Speed

Xara Designer has the world's most sophisticated, highest performance vector rendering engine. Quite simply this makes it the fastest graphics software to be found.

Direct Action Tools

Xara Designer's Direct Action Tools allow you to create effects such as transparency, shadows, bevels or gradient fills in an interactive, fast and intuitive way. No distracting dialogs - simply drag on the object!

Drag and Drop

Many tasks in Xara Designer benefit from being able to use the drag and drop principle, which is the most intuitive way of working and a great time saver. It also supports drag and drop import of files, such as photos.

Solid Object Editing

Instead of dragging outlines when you draw, move, rotate or resize objects, Designer offers solid live object manipulation. Only Designer is fast enough to do this on complex vector graphics.

Undo / Redo

Being able to change what you have done is vital in a graphics package. Xara Designer allows unlimited undo, making experimentation easy.

Zoom

The Zoom tool allows magnification up to 25,000%, perfect for detailed work. And it's super-fast and resolution independent too.

If this image was created in Photoshop with the same detail, the file would be 2000 x 3000 inches, take hundreds of megabytes of memory and file space. As a vector design it takes just 180Kbytes!

Anti-Aliasing

Xara introduced the world's first vector anti-aliasing to bring maximum screen quality and is still a pioneer with the fastest, highest quality anti-aliasing available in any drawing program.

3D Extrude

The world's fastest, slickest, and highest quality vector 3D extrude tool.

Take any shape, and just drag on the face to create a beautifully lit and shaded 3D version. Drag on the sides to extend the extrude depth. It couldn't be easier.

Drawing Tools

Xara Designer is primarily a vector graphics application and includes a set of really easy vector line and shape editing tools.

The Freehand tool offers live smoothing after you've drawn your line, along with the ability to edit any outlines.

Transparency

Xara was the first vector application to introduce transparency, and continues to this day to offer the easiest, most advanced transparency control of any software. With click-drag simplicity you can create graduated blends to any object, photo, text, and vector shape.

Blend Tool

The blend tool tweens or blends from one shape to another. It's ultra-fast, click-drag simple, works with vector shapes, text and photos.

Soft Vectors

Xara was the first application to offer vector feathering, vector soft shadows. It still has the most advanced and enables high quality realistic images to be created more quickly and easily than on any other software.

Feathering, combined with transparency provides great photo compositing features, as well as great vector shading.

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 even after applying the effect. Most modern Photoshop plug-ins work as Live Effects.

Shadows, Bevels, & Contours

Xara Designer offers several powerful tools that allow you to add realistic effects with a single click. Apply, remove, and modify semi-transparent (or 'soft') shadows to any object with the Shadow tool. Use the Bevel tool to add bevels to any object, giving them the realistic appearance of depth. And add contours around objects with the Contour tool. All resolution independent (don't lose quality when you scale them)!

Photo Handling Overview

Xara Designer photo handling beats other graphics programs on many fronts: It's much, much faster, produces files that can be 10x or more smaller.

Being entirely object oriented means completely non-destructive photo editing, and uses a fraction of the RAM required by other products. It can handle multiple very high resolution images with ease, even on a modest PC. It makes the perfect photo composition tool.

Photo Quality & File Size

Xara Designer offers unique non-destructive editing of photos - that means you can edit your photo as many times as you like without the loss of quality that is normal in other photo programs.

Designer is also unique in the way it handles and stores photos (with lossless vector-based photo editing, combined with embedding the original JPEG) which means that files containing photos can be anywhere from 3 to 100 times smaller than with other programs.

Integrated Photo Tool

Xara Designer includes a revolutionary integrated, ultra-fast, non-destructive photo editing tool. It offers real-time photo enhance (brightness levels, sharpen, blur etc) plus real-time scaling and rotation even on 50 Megapixel images. Other features include flexible cropping, red eye removal, perspective correction, photo erase and masking tools and the innovative content aware scaling and zooming.

Combine this with vector masking, layer blending, feathering - all in the non-destructive, memory efficient way - and you have something that no other photo tool can provide.

Photo Panoramas

Perhaps the easiest to use panorama maker. Drop a series of photos on the page, click one button and you'll get a perfect, seamless joined panoramic image.

Intelligent Scaling

The Photo Tool includes innovative intelligent image scaling technology that allows 'content aware scaling', which means images can be 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.

And there is also '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.

Bitmap Tracer

Xara Designer's powerful bitmap tracer can convert your bitmaps – typically photos, line-art or logos – into editable vector shapes.

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.

In addition the Live Effects tool, the most advanced of any available, enables you to apply these plug-ins to photos and vector shapes for a range of amazing visual effects.

Designer includes more than 35 built-in Live Effects.

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.

HTML website Creation

Xara Designer Pro includes a complete 'website creation' feature that enables you to design multi-page websites with ease, including mouseover and pop-up effects, navbars and menus, animations and widgets. One click preview and ftp upload included. It's the world's most advanced WYSIWYG web page layout - and with no HTML skills required!

Animated Flash Report

Xara Photo and Graphic Designer and Designer Pro offer a genuinely easy way to create really efficient Flash animations.

Total Design Freedom

Xara Designer Pro gives you total design freedom - using drag and drop you can literally place anything, anywhere on the page. And things which are normally difficult to achieve in HTML are a snap in Xara Designer Pro - for example text with curved edges, text or graphics at an angle, text flowing around objects - no problem!

Clever Stuff

But Designer Pro has some clever tricks too, to make things easier for you - here's just a few of the things that will save you time and trouble:

Liquid text flow around objects; easy mouseover, thumbnail and pop-up creation; automatic adjustment of photos to the correct web resolution; one-click change of site wide theme colors and shades; automatic color matching of imported objects such as buttons; and buttons and text panels that automatically stretch as you change the text.

Web Widgets

And it's a snap to add widgets to your site with Designer Pro, such as Google Maps, Picasa photo albums and slideshows, YouTube movies, forms, e-commerce and many, many more. Plus there's a library of popular Widgets included in the Designs Gallery which you can just drag and drop onto your page.

Compatibility

Working with industry standards is vital, so Xara Designer Pro sites are W3C compliant, cross browser compatible (IE 6+, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and XHTML, CSS standards based.

Presentations and 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 presentations and presentation components such as bullet points and arrows.

Import And Export

Designer offers support for a huge range of file formats, making it easy to exchange your work with other users and programs. This includes common bitmap types (eg GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, PSD, and RAW photos) and key vector types (eg PDF and AI/EPS, and EMF/WMF). For text Xara Designer supports RTF (Rich Text Format) and for websites HTML and Flash.

PSD Support

Xara Designer has full support for importing and exporting Adobe Photoshop® PSD files including layer support.

PDF Support

Xara Designer offers industry leading export of super-clean, very compact PDF files (including support for graduated color fills and flat / graduated transparency). Combined with the PDF import feature, this provides another way to interchange files.

Color Seperation 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.

XPS Support

Xara Designer Pro supports XPS export (and has a beta XPS import filter). This is an entirely new ‘page description’ file format invented by Microsoft that's vector based, and so is ideal as a resolution-independent portable document format.