Page 340 - Xara Designer Pro X17

340 Photo Handling

Photo Handling

Non-destructive photo editing

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

Photo handling in Designer Pro is very different to other graphics programs that you may
be used to.

In Xara Designer Pro X you can color, crop, copy, blend, enhance, clone, 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 .xar 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.

This is fundamentally different to the way most photo editing programs work (which are
destructive - i.e. they alter the actual pixels of the image).

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 Designer Pro X. 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

Photo Objects

In Designer Pro photos (or bitmaps) are just another type of object on the page. You can
drag and drop photos onto the page from your Windows file explorer, and then you can
resize, rotate, copy and move them around just like any other object. Importantly you can
adjust the transparency, even graduated transparency, feather edges and clip and cut
shapes out of photos with ease. The transparency feature lets you blend, merge or
create composite photos.
Where you might have to use layers in other photo tools, every object in Xara Designer
Pro X is on its own layer and, just as with any object on the page, you can move it
forward to be in front, or backwards to be behind other objects.