Xara Photo & Graphic Designer originally made its name as award winning illustration software, but as we have added photo, text and page layout tools over the years, it has become an increasingly popular choice for graphic design.

The key to its popularity is its speed, ease of use, uncluttered user interface and the intuitive design of its drawing, photo editing, design and page layout tools. For example the interactive nature of all its tools, the use of drag & drop and infinite undo all make experimentation both quick and easy.

Xara was a pioneer of vector transparency and still offers unique advantages such as graduated transparency, but even so recent versions have continued to add significant developments such as the flexible new Art Brushes in the Freehand Tool, and integrated support for 600+ Google Fonts and over 1500 Font Awesome & Google Material Design symbols & icons.

Photo tools include:

• easy crop, rotate & resize,
• quick & easy auto enhancement, or manual control (brightness, contrast, blur, saturation, temperature, cross process)
• background erase (example below) and a magnetic lasso for cutting out objects
• photo healing and magic erase to remove scratches or blemishes or even quite significant unwanted objects (examples below)
• color select (example below)
• shadow & highlights control to adjust brightness in areas of shadow & highlight without affecting the rest of the photo
• red eye fix
• perspective fix
• a panorama maker (example below)
• advanced content aware resizing
• masking and cloning tools
• plus over 60 Photoshop plug-ins and 120 ready-made photo filter pre-sets

Other graphic design features include: a flexible text tool which includes text on a path and spell check, freehand drawing and shape tools, tools for design effects such as transparency, bevels and shadows. Many of the other individual tools are also best of class, for example feather, fill, blend and 3D extrude.