New erasing and masking capabilities
add to Xara’s extraordinary creative power. It’s an incredible bargain for
occasional designers.
Price: $89 - Upgrade $45
Suppljer: www.xara.com
The name might be a bit of a mouthful, but
it leaves you in no doubt as to what Xara is all about. It’s a workhorse
capable of handling any project you throw at it, from vector-based logo design,
to bitmap-based photo enhancement and multipage desktop publishing projects.
What isn’t so clear from the clunky title
is just how eye-wateringly quick Xara is in practice. It has the fastest
graphics engine in the business, and it was this ability to render advanced
vector and bitmap effects in real-time that made Xara stand out when it launched
in 1995.
New
erasing and masking capabilities add to Xara’s extraordinary creative power.
It’s still the secret of the program’s
success today, and it’s demonstrated by the new Shape Eraser toot. This lets
you drag around the edge of a shape to move its outline inwards, and drag
within it to create holes. The beauty of the speed is that the tool is
responsive even if the object has complex formatting such as a bevel, drop
shadow, graduated transparency, or even all three.
The Shape Eraser permanently changes the
path of the vector object it’s applied to, but the tool can also work in a very
different mode. Using the Softness slider, erase effects can also be applied as
an opacity mask. This lets you vary the transparency to produce soft fades, and
the best port is that it acts non-destructively, so masks can be removed or
fine-tuned later. It means freeform transparency effects can be applied to
objects such as text and bitmaps that themselves remain fully editable.
Painting out areas of an imported bitmap
with the Shape Eraser can be handy, but even more useful is the option to fade
out or remove specific colours. This can be done using the Photo tool’s new
Colour Select/Erase option, which gives fine control through adding sample
points to an image, each of which has its own colour tolerance and fade
setting. Being able to manage bitmap transparency in such a way directly within
Xara greatly increases your creative options.
The Colour Select/Erase tool has another
trick up its sleeve. Rather than erasing a selection, it can be turned into a
soft mask, and Xara’s various enhancement controls can be used to change
brightness, contrast, saturation and so on. With this latest release,
selections can also quickly be recoloured by setting a target hue and strength.
It’s another big boost to the creative options on offer.
Improved publishing
The new Xara also significantly improves
its handling of text-based publications. First, the Designs Gallery provides a
wider range of templates and clip-art, all server-based and regularly updated.
The Pages and Layers gallery has been enhanced so you can select more than one
page tar copying, deleting and reordering. Using the Text tool, objects can be
pasted into your text flow as inline graphics.
On the text front, the highlight is Xara’s
style-based handling. Previously, each paragraph had to be formatted
individually; now styles can be used to apply consistent formatting quickly.
Change the formatting, then update the style and all similar paragraphs will be
updated. There isn’t the precision of a publishing program, but it’s fast and
effective, especially as Xara uses its speed to offer live previews.
The
new Xara also significantly improves its handling of text-based publications.
For those looking for even more power than
what is on offer with the standard software package, Xara provides Xara
Designer Pro X (US $299), which builds on the standard version with advanced
capabilities such as support for multicore processors, colour separation and
PDF/X export. This new version of the software also adds updated Pantone
libraries and a Shape Builder tool, which is essentially the reverse of the
Shape Eraser, allowing you to paint on an existing shape to enlarge it.
These days, the main focus of Designer Pro
is web design and this sees a number of advances. Before, the position of
elements on o page had to be adjusted as you added or edited text, but now the
page can be set to automatically lengthen, with expanding text areas pushing
down other objects. Fonts can be embedded for display in most browsers, and
there are widgets for handling charts and MP3s, and all the JovaScript-based
widgets are resizable.
Xara Designer Pro X provides all you need
to create not only design- intensive commercial print but websites as well.
It’s impressive integrated power, but we still feel uncomfortable with the
whole idea of a code-free web-authoring package. For occasional designers and
those focusing on graphics, Xara Photo and Graphic Designer MX 2013 provides
the same extraordinary creative engine as Designer Pro and even more
extraordinary value.
