Page 381 - Xara Web Designer Premium

Photo Handling 381

• Select "FILE" > "OPEN" and select a photo file
• Create a blank photo document by selecting "FILE" > "NEW" > "BLANK PHOTO"

Photo documents are characterized by the following behavior differences compared to
traditional Web Designer Premium documents:
• There is no visible white page. In fact the page dimensions are set automatically to
match the photo plus any other objects you've added.
• Photo documents have a 1 pixel grid by default and snap to grid is turned on. This
makes it easier to get pixel-accurate crop or clip regions.
• The Pasteboard (the area around the photo) is a darker color. This makes it easy to
distinguish at a glance between photo documents and drawing documents.
• The document zoom is set so that the photo fills the view and the PHOTO TOOL is
automatically selected as the current tool.
• Dropping additional photo files on top of an existing photo just adds a new photo to the
document instead of replacing the photo in its frame. And the view will zoom out so
you can see the whole image.
• Images are not resized to be 500 pixels on import as they are in normal documents,
but are imported at 1:1, so that at 100% zoom you're seeing the image at full size.
• The pixel smoothing options are altered. By default it selects the "Very high quality"
display mode, which is best for images scaled down or zoomed out. It also has pixel
smoothing turned off when zooming in, so you can see the pixels are very large zoom
factors.
• If you’ve opened a JPEG photo file as a photo document, when you save changes
your JPEG file will be overwritten. See Editing Photo Files below for details.

In all other respects Photo Documents behave like normal Xara Web Designer Premium
documents. You can use all the normal drawing and text tools as usual. If you want to
create a photo document of a given size, you can alter the "canvas" or page size by
selecting "UTILITIES" > "OPTIONS" and the "PAGE" tab and entering the required
dimensions.

In Photo Documents two extra controls become enabled. The PREVIOUS and NEXT button
will move onto the Previous or Next image in the folder from which this image was
opened. This will close the current image, so you may be prompted to save the file.

Editing Photo Files

You can use Xara Web Designer Premium to easily edit your JPEG photos and save
back the modified JPEG. And unlike with most photo editors, you can do this multiple
times without loss of quality, even though the JPEG format is a lossy format. That’s
becauseXara Web Designer Premium is able to save your edits in a lossless way, along
with the original photo. Here’s how it works.