The latest version of Xara Designer Pro graphics software has just been released, with significant improvements to many functions.
The boxed version of Xara Designer Pro X10. (Source: Magix AG.)
Xara Designer Pro X10 provides tools for a range of graphic design tasks that would normally require three or more separate ‘suite’ programs: illustration, photo editing, web graphics, advanced page layout (Desktop Publishing & PDF) and website design. Fast and efficient, it supports multi-core processors for even faster performance, it includes professional design tools like PANTONE ®, CMYK, colour separations and PDF/X.
The new release features Xara’s innovative new publishing technique called Supersites, an alternative way to publish print documents and websites. Instead of a separate set of web pages, with typical ‘click-wait-load’ navigation, a ‘supersite’ provides instant navigation between pages, along with animated page transitions. Users can choose to have all web pages presented as a single scrolling list of pages, one below the other, or arranged horizontally with swipe actions (for touch devices) for page to page transitions. The website can be set to ‘fit to screen’ so that it smoothly and automatically resizes to fit any browser window.
Bundled with this release is a new Photoshop plug-in called PhotoLooks from Red Giant (previously sold by Red Giant for $199) for users wishing to intensify the mood of their photo via various colour and lighting effects or adding a popular film look from soft lighting to Hollywood drama. The plug-in includes more than 100 pre-sets inspired by real commercial projects, from wedding vignettes to popular cinematic looks. New shadow and highlight controls enable precise editing control over areas in deep shadow or bright light. Automatic panorama stitching can detect the position of stitched images and produce higher quality results.
This release also includes a new online content catalogue, new templates and widgets, support for the automatic rotation of images from iPhones and other cameras with orientation sensors, a new insert menu, improved web presentations, improved import/export support for .doc and .docx files, RTF files. Also new is a significantly improved PDF import that allows almost all PDF files to be edited.
Xara Designer Pro X10 costs just US$299 with upgrades from US$99. It operates on Windows XP/Vista/7/8.1 and requires a minimum 500MB of RAM and 300MB of hard disc space. Details are available at – xara.com/designer-pro
