Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7 review

Photo & Graphic Designer is also surprisingly effective as a photo editor. There’s considerable scope to optimise colours, skew geometry and apply a wide range of artistic effects. Unusually for an illustration package, it can also apply localised edits to specific parts of a photo, such as red-eye reduction and cloning.

Joining this line up is a new feature called Magic Erase. It removes unwanted objects from photos by replacing them with cloned areas of the background. In our tests it was clever enough to reconstruct the soft verge of a path, but anything with straight lines or recognisable shapes was less convincing. Still, it was only marginally less successful than a similar feature in Photoshop CS5. To deal with the occasional crisp packet marring an otherwise great shot, it’s extremely welcome.

The Magic Erase function isn’t infallible but it has a good stab at replacing objects in a photo by extrapolating the background

Other improvements aim to speed up operation even further. The Snap to Objects function is more sophisticated than before, snapping to the centre or edges of other objects and using on-screen indicators to help users keep track of what’s going on. It’s now possible to edit an object within a group without having to ungroup it first, and there are various refinements to the cut, copy and paste functions.

There’s more than enough to justify the £29 inc VAT upgrade price. For new users, it’s hard to imagine a better product for people who want to produce design projects with the minimum of fuss. We’d stick to Photoshop Elements for photo-editing duties, but to have such capable illustration, graphic design, DTP and web animation tools for just £69 is a real bargain.