Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7, Move Over Photoshop

(All Pictures Are Screen Saves Taken By Ken)

Main Screen

Every once in awhile I am pleasantly surprised when I review a piece of software. It is very rare however that a piece of software that costs about 10% of another famous piece of software can be called better. This is one of those very very rare cases. No one loves the software put out by Adobe more than I do. As I have said in the past, it is a fine company with very good products. I am not a graphic artist. I draw occasionally pictures to be used on my website to illustrate an article once in awhile. On rare occasions I might try to draw something just for pleasure, but that doesn't happen much. Recently I came across a piece of software by Xara. It is called Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7. I had heard from some others that it was very good and its cost was under $100. What surprised me was that people were starting to compare it to Photoshop, not just the one piece of software but the entire Photoshop suite. I decided it was time to try it. It can be downloaded on a trial basis from the Xara website, which I did. I liked it so much I purchased it.

You might ask, how versatile can this software be at this price? It does so much that it comes with a manual of 555 pages. The program is not hard to use, but you will need some time to study it, because many functions are not easy to find when you first use it. A lot of people are saying that the power of this program is greater than Photoshop. A lot of functions are in different menus that are all around the main screen, even along the bottom. Usually a traditional art or photo editing program will have a pretty standard tool menu. That is the menu with the brush, fill, line, rectangle, etc. I am sure you all know what I am talking about. The first thing you notice is that the tool menu is on the left and does not have all the tools in it. This does not mean that they are not available, they are just in a different place.

The Following Are The Drop Down Menus:

There are also sub menus that are not shown, any item with an arrow contains them.

Below Are The Side Menus:

One of the first things I usually do when evaluating this type of program is to see how hard it is to make a hollow circle. You have to remember that I have only been using this program for one day so there may even be more efficient ways of doing this, but I went to the menu on the lower top of the screen and picked the circle. It was a solid circle. I then noticed that as you select the tools on the left, the lower top menu changes according to the tool you selected. Some of the tools on the left have several shape choices available, such as star, circle and rectangle. Even the sub selections of these tools may alter the lower top menu. I found that if you select the amount of pixels for the frame around the circle and then fill in the circle with the background color, only the frame remains and you have a hollow circle. The tool to select the border thickness is located on the top fixed menu next to the magnifying glass adjustments. Making hollow circles turns out to be very easy.

In the tool menu is a button called 3D. If you click on this button after drawing something it will allow you to drag it around until you get the 3D shape you want. For example I made a circle, then clicked on the 3D button and stretched it into a thick hockey puck. There is just so much to this program that I couldn't possible go over everything in it, or this review would also be 555 pages long like the manual. One of the really great things about this program is that it has the ability to move objects around even after you have drawn other ones. The entire object array is moveable. The upper menus are moveable so you can set them up any way you want, as are one or two other tools. This software is not only for editing photos and art work, it also edits movies, but I haven't tried that part out yet, just as I haven't tried the part for editing documents. The color selection tools are conveniently located on the bottom bar of the main screen along with the color picker. There is also a freehand tool there that will automatically fill in any shape you draw with it.

It seems to me that every tool that I could think of has been put into this software. There is a shadow tool and a feather tool. The software uses vector graphics rather than bitmap graphics such as Photoshop uses. Because of that, according to the enclosed manual, you can re-color, edit, rotate and re-size an object with no loss of quality. Need to move an object with precision? The arrow keys will do it one pixel at a time and the shift key will also do it 10 pixels at a time.

This software is also suitable for creating web pages. There is even a spell checker built into this software. An interesting feature is that a drawing have many layers if desired and each layer can have any number of objects. If you turn off a layer the objects in it disappear, but it can be turned on again. If you are looking for a great graphics program that some say is even more powerful than Photoshop , that sells for a fraction of the price, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 is for you.