Page 369 - Xara Designer Pro X17

Photo Handling 369

To choose an external editor, select the PHOTO EDITING tab in the Options dialog.

XPE is a basic picture editor. Most of its functionality is now provided by the Photo Tool
directly and so this tool provides little benefit. It's here mostly for back compatibility
reasons.

Alternatively, if you select the "Edit bitmap with this program" option and browse to select
an external program, then this can be launched by double clicking on any image when in
the Photo tool (you will probably need to browse to your program files folder on your local
hard drive and select the program executable .exe file).

It should be understood that images transferred to and from external editors are
transferred as uncompressed images (to avoid compression / decompression cycles)
and so this will increase the file size of your .xar file.

When editing a photo in a separate program in this manner, you can carry on using Xara
Designer Pro X as normal. Each time you save the image from the photo editor (or just
close the program and click the Save option) Xara Designer Pro X will automatically pick
up the changed version and replace the original image. This means you can just continue
editing the photo in the external program, and to see how this looks in context in your
Designer Pro document, just click "Ctrl + S" (or whatever the normal saving shortcut in
your photo editing software).

Note: Xara Designer Pro X always sends the original un-clipped whole photo to the
external editor. Any images that are enhanced (e.g. brightness altered) or clipped with
the photo clip, or have any live effects applied, will have these changes missing when
you edit them this way. However, when the edited image is returned, the clip and photo
attributes are re-applied to the edited image. For this reason, it's not recommended that
you alter the size or crop images in an external editor.

You can, of course, Undo any external edits you've applied by using the usual Designer
Pro Undo feature (it always stores a copy of the 'before' image). However when you save
and re-open the .xar file all Undo information is lost.

Editing images this way is a destructive edit. i.e. the image is permanently altered by the
external Photo Editing Tool, and the original cannot be recovered once the file has been
saved and closed.