Feature: Xara could be the best-in-field photocomposition tool
Motivation:Have you ever worked at a PhotoComp table and wished for more? Xara has announced Xara Xtreme and has done 4 things to make this the photocomposition tool of choice. Now lets be explicit on what is meant by photo composition. Photocomposition/ Photo-finishing is not about photo-editing which is the domain of powerhouse tools like Adobe Photoshop and Fireworks or Corel PaintShop Pro and Painter. Photocomposition takes an edited photo and places it in an overall composition like a front cover of a magazine or a collage or the work-ups for a product package or the design of a stamp.

Most of the images used in a photocomp have already been edited and finished - you can make both bitmap and vector corrections but the bulk of the work is done outside of Xara Xtreme, especially for bitmap images. On the vector side, Xara certainly holds its own until you start to do complex transformations or merging of vector objects, then Corel Draw or Illustrator are the primary tools of choice.

So it sounds like Xara is neither fish nor fowl - not top of the line vector drawing tool though quite good and not dominant in bitmaps either. But what Xara Xtreme brings to the table are four essential ingredients.

First, there is blazing speed of operations - even with huge bitmap files of 20-50MB or complex vector drawing with thousands of objects and elements Xara Xtreme has improved its already fast speed of operation. It really helps to have a fast graphics engine as in Xara because then users can try different approaches a lot faster and more flexibly. Planned trial and error which i at the In fact that is the second strength of Xara Xtreme.

Second the many operations are performed live - these Live Dynamics mean that trial and error is minimized for such operations as Bevel, Blend, Contour, Drop Shadow, Fill, Live Effects, Mould, Transparency and so forth. And Xara is smart. If you point at an object with the a tool the first click selects that object then the second click starts to change the properties of the object according to what tool you are using - this is the Live Dynamics by which users immediately see what the Mould, Drop Shadow, Transparency and other tools are going to do. Let me give a few specific examples to illustrate the point.

Drop Shadow - The screenshot at the left shows the effects of the drop shadow tool in action. By just sliding the mouse in a due South direction I have moved the drop shadow into a new position to represent a new external light position of top right. This required no dialog - simply dragging my mouse around brought equivalent and immediate shifts in the position of the drop shadow. So I knew by trying a few movements the exact new positioning of the drop shadow. No trial and error setting dialog forms and then triggering the drop shadow as in other programs like Canvas and Illustrator and doing this 3-5 times until you get the precise results desired. In short, Live Dynamics is a wonderful time saver and as we shall see it permeates Xara Extreme's interface.

Transparency - This is one of the devilish stylings to control and get exactly right in photo finishing. For example, Xara Xtreme has 220 different settings among the shape, type and tiling properties available. S being able to quickly drag and drop and thus tryout different transparency settings is a real boon to designers.

Well just check the screenshot at the left. The arrow line with the blue tip is the transparency control. Swing it right or left and the transparency immediately shifts accordingly (and with big 4-6MB bitmap images just as fast as the .4MB image here - trust me on this). Move the arrow in and out and the transparency moves in and out as well. Want to move the starting point for the transparency ? Just move the base of the control arrow (opposite end from the blue tip) and the base line moves too. Or just start again by dragging and dropping anywhere in the image. Huge time saver.

Bevel - Again Xara provides a 60 different property settings for the Bevel control including 15 different edge types. So here too being able to quickly try out the different settings is quite useful to designers.

From the screenshot, users have two drag and drop controls. The red double-arrows control the size of the bevel edge. Grab or click on any one of the arrows and drag it in or out - watch as the bevel edge increases or decreases in size accordingly. Likewise, the center white arrow with the blue square tip, control the direction of the incident lighting. Swing that arrow tip around and the incident light follows so you can easily highlight any bevel edge. This automation allows a designer to check out the different ruffle, rounded, point, and other bevel edge designs very quickly to see which works best. Again, very handy.

Fill tool - I would be remiss if I did not mention the Fill tool in Xara and all the options it offers. Xara has flat plus 7-8 gradient or fractal fills. But the real attraction for photo-finishers is the ability to do bitmap fills. Just drag and drop an image from the Fill gallery (you can add your own images to the Fill gallery) onto any object on the screen. The screenshot at the left shows a flying skier from the closing ceremonies at the Torino Winter Olympics just dragged and dropped on the 4-star object. But what is equally important is the two arrows with blue tips. By dragging on these arrows one can rotate, shrink/expand and easily manipulate the positioning and size of the fills. And with the dropdown choices of single tile, repeating tile, and inverted repeating tile - photo-finishers have a rich set of options for polishing their bitmap images inside their vector containers. As can be seen from the screenshot, dropshadow, bevel and all the vector operations can be performed on a bitmap fill object. This is the crowning photo-finishing touch for Xara Xtreme.

In sum, given already the blazing speed of operation of Xara even when using 10-30MB fill files, Live Dynamics just adds to the overall speed getting radical photo-finishing done in Xara Xtreme.

Third, Xara has strong consistency of operations - one of the most reassuring aspect of using Xara Xtreme is the confidence that the same operations that work for vector objects, also apply to text and bitmap objects as well. The screenshot to the left shows this consistency in the case of some lettering applied to one of the Closing Ceremonies Cards I created for my flickr.com gallery. I have applied a drop shadow and a bevel fill t the lettering. But it could have been a bitmap fill or contouring applied to the text just as easily. There are some restrictions on operations. Basically one can only apply either a Mould, a Contour, or a Bevel to an object not two or more of these operations at the same time. But after that constraint, the number and combination of operations are the same for all objects - vectors, bitmaps, and text. Net result - again, work gets done faster in Xara Xtreme because once you know how an operation works for text you also know how it will work for vector and bitmap objects. Very nice.

Fourth, Live Effects adds Adobe plugins to Xara's repertoire - Adobe plugins provide a wide range of filters and effects that run the gamut from 3D projections -> Right Hemisphere through natural painting -> Virtual Painter to dramatic tilings -> Terrazzo. The following screen shot at the left shows the use of the Virtual Painter 4 plugin with with some Xara Xtreme text objects which have been beveled and drop shadowed with an image. Notice the original text design below the Silk Screen subtitle in the screen shot.

What this means is that Adobe plugins and heir effects can be applied to any Xara object - text, bitmap or vector. This is very nice because it means that users can apply a whole stack of plugin effects to any object in a Xara image. The only fly in the ointment - the pulldown with list of effects applied has a bug - sometimes it shows all the effects applied; other times you have to delete the top effect to get at the underlying effect to change or delete it. Live Effects screams out for a mechanism like Photoshop CS's Filter Gallery with effect layers that can easily be added, deleted, changed in order of application, etc. But having the full power of just about any plugin be applied to vector as well bitmap images - that is very nice indeed.

Summary

So these are some of the key features that makes Xara Xtreme a must for photo finishers. And we have not mentioned yet such features as high quality PDF export, Bitmap tracing to vector images, and animation creation. But Xara screams for two major improvements. The Bitmap Photo Editor is just okay - with all the rapid development of bitmap/graphic libraries and programs, Photo editor could use some beefing up the arena of masking, color corrections, and image transformations. Second and perhaps even more important, it would be nice to have a better Layer dialog that keeps track of all the bitmap, vector, group, and text objects in an image so that for complex renderings one could more quickly navigate to and operate on the different objects.

However, the bottom line is that Xara Xtreme offers so many unique features (Live Dynamics, Live Effects, ultra-fast rendering), cumulative ease and speed of operation, and finally great value (a $100 price and ability to run in Windows and Linux) are so good that photo-finishers should add this to their toolkit right away.