Xara Photo & Graphic Designer MX 2013 review

Xara’s photo-editing features are better than ever. A Colour Select/Erase tool acts like Photoshop’s Magic Wand, selecting areas of similar colour. It’s easy to select a range of colours and soften the edges of the selection. This selection can either be hidden or have colour correction applied, which is just the thing for bringing out colours in the main subject without affecting the background.

The new Hue control adds a colour tint, using a colour spectrum control and a Strength slider to vary between unprocessed and monochrome. It’s a different approach to the Hue controls in most other software, which rotate colours around the colour spectrum. Xara’s is more of a colour filter control, but it’s no worse for that fact. Xara still lags far behind Photoshop Elements for photo-editing prowess, but in practice there’s increasingly less need to run both side by side when combining photos and vector graphics in design projects.

The new Colour Select/Erase and Hue tools let us isolate these daffodils and turn them purple with a reasonable degree of success

There are so many things we love about this software. The incredible performance comes top, but a close second is its ability to turn its hand to vector drawing, photo editing, desktop publishing and even simple Flash animations. There are lots of thoughtful touches, too. As an example, the software opens documents from the last session, including those that were not saved, when launched.

3D extrusion and custom brushes are just two of the many powerful drawing tools

There are lots of inspiring drawing tools, such as the ability to turn any object or collection of objects into a brush, or to give shapes 3D depth, complete with lighting effects. CorelDraw goes even further for creative tools, but there’s more than enough in Xara to fire the imagination and the price is right for home users. It’s a Best Buy.