparency shapes based on a drawn object or group of objects.
Line length and area information
The Selector tool Infobar includes a field displaying the perimeter length of any selected closed shape or the line length of a selected line, and the area of any closed shape. It's particularly useful for plans where you have set up accurate unit scaling, meaning you could for example read the exact floor area in square feet or meters.
Live Copies
A powerful feature and a great time saver - Live Copies are multiple instances of an object in a document, that all update instantly and automatically when one of them is edited (sometimes called 'live clone').
Web
Xara Designer has long been a popular choice for creating web graphics. High quality anti-aliasing, flexible transparency support, a comprehensive set of drawing tools, the ease with which you can mix photos, drawings and text, and simple image map creation all make Designer a good choice for creating web graphics. Designer supports all the web bitmap formats including GIF, JPEG and PNG (including alpha channel) plus it offers full manual optimization at export ensuring the best quality and file size.
Xara Designer also offers one of the easiest ways to create really efficient Flash animations (and it can produce animated GIFs too). The bundled templates include a large selection of professionally designed web graphics such as buttons, headings and icons plus a set of photo gallery pages. And there's even a free web hosting offer. Xara Designer Pro builds on these strengths and includes web design features which make it a first class web authoring tool in its own right. Designer Pro can produce web pages and websites, including support for features like navigation bars and DHTML menus, widget integration, the creation of presentations and Webinars, and photo features such as pop-ups and slideshows.
Animated Flash Export
Xara Designer offers one of the easiest ways to create really efficient Flash animations. Flash animations use vector graphics. Unfortunately existing Flash tools have a reputation for being unintuitive, difficult to master and over complex. As a result Flash has been restricted to those willing to dedicate substantial time to mastering these tools. On the other hand, the Designer drawing tools have the reputation of being extremely easy to learn and slick. So now we bring the ease of Designer to Flash animations. Designer Flash animation doesn't use complex time-lines. Instead it's more like traditional animator's art, where you produce snap-shots or key frames of your animations at points in time. Designer automatically produces in-between frames to create smooth, really compact Flash animations. Note: Designer Flash animation does not support complex advanced features such as scripting, sound or embedded movies. Instead it's Flash animation for the rest of us, perfect for creating banner ads, text and photo effects.
Flash export (.swf)
Flash by Adobe has become a standard for vector graphic animations on the web. But, as web multimedia designers know, it's not the best tool for actually creating graphics. Any static image you create in Xara Designer can be exported in .swf format, which can then be imported into a Flash movie and animated. Because the graphic is in the Flash format, it remains scalable, so you can resize it and manipulate it within Flash without losing any quality. Xara Designer also has its own quick and easy Flash animation feature.
GIF Animation
Animated gifs are still a common form of animation used on the web. Used for banner advertisements, spinning buttons and character animation, animated gifs will be around for a long time yet. The Xara Designer Frame Gallery allows you to create animations one frame at a time. It gives you complete control over every aspect of the animation from pauses between frames to the transparency of objects. When exporting, Xara Designer is able to fully optimize animated gifs so they have as small a file size as possible, meaning you can create eye-catching animations without hindering the performance of your site.
Dreamweaver integration
Adobe's Dreamweaver is one of the leading web design packages and is used by designers across the world to create stunning web pages. Xara Designer has a special option when exporting an image in a web format (gif, jpeg or png) which saves some extra information used by Dreamweaver, along with the graphic. Then, when you're making a web page in Dreamweaver, you can insert the graphic as normal, but if you want to edit it at any point, just click on the image and Xara Designer will automatically load up with the graphic open. Note: only works with Dreamweaver 3 or higher.
Hexadecimal RGB web color
Being able to select colors based on their hexadecimal value is vital for web designers. That way you can match your graphics with colors from the standard web safe color palette, that you use on your web page. Often a designer will want to match a graphic color with the background color placed in a cell of a table for example. As HTML uses hexadecimal values (eg. #CCCCFF) to represent colors, it is extremely useful to be able to specify these colors within a drawing package. Especially for web designers, Xara Designer has a Hexadecimal RGB Web Color option which allows just this.
Image slicing
Large, complex graphics for web pages can produce large files, which take a long time to download over the Internet. However, often these large graphics contain areas of flat color or little detail. To reduce the amount of data to download you can 'slice' the image into sections, which can be download separately. The advantage is that areas of flat color/little detail can be saved at a lower quality (eg. as a 2-color GIF) than complex areas, which can be saved at a higher resolution. The 2-color GIF file takes less time to download, but it means you can still have high detail areas within your image. Xara Designer not only slices and saves the images for you, it also writes all the necessary HTML too, so you can just copy it into your web page.
Image maps
Image maps are used in web pages to create clickable areas or hotspots on a graphic. For example, if you had a map of the United Kingdom - as shown in the example - you can use an image map with a hotspot over each country. Xara Designer allows you to assign a web address to any object in a document. You can then export the complete image along with the necessary HTML required to make the image map work. When assigning a web address to an object you have the option to make the hotspot fit the object exactly or roughly outline the area with a rectangle which can produce much less code than a complex shape. You also get the option to select where the link should point to - to a new window, the current frame, the parent frame and so on.
