Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9

Xara has released version 9 of its Windows-based creative design software, Xara Photo and Graphics Designer. New features include an advanced healing brush, 11 new photo effects, Google font support, new masking and selection tools, advanced background erasing options and more. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 costs £69.99.

Xara Press Release

New Xara Photo & Graphic Designer v9

21st May, 2012 - Xara today announced the release of the latest new version of their creative design software, Xara Photo and Graphics Designer v9.

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is ideal for any graphics enthusiast, small company or academic user that requires the best value general purpose photo and graphic design tool.

The headline new features include:

Advanced Healing Brush – remove blemishes with a single click, or brush over an area to erase it.

New Mask and Selection tools.  Easily paint, or draw a region or area to enhance, such as adjust the brightness, sharpness, color temperature etc.

Advanced background erase. Extract complex shapes such a people or objects in the foreground, and place them on alternate backgrounds.
Drag and drop re-colouring of clipart and vector groups.

Google Font support. Browse, preview and install any of the 600+ Google Fonts.  Although Google Fonts were primarily designed to be web fonts, they are open source Truetype or OpenType fonts and Xara has built in a way to automatically download and install the font as a Windows font.

11 new Photo Effects including Fake HDR, Polarized Grayscale and Color Splash to highlight a color.

New clipart including a wide range of ‘company logo’ designs

Most of Xara's photo editing tools are non-destructive. Also known as 'parametric image editing', this non-destructive technique allows you to adjust or even remove edits at any point in the future, without affecting the original image. Photo edits are stored as the parameters to be changed (such as brightness or blend levels) rather than the altered pixels.  This is much faster, more powerful, more memory efficient, and allows near infinite Undo.

Xara Photo and Graphic Designer introduces some really advanced photo editing features. An automatic background erase that normally takes hours of careful manual masking (or would be impossible), can be done in seconds. The Healing Brush is built on what Xara believe to be the most advanced intelligent 'fill in' algorithms anywhere. The new Mask and Selection tools make it easier than ever to apply edits to specific areas, and to have those edits seamlessly blended into your photo.

Charles Moir, Managing Director of Xara said: "As the name suggests 'Photo & Graphic Designer' is more than just another photo editor. It's one of the most advanced and powerful vector graphics programs available, and seamlessly combines all the photo editing features you're likely to need. Why should you have to use one program for general vector 'artwork' style graphics and another for photo editing, when you can get one, really fast, really easy-to-use graphics program that does it all? It's simply the most advanced photo and graphics editing tool available, for the money."

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 costs just £69.99 (inc VAT)

Upgrades from v8 to Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 cost £35 (inc VAT)

It operates on Windows XP/Vista/7/8
For more information see  - xara.com
Demonstration pages of the new features - xaragroup.magix.net/PGD9Demo1/