Page 401 - Xara Web Designer Premium

The Photo Tools 401

Alternative Content Aware Scaling
When stretching photos there are two alternative ways to scale the image. The method of
just dragging the size arrows sometimes doesn't work so well with some image types.

However by holding the "Alt" key when dragging one of the side handles in the CONTENT-
AWARE PHOTO RESIZE TOOL (on page 397) performs a different intelligent scale using an
alternative algorithm.

Content Aware Scaling notes
• You can only compress an image to half its initial width or height
• If you save a document with a photo that has been prepared for Content Aware
resizing, then it saves the resizing information in the document. The advantage of this
is that you can later re-adjust the photo using the Content Aware feature. There is a
significant file size overhead of saving photos like this.

Panorama Stitching

Xara Web Designer Premium includes a tool that can automatically stitch
together up to 8 photographs into a single wide, high-resolution panorama.

Creating high-quality panoramas can be a very complex and technical process, often
requiring special equipment or lenses and accurately exposed and aligned photographs.
The panoramic stitching feature built into Xara Web Designer Premium requires none of
these, and can use an every-day digital camera so that anyone can create outstanding
quality panoramic images in a few minutes.

This tool features:
• Automatic estimation of the focal length to warp the images to reduce fisheye effects
• Automatic barrel, pin cushion and vignette adjustments
• Automatic exposure correction
• Automatic detection of shared overlap points and seamless blending of joins
• Automatic cropping of the final result.

To create a panorama you need to take a series of separate photos from a central
position. Ideally each photo would overlap the next by approximately 30%, although it will
work with more or less overlap.
The process of creating a panorama is very straightforward:

1. Import each of the photos. There is no need to try and position the overlaps
correctly
2. Select all the photos you want to stitch together, they don't have to be in order.
3. Click the PANORAMA button on the PHOTO TOOL fly-out bar.

It will start the process of stitching and continue as a background process. A popup
status window shows the progress through the various stages, although you can