Exporting and optimizing
Optimization of web graphics is an essential factor if you want to keep fast download times for your web pages. In order to make graphics have the smallest file size possible, yet still look good, it is often necessary to optimize them. Xara Designer has fantastic built-in auto-optimization for web graphics and photos, and also allows you to take complete manual control of optimization settings yourself. This means that you can choose the exact settings you want, including: color depth, dithering and transparency. You can also lock specific colors to make sure they are retained within the image. You can preview every change you make so you can see what the result will be before committing yourself and in the Export Dialog you can compare different export options so you know which one is best.
Linked stretching
Linked stretching is the process of using named objects to stretch or extend other named objects. One of the most typical uses for Linked Stretching is when making a button with text on it, typically for a navigation bar on a web page. It means that when you change the text, the button automatically stretches so the text fits on it perfectly.
Web Templates
The bundled templates include a large selection of professionally designed web graphics such as buttons, headings and icons which can be dragged and dropped on to your document and easily changed to match your site. The color, text and size of the templates are completely customizable without any loss quality (because they are vector) and especially benefit from the Linked Colors and Linked Stretching features, and it's easy to add mouseover effects. They can be exported in any of the common web formats such as GIF, JPEG or PNG. There is also a set of photo gallery pages. Designer Pro only: Designer Pro includes additional web design features, and so the Pro Designs Gallery includes a large selection of web page, website, presentation and NavBar templates.
Photo Galleries
The Designs Gallery includes a wide selection of photo galleries. Adding your photos couldn't be easier, simply select the photos and drag & drop them onto the page and the gallery will be automatically populated. All the photo tools such as auto-enhance and red-eye correction can be used to edit your photos individually, and the captions can be edited with the Text tool. What's more it's easy to create pop-ups (where clicking on a photo thumbnail pops-up a larger version). Once you're done, Designer includes an FTP upload feature so you can publish the gallery direct to your site from within Designer (and if you don't already have a site, Designer includes a free web hosting offer from MAGIX).
Free hosting
Xara Designer comes with a free website hosting offer from MAGIX, so you can publish your website as part of Magix-Online world. The offer has no time limit, includes 500MB of storage and your own web address!
It's easy to add widgets to a website created in Xara Designer - examples include Google Maps, Picasa photo albums and slideshows, YouTube movies, forms, e-commerce, news feeds and many, many more. You can simply drag and drop the Widgets onto the page. Designer Pro includes a library of popular Widgets, including a new range of 'eye-catcher' text and photo animation widgets, you can see previews of the eyecatcher widgets here. We have a Widget Guide which shows you how to expand the features and functionality of your Designer site using some of the more popular widgets.
HTML Website Creation
With Xara Designer Pro you can easily create HTML web pages and even multi-page websites, in a totally WYSIWYG fashion - absolutely no HTML skills required. The advantage of using Designer Pro to create web pages is that you get complete freedom to position items anywhere on the page, to include as many graphics as you like (even semi-transparent graphics) with text - even rotated text - wherever you like! And Xara Designer will create all the HTML for you. Designer Pro can create multi-page websites using the multi-page document feature. Some of the great features that make Designer Pro a first class web authoring tool in its own right include easy creation of mouseover and pop-up effects, text flow around photos, Flash and animated GIF creation, single click web page and site preview, ftp upload, support for third party 'widgets' and easy one-click site wide color changes. Recent significant new features include support for NavBars with DHTML menus, drag and drop addition of external documents and videos, and a new Widget Library. Designer Pro 7 now includes all the features and templates of Web Designer 7 Premium, including support for presentations and Webinars. An as you would expect, Designer Pro produces cross browser, cross platform compatible, fully standards compliant (X)HTML. The Designer Pro CD also includes a selection of professionally designed web graphic, web page, website and presentation templates (updated in V7). You can see an example site created in Xara Designer Pro at designer.xara.com - it's also an introduction to the web features.
Navigation bars & menus
Buttons and navigation bars are an essential part of most web sites, but making them can be a time-consuming and frustrating experience. Xara Designer Pro allows you to create standalone buttons or fully functional navigation bars within minutes including rollover effects - and Designer will write all the code for you. Simply take any button design and quickly turn it into a horizontal or vertical NavBar. An intelligent automatic button stretching even automatically adjusts the button width as you enter text. Recent updates to the NavBar feature include support for DHMTL sub menus with various animation and transparency effects, the ability to create an automatic NavBar with buttons linked to all pages of your website (the NavBar is updated as you add / remove pages) and auto-highlighting of 'current page' NavBar button.
Pop-Ups and Slideshows
In Pro the animated photo pop-up effects have additional advanced controls including an optional soft shadow, title and captions and page dimming (the page under the pop-up can be dimmed). If you have a number of thumbnail photos with the pop-up effect on the page, you can show this as a slideshow, with Next / Previous / Play / Pause controls and an optional thumbnail strip shown at the bottom of the window.
Presentations & Webinars
Designer Pro makes it easy to create web-based 'slide-show' style presentations that your website visitors can step through using the keyboard arrow keys. You can add animated transition effects as each step and page is displayed, and the Designs Gallery includes a range of ready-made, customizable presentation components such as bullet points and arrows. You can also easily remotely host a web meeting (a ‘Webinar’) to showcase your presentation, step by step and page by page, to a group of invited participants.
