Software developer, Xara, has released the latest version of its Photo & Graphic Designer editing program, which combines a palette of non-destructive advanced photo editing tools with powerful vector graphics.
New background erase functions in Xara Photo and Graphics Designer make it easy to extract cvomplex shapes and place them on different backgrounds. (Source: Xara.)
Xara Photo and Graphics Designer v9 is priced at just US$89.99, with upgrades from v8 for only US$45 and it’s available for computers running Windows XP/Vista/7/8. New features include:
– Advanced Healing Brush that lets users remove blemishes with a single click, or brush over an area to erase it.
– New Mask and Selection tools for painting or drawing on a region or area to enhance, such as adjust the brightness, sharpness, colour temperature, etc.
– Advanced background erase functions that enable users to extract complex shapes such as people or objects in the foreground and place them on alternative backgrounds.
– Drag and drop re-colouring of clipart and vector groups.
– Support for the 600+ Google Fonts.
– 11 new Photo Effects including Fake HDR, Polarised Greyscale and Colour Splash to highlight a colour.
– New clipart including a wide range of ‘company logo’ designs.
Most of Xara’s photo editing tools are non-destructive and use ‘parametric image editing’, which allows users to adjust or even remove edits at any point in the future, without affecting the original image. Photo edits are stored as the parameters to be changed (such as brightness or blend levels) rather than the altered pixels. This is much faster, more powerful, more memory efficient, and allows near infinite Undo. As far as we have been able to determine raw file conversion is not supported.
Demonstrations of the new features can be found at xaragroup.magix.net/PGD9Demo1/. Full details are available at www.xara.com.
