Page 352 - Xara Web Designer Premium

352 Photo Handling

Photo Handling

Introduction

Photos are an integral part of almost all creative work nowadays, from websites, to flyers,
brochures, DTP work and more.

Photo handling in Xara Web Designer Premium is different than you may be used to with
other graphics programs.

In Xara Web Designer Premium you can color, crop, copy, blend, mask, feather (fade the
edges of) photos as much as you like. The object oriented, non-destructive nature of the
photo handling means that, for example, when you resize a photo, you are not really
altering the original photo, but just resizing a visual copy. The original imported image is
saved in the .web file, so that you can later edit, and resize again, or apply any of the
Photo Tool editing options, with no loss of quality. You can even un-crop cropped
photos.

The photo handling is astonishingly fast. You can open a 50 Megapixel photo, and
perform any of the enhance operations, and rotate the full resolution image in real-time.

This chapter covers the basic principles of manipulating photos and bitmap images in
Xara Web Designer Premium. The operation of the Photo Tool is covered in the separate
Photo Tool chapter.
*Benchmarks based on photo compositions created with multiple hi-res JPG digital photos

High resolution images

High resolution images of the kind used by Apple's Retina displays can be
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automatically created by Web Designer Premium.
In order to take advantage of Retina type screens it is normally necessary to create all
your web photos and graphics at twice the normal resolution of 96 dpi - that is twice as
many pixels per inch both vertically and horizontally which is four times as many pixels
per square inch. The downside of this is that your files are now up to four times as large,
thus dramatically slowing down your website for all your visitors. For those visitors to
your website that do not have high-resolution screens this is an unacceptable penalty.
Web Designer Premium solves this problem by both automatically creating the high-
resolution photos and web graphics for you and also being smart enough to load the
correct resolution graphics for the browser being used. Retina images are also used in
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FIT TO WIDTH websites when scaling your website above its normal size.