Photo Tools Design & Useability Enhancements Other Minor Enhancements

Photo Tools

Photo Healing

A simple but incredibly effective tool that can be used to erase spots, scratches and blemishes from photos. In fact it can be used like a ’paint brush’ for the magic erase feature, so you can erase even quite large features from your photo with amazingly seamless results.

See some more examples

Before After

New Masking Tools

It’s a pretty common requirement to want to work on just one part of your photo (or indeed vector image) - for example brightening a selected area of a photo, or cropping a specific shape out of a photo or vector image.

With the new mask and region tools it couldn’t be simpler. With the region painter tool you can draw a selection region to apply effects to (such as you brightness change, or crop) or you can use the mask painter tool to protect an area from being altered.

See an example.


Bonus Software

Photo & Graphic Designer includes two valuable free additions from the MAGIX range:
  • The Premium version of MAGIX Online Photo Album, free for one year. Share your photos with friends, families and colleagues with an online album (see our example & find out more here)
  • A free copy of MAGIX Photo Manager, a useful utility for sorting, searching and creating back-ups of your photos


Background Erase

A really quick, easy and effective way of cutting complex objects out of photos, so you can place them on alternative backgrounds.  We've had some fun combining the healing and background erase tools in demo 1 and demo 2.

See some more examples

Before After

New Photo FX Plug-ins

11 all-new photo plug-ins for a dazzling array of creative photo effects:

  • Fake HDR: simulates the effect of HDR images
  • Tilt Shift: Certain image areas are blurred resulting in a miniature world look
  • Orton: Blurs the image in a special way which makes the colors stand out
  • Little Planet: Turns the image into a mini planet
  • Pencil: Transforms the photo into a pencil drawing
  • Lomo: Gives the image a processed appearance by distorting its colors
  • Color Splash: Specific areas of the image are in color and the rest is black and white
  • Polarised greyscale: Converts the image into greyscale after treatment of certain color filters
  • Color Mix: Mixes up the red/green/blue color channels
  • Sepia: Transforms color photos to give the impression that it's on old paper
  • Thermal: Certain parts of the photo are colorized, without affecting the brightness, similar to a thermal imaging camera

See some examples.


Design & Useability Enhancements

An easy way of re-coloring elements in complex grouped objects

There’s a new and much faster way of changing the individual colors in grouped objects such as clipart and buttons.  When you drag & drop a color onto the group, you’ll see a list of all the colors in the group, simply pick the one you want to change (changing a theme color converts it to a local color).

Direct support for Google Fonts & a new Google Font picker

Every document has the perfect font, so you can never have too many of them. Google has recently shaken up the font world by offering a large and growing collection of fonts for free. We bring that collection right into the font picker with a new Google Fonts section where you can preview and select fonts from the current 600+ Google Fonts collection. What’s more, if you import a document with Google fonts then the fonts will be automatically downloaded and installed.

Graphical bullets & numbers

You can now create and use your own graphical designs for the bullet character or the number at the start of bullet or numbered lists, which can make a significant improvement in the presentation quality and impact of any bulleted or numbered list.  You can use any of the in-built drawing and text tools to create your own bullet and number graphics and we also supply a collection of ready-made examples in the Designs Gallery.

Shape Painter Tool

This tool enables you to ‘paint’ onto an existing shape to enlarge it, add new areas or adjust the shape or outline. It does this in a vector way, and is a much more direct and often easier way than using the Shape Editor tool. You can adjust the size of the ‘brush’ as well as its aspect ratio and rotation angle.

The Shape Painter InfoBar provides controls over brush size, the roundness, brush tip angle and the softness, as well as a smoothness control which adjusts how accurately the brush stroke follows your mouse movement.

Note: This tool can be used on photos, but it’s only useful to enlarge an already edited or cropped photo outline.

Support for multi-weight fonts in the font menu

Where a font has more than the usual bold and italic versions, the full font family is now displayed.

New & Updated Templates

Some categories (such as photo calendars) have been updated, plus we've added new collections of customizable bullets & numbers (Page Elements > Graphic Elements > Bullets & Numbers) and logos (Page Elements > Graphic Elements > Logos).

Other Minor Enhancements

Fly-out toolbars easier to use

Version 9 release makes it easier to traverse the fly-out menu without it closing.

Improved speed and quality for JPEG / PNG

A new and improved JPEG / PNG converter means significantly improved import / export times, and a subtle quality improvement.

Windows 8 touch compatibility

v9 is now compatible with Windows 8 touch devices.

Useful right-click menu options on document tabs

We've added some useful right-click menu options on document tabs: save as, close all but this, discard, close all, discard all.

Larger thumbnails

In v9 .web files are saved with extra large thumbnails so you can take advantage of the ‘extra large icon’ view option in Windows File Explorer (Windows 7 & 8)

Simple page color change

There is a new quick and easy right click option to change the color of the page or pageboard background.