Here are just some of the reasons why we believe Xara stands out from the competition, making Photo & Graphic Designer a great choice for all your photo editing, illustration and graphic design needs.
Photo & Graphic Designer allows you to do amazing things with photos, includes really intuitive vector drawing tools and advanced text handling, all in one seamlessly integrated environment.

Revolutionary Photo Handling
Photo & Graphic Designer's photo handling beats other graphics programs on many fronts.

Fast, non-destructive photo handling
Photo & Graphic Designer photo handling beats other graphics programs on many fronts. It's much, much faster, produces smaller files and it's non-destructive. It makes the perfect photo composition tool.
Photo & Graphic Designer offers completely non-destructive photo editing (which means you can edit your photo as many times as you like without the loss of quality that is normal in other photo programs), and it uses a fraction of the RAM required by other products. It can handle multiple very high resolution images with ease, even on a modest PC.
Photo & Graphic Designer is also unique in the way it handles and stores photos, which means that files containing photos can be anywhere from 3 to 100 times smaller than with other programs.

Integrated Photo Tool
Photo & Graphic Designer includes a revolutionary integrated, ultra-fast, non-destructive photo editing tool. It offers both automatic real-time photo enhance and manual controls (brightness, contrast, sharpen, blur, saturation, temperature and a new cross process option) plus real-time scaling and rotation even on very high res images. Other features include flexible cropping, red eye removal, advanced shadow & highlights and brightness levels controls, perspective correction.
Combine this with features such as vector masking, layer blending, feathering - all in the non-destructive, memory efficient way - and you have something that no other photo tool can provide.

 

Advanced Photo Manipulation
The powerful photo tools can produce almost miraculous changes and improvements to your photos!
The Photo Healing and Magic Erase tools makes it quick and easy to seamlessly erase unwanted objects from your photo completely, so you'll never know they were there! See some examples
v365 includes a new Magnetic Lasso for quick and easy cutting out of any object in your photo. Or for images with challenging outlines (eg a person's hair) there's the Background Erase tool. See some Background Erase examples
The Color Enhance control is another powerful tool for photo manipulation. It's incredibly quick and easy to perform any enhance operation - such as a change of brightness, contrast or color - based on a selected color in your image. See some Color Select & Enhance examples

Creative Effects
Photo & Graphic Designer includes a selection of 60+ creative 'Live Effect' plug-ins that can transform both photos and vector drawings (they are called Live Effects because the object remains editable even after applying the effect). Effects include oil painting, pencil and crayon drawing, crumple, fish-eye, waves, 'liquid paint' for creating caricatures and many, many more.
Most modern Adobe Photoshop® plug-ins work as Live Effects, giving access to a huge range of free and commercial plug-ins for creating effects that would take a lifetime to explore.
The Content Catalog also includes almost 30 ready-made photo filter pre-sets that you can simply drop on your photo to create popular effects and moods such as 'summer', 'vintage' and 'exposed'. See some examples.
In addition there's an Effect Painter and flexible mask and region tools that enable you to enhance or apply effects to selected areas of a photo.

Photo Panoramas
Perhaps the easiest to use panorama maker. Drop a series of photos on the page, click one button and you'll get a perfect, seamless joined panoramic image.

See Panorama examples
Intelligent Scaling
The Photo Tool includes innovative intelligent image scaling technology that allows 'content aware scaling', which means images can be stretched or squashed while retaining the proportions of important parts of the picture.
This can provide a near miraculous ability to stretch and change the aspect ratio of photos, without apparently distorting the content of the photo.
And there is also 'content aware zooming', which works in a similar way but allows you to resize the object that is the center of interest without increasing the size of the total image.

Bitmap Tracer
Photo & Graphic Designer's powerful bitmap tracer can convert your bitmaps – typically photos, line-art or logos – into editable vector shapes.

All The Creative Tools You Need
Photo & Graphic Designer offers all the tools that a creative designer could need for illustration and text handling.

Drawing Tools
Photo & Graphic Designer is the primary tool of many illustrators and includes a set of powerful but really easy to use vector line and shape drawing and editing tools.
The Quickshape tools (rectangle, circle etc) allow you to draw pre-set shapes very quickly and easily. Editing shapes and lines is easy and the Freehand line drawing tool even offers a slider for retroactive smoothing after you've drawn your line. And there's support for pressure sensitive tablets too.
The powerful Shape Eraser and Shaper Builder tools allow you to easily erase or build on your image with a 'paintbrush' type action, whether it's a vector drawing or a photo.

Advanced Text Handling
Photo & Graphic Designer offers everything you need for adding creative text to your designs.
The Text Tool allows you to enter as many lines of text as you want, at any place in your document and at any angle, and you can also set your text along a curved path. Additionally, just like any drawn object in Photo & Graphic Designer, you can freely resize it on the page, and apply any of the effects, such as transparency, fills, molds and so on - and yet the text remains editable.
Like any word processing program you have full control over the text styles, including font (with 600+ integrated Google fonts, and 1500+ Font Awesome / Google Material Design icons & symbols), color, justification, line spacing and kerning etc.

3D Extrude
The world's fastest, slickest, and highest quality vector 3D extrude tool.
Take any shape, and just drag on the face to create a beautifully lit and shaded 3D version. Drag on the sides to extend the extrude depth. It couldn't be easier.

Blends
The blend tool tweens or blends from one shape to another. It's ultra-fast, click-drag simple, works with vector shapes, text and photos.
Blends can be used to create complex highlights, blurred edges on objects, repetitive patterns and many other effects, in other words it's a vital tool for creative design. Photo & Graphic Designer performs blending in a very quick and memory-efficient way compared to other drawing packages - meaning less waiting for you and less draining of your systems resources.

Transparency & Feathering
Xara was the first vector application to introduce transparency, and continues to this day to offer the easiest, most advanced transparency control of any software. With click-drag simplicity you can create graduated transparencies to any object, photo, text, and vector shape.
Xara was also the first application to offer vector feathering (sometimes called Soft Vectors). This is a technique of slightly blurring the edges of objects to help them blend into the background and enables high quality realistic images to be created more quickly and easily than in any other software.
The combination of feathering and transparency is great for any photo composition work, as well as realistic vector shading, vital for any good illustration.
and more...