Art Brushes
There's a big step forward for the Brush Tool with significant improvements to the existing Scatter Brushes and a totally new type of Art Brush.Scatter Brushes repeat shapes along a line and you can now create them using any type of object (so for example you could include feathering or extrusions). Art Brushes stretch a vector shape or bitmap along the line.
Create an infinite variety of effects with the new Art Brushes
Liquify Shape Editing Tools
Fans of the Shape Painter Tool will love the extra flexibility offered by a new selection of vector shape editing tools (in the drop down list in the Shape Painter InfoBar).
Example using the Warp Liquify Tool
New Blend Modes / Transparency Types
5 new W3C standard, web-safe and PDF-safe blend modes in the Transparency Tool (Overlay, Hard Light, Soft Light, Luminosity & Color - see the Release Notes for more information).nb Bleach and Stained Glass have been renamed (Multiply and Screen) to match industry standards.
The new blend modes offer plenty of opportunity to experiment
Auto-Correct / Abbreviation Expansion
Create your own list of abbreviations that will be automatically expanded as you type, so for example PGD could be expanded to Photo & Graphic Designer as you type. It's great for symbols too - for example you might set up yen to render ¥
Create your own list of abbreviations that will be automatically expanded as you type
Other Text Enhancements
- A text background color option so you can easily highlight words
- An easy way to replace one font with another throughout a document (especially useful for replacing missing fonts in imported PDFs)
- 'Update style to match' option (useful for copying styles from another document or applying styles to unstyled documents, particularly imported PDFs)
- More detailed information on font permissions in Document Information
- Update of the Font Awesome Symbols (a quick & easy way to insert symbols from the large and growing Font Awesome selection. The full set is displayed via the Insert menu)
- Google fonts updated
- Fonts will look correct in exported documents where fonts are missing if outlines are embedded (for example from imported PDFs, most of which include embedded character outlines)
- Option to show extended Text Tool InfoBar, instead of some controls being in a flyout bar.
Document Sync With Dropbox or GDrive
Photo & Graphic Designer can now sync files via Dropbox and Google Drive. So if you have the same file open on multiple computers, and you make an edit and save the file on one computer, it will be updated in Photo & Graphic Designer on the other computers.
And there's another bonus: Dropbox and Google Drive maintain older versions of your files, and provide easy ways of viewing and reverting back to earlier versions (in Dropbox simply right click on a file and select 'View previous versions'). This is a safe, easy and storage-saving way of maintaining multiple versions of your files.
And there's another bonus: Dropbox and Google Drive maintain older versions of your files, and provide easy ways of viewing and reverting back to earlier versions (in Dropbox simply right click on a file and select 'View previous versions'). This is a safe, easy and storage-saving way of maintaining multiple versions of your files.
Easily sync your documents via Dropbox or Google Drive
Import & Export Enhancements
PDF Import:
- Improved text editability (improved text reconstruction, margins, better text link import, better underline import)
- Better support for import of PDFs with embedded font subsets, where fonts are not installed locally
- Many other minor fixes and improvements.
Other Import / Export
- Improvements to Word import.
Bonus Software
Photolooks 2 will be bundled again with v11. Photolooks is a powerful and flexible plug-in (previously sold by Red Giant for \$199!) that could change the way you approach color in photography! It includes over 100 presets, but you can dive deeper by exploring the PhotoLooks tools and their powerful way of manipulating color and light to create your own custom effects.
Create an infinite variety of subtle (or not so subtle!) effects using PhotoLooks2
Other Misc Enhancements
- A new option Arrange > Combine Shapes > Intersect all shapes (the overlapping areas of shapes become separate shapes)
- Improved support in the drawing tools for modern touch devices, including the Microsoft Surface stylus
- Two new SmartShapes, a photo text panel and a spiral (you can find SmartShapes in the Designs Gallery / Content Catalog or Insert > Shape) doubleclick to show the edit handles
- Objects are automatically resized down to column width when you insert them into a text column
- InfoBar pulses on tool selection
- Option to export retina version of web graphic at the same time as 96dpi version
- Auto-creation of links when you type a URL so for example typing xara.com will automatically create a link to the Xara site (useful for PDFs).
Have fun with the new Spiral SmartShape
New Content
v11 includes a selection or new templates in the Designs Gallery, and of course new brush designs:- a new category of dividers & flourishes
- the 2016 calendars
- some additional invitations
- more logos (in Page Elements) making over 120 in total
- a selection of brush designs for the new Art Brush feature, in the Line Gallery
Some of the new logo templates in the Designs Gallery