Xara has announced the release of version 8 of their Designer products – Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX (v8) and Xara Designer Pro X (v8).

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Both applications are fast, easy-to-use single integrated programs that provide all the tools for a range of graphic design tasks that would normally require three or more separate ‘suite’ programs. They include facilities for illustration, photo editing, advanced page layout, web graphics and animations ““ and in the case of Designer Pro building complete websites and online presentations.

New features in Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX and Xara Designer Pro X include:

  • Powerful Colour Erase /Selection to enhance (change colour, adjust brightness, blur, etc) or make parts of photos transparent based on the selected colour.
  • Photo hue adjustment to change the colour tint of any part of a photo.
  • An innovative new Shape Erase Tool that can perform both vector erasing or path adjustment, as well as ‘soft mask’ painting to perform detailed soft-edged erasing of vector, text and photo objects.
  • A new Text Styles feature that offers an efficient and powerful way of controlling the global appearance of text. Generates CSS compatible styles.
  • New Inline Graphics for embedding symbols and icons into text.
  • Many new Template Designs for greeting cards, brochures, business cards, CD covers and certificates, plus many new categorised clipart designs.
  • Photo Tool improvements and additions including the integrated Panorama stitching tool, a more efficient ‘Optimise all images’ function and ability to optimize images upon upload.
  • All titles in the MAGIX/Xara range can share media files with each other and with some important third party services such as Flickr and Facebook.

Both applications are Windows-only (compatible with XP, Vista and Windows 7). They are available for downloading from http://www.xara.com. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX 8 costs US$89; Xara Designer Pro X 8 costs US$299.

Upgrades from v7 to Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX 8 are available for US$45,  while upgrades to Xara Designer Pro X 8 cost US$99.