Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 review

There’s a new set of masking tools that allow colour correction to be applied to limited areas of a photo. Regions can be created using a brush, lasso or rectangular marquee tool and resized and reshaped using the existing vector handles. It’s also possible to feather the edges or add a transparency gradient so that colour correction becomes progressively stronger, which is just the thing for bringing out the contrast in skies. However, the vast majority of effects don’t support these masks. Only brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature and hue are available, and applying any of the new or existing creative effects ignores the mask.

Attempting to apply masked colour correction to a vector drawing object gave unexpected results. The mask was converted into an independent vector object that applied the colour correction to any objects below it, a bit like Adjustment Layers in Photoshop. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it’s a little confusing that masks behave differently depending on the type of object to which they’re applied.

Using the Background Erase tool involves loosely defining the areas to keep and delete

The masks also facilitate a new Background Erase tool. It’s designed for cutting out objects from their background without the labour-intensive task of tracing contours manually. It took us a while to work out how to achieve this, as it’s done with two tools that don’t appear to be linked. The Mask Painter tool is used to define areas to keep, while the Eraser tool defines areas to delete. They can be applied quite loosely, though; they just need to tell the software which blocks of colour must stay and which must go.

The results are impressive but not quite perfect, and manual correction is tricky

The Background Erase tool coped extremely well with complex outlines such as hair, with clever use of variable opacity to give a feathered, textured outline. The results were never perfect, though, as the function had a tendency to feather areas that didn’t warrant it, such as shapes against a similarly coloured background or areas that disappeared into shadows. These kinds of issues are common in automatic masking tools such as this, but tidying up manually was harder than it is in Photoshop Elements. It was easy to remove additional unwanted areas with the Erase tool, but the only way to reinstate areas that had been removed in error was with the Undo tool, followed by adding finer detail with the Mask Painter tool and trying again.

Another new feature is the Shape Painter tool, which adds to vector shapes using brush strokes. It’s a welcome addition, but it’s frustrating that it can’t be used to repair scrappy edges caused by the Background Erase tool. There may be technical reasons why this isn’t feasible. Background Erase can produce decent results quickly, but it doesn’t have the precision for meticulous results.

There’s a handful of workflow improvements, including better handling of fonts and a quick way to change a specific colour in a multi-part, multi-coloured object. The templates and clip-art gallery is bigger and better than ever. Overall, though, this update doesn’t feel as accomplished as previous versions. The software isn’t any worse for these new features, but there’s a risk here of Photo & Graphic Designer losing its way. Over the years we’ve seen a few creative applications that made great strides in their first few versions but diluted them with mediocre features as the version number reached double figures. We hope that won’t be Photo & Graphic Designer’s fate.

This is still the best vector-drawing and graphic-design software for home users. It’s faster and more polished than Serif DrawPlus X6, and cheaper and more approachable than Corel Draw X6 and Adobe Illustrator. However, we don’t think this is the most compelling update for existing users. We’d be tempted to hold back on the £35 upgrade and see what version 10 brings.