UNITED KINGDOM —
Xara (www.xara.com) announces the release of the latest new version of its creative design software, Xara Photo and Graphic Designer v10 — a program that provides tools for a range of graphic design and photo editing tasks. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is intended for the graphics enthusiast, small company or academic user.
New shadow and highlight tools provide the user with editing control over specific areas of their photo that are in deep shadow or bright light. Bundled with this release is a new Photoshop plug-in called PhotoLooks from Red Giant (previously sold by Red Giant for $199) for users wishing to intensify the mood of their photo via various color and lighting effects or adding a popular film look from soft lighting to Hollywood drama. The plug-in includes over 100 pre-sets inspired by real commercial projects, from wedding vignettes to popular cinematic looks.
A new way to ‘enhance by color’ provides a way to selectively enhance or process areas in an image based on its color. For example, users can just click on the sky, and all similar blue areas are now active, and further adjustment of any photo enhance control (e.g. brightness levels, saturation, blur/sharpen, tinting, re-coloring, etc.) will now apply to all those blue areas.
Xara SmartShapes are a new way to draw aesthetically attractive shapes on a document, that require no knowledge of any drawing tools, and furthermore, they remain fully customizable. Users can create and edit some of the most commonly required shapes. The library of SmartShapes will grow over time, but starts with text panels, speech bubbles, arrows and more. Xara has also introduced a way to insert graphical symbols from a large and growing Font Awesome selection.
The automatic panorama stitching has been improved to automatically detect the position of stitched images and also produces higher quality results. This release also includes a new online content catalog, support for the automatic rotation of images from iPhones and other cameras with orientation sensors, a new insert menu, improved import/export support for .doc and .docx files, RTF files, and significantly improved PDF import that allows almost all PDF files to be edited.
"Photo & Graphic Designer is different and superior to standard photo editors because it's not only a great photo editing tool but it’s also combined with powerful vector graphics and illustration tools," said Charles Moir, founder and managing director.
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 10 operates on Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1 (PhotoLooks 2, XP not officially supported) and costs $89.99; upgrades from v9 to version 10 cost $35.