Now this reviewer has previously found that Xara Xtreme has 3 very strong characteristics. First, of all the vector drawing programs including Corel Draw, Freehand and Illustrator, Xara Xtreme is one of the easiest to use because many of its vector features like Bevel, Contour, Drop Shadow, Extrude, Fill, Polygon, Transparency and other tools use simple drag and drop operations to achieve their results. Second, Xara is able to handle mammoth files with tens of thousands of vectors and huge, 20MB++ bitmap images with unbelievable speed. Users should download the free trial version here and see for themselves - I can say I am manipulating 20-80MB files with ease; but until you have done it you won't appreciate the results. Third, Xara Xtreme has combined bitmap and vector operations in novel yet easy to use ways, so for photo composition and brochure layout - this is is the place to be. So this review, will try to convince graphic designers and photofinishers that there is great photo composition opportunity with
Xara Xtreme.

Photo Composition Tools

Here is an example of a poster design being developed for a Jazz Dance Group, Valentine's Stars. The idea is to suggest a French Canadian Vedette show-poster with a variety of different star motifs. I will fill each of the stars with a dancer's image. Creating, sizing and filling the stars is a cinch. The Main Star may have to be scaled up or thickened - but the star echoes a jazzy dancer with a beam light on her. It took less than 15 minutes to create this and 4 other "Vedette" designs. Yet I have used some nifty touches like the contour and drop-shadow on the Main Star, gaps for the Drop-in Text, and black outline for where the Show-image will drop into place as background.

The key is the confidence that I can change or recreate any element quickly. I am just about to set down a vignette text box using the Oval [just above the "1)" in the screenshot]. Note how the Properties bar controlling the Oval tool is setup just above the drawing area. This is typical of Xara Xtreme. Each time you choose a tool its properties are immediately placed along the top of the screen in the Properties bar. I go there first to get the exact setting I want for the tool and then use the drag and drop action to draw out the oval (position the Drop shadow or build up the Contour with some of Xara Xtreme's other tools). This workflow plus the speed of operations in Xara Xtreme means it is easy to try a lot of variations to get a design right.

In addition users can easily create templates for posters, web pages, brochure designs that become the point of departure for getting things done. And the new Xara Xtreme polishes up three areas of editing. The plugins have always been non-destructive, Xara calls them Life Effects and Adobe Photoshop calls them Smart Objects (Xara had them first). But that was of little use because setting up and then using the plugins was such a chore including a bumpy interface - no longer. All my plugins from Buzz Pro, Flaming Pear, Nik Effects, Topaz and others work like a charm in Xara Xtreme. The one drawback - the plugins, both Xara's own and 3rd party, take 10 to 50 seconds to work on huge bitmap images - depending on the bitmap original size, the plugin and how many are in the stack.

Second, the bitmap editing for brightness/contrast, saturation, blur and sharpness is now incorporated right into the Property bar rather than bringing up a separate dialog window for bitmap editing. This is faster and more convenient - and tied in with non-destructive Live Effects. Third, the vector operations of Combine, Duplicate, Group, and Join, are quick and easy to use to speed up drawing along with the Blend Tool and Create Brush commands. The only only thing that is missing is a set of perspective transforms. But those can be achieved using the new, easy to use Extrude tool. In fact that is the strength of Xara Xtreme, there is often more than one way to get things done quickly.

DTP and HTML in Xara Xtreme

Here is another example where speed and plugins make the difference. The image file used in the lower rectangle is a 131MB TIFF file. Moving and rotating that file under the Fill command is lightning fast (try that in Adobe or Corel). But also I have been able to apply Plugins to this monster file with waits of 10 to 50 seconds in Xara Xtreme. In contrast, with Photoshop, using the same image file and same Plugins the wait was 180-240 seconds. Also with Live Effects - all of the changes are non destructive. But of even greater utility, the vector+bitmap is treated as one - so the same plugin effects are applied to both Vector and Bitmap parts of the total image. Nice.

Especially in DTP brochures and menus which Xara Xtreme is good at doing. Because Xara Xtreme has auto-flow text blocks and the new feature of text-flowing around any shaped image (oval, camel vector drawing, the extruded Giant letter "K") doing brochures, facing pages, and simple DTP apps is like falling off a log. It is especially convenient to drag the text overflow pointer from one text block to another and see the overflow text disappear from one text block and appear instantly in the newly designated overflow text block.

And of course resizing, skewing, rotating and other transformations of text blocks is easy and par for the course with Xara Xtreme. You can even Bevel, Drop Shadow, and make Transparent a text block - or Extrude it when combined with an underlying shape (see the screenshot at the left for an Extruded text block).

Now all these "tricks with text blocks" may seem outlandish - and that is perfectly true so keep the idea in mind when you want your message to be outstanding. In short, look to Xara to provide opportunities to display a unique and distinct style - be it simple and classic or off-the wall and attention grabbing.

These same DTP features can also be applied with some new processes to quickly create HTML pages. In fact the same brochure files for PDF output can be easily redirected with menus enhanced using the Flash tweening and animation features. Users can also borrow from a library of HTML page templates as good starting points.

Again a basic 8-12 screen website can be put together in less than a day with these processes and tools. However, there is one downside to the method - the HTML generated by Xara Xtreme is pretty complex using lots of "busy" CSS. Busy CSS is where the web developer uses numerous CSS style= statements to make the page look very polished. But the downside is that just about everyline has some unique HTML and/or CSS applied. This can be very challenging to maintain, especially if many devlopers using other web tools may need to make changes to your site. Xara Web HTML is very powerful, but it also almost demands exclusive use of Xara for web pages created by it. The Screenshot below shows and example of the busy HTML+CSS of which I speak.

       What is meant by "busy Xara CSS styling"
The net result is that if you stay strictly with Xara Xtreme to do all your Web pages including updates and maintenance, then you are okay. However, the reality is that web pages can get extended and modified from several sources - a Contribute or Vignette or other Content Management System; by IT web developers using Eclipse, Dreamweaver or Visual Studio; or the summer intern forced to make a quick fix using Notepad or some simple HTML editor. Everyone of these development apps are going to find Xara Xtreme HTML ... just a bit extreme and not always intuitive for quick edits and fixes.

In sum, Xara Xtreme is strong and useful for a broad range of DTP and text+image processing tasks. So the rule of thumb might be Xara is not for a books, manuals and complex papers on the DTP side; and not for a website that is going to have several different editors/maintainers - otherwise lay on MacDuff and use Xara for text-oriented graphic designs.

Creative Juices

Xara Xtreme is rich in its Bitmap+Vector+Text graphic capabilities. I know when I am working with the program I will discover some novel ways of designing and laying out an idea or design or message. This method will be different from anything I might do in Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Corel Draw or most other graphic programs. The reason is two fold - first, Xara's powerful bitmap+vector operations lead to new ideas and photo compositions. Second, Xara's very fast speed and highly interactive interface lets me try more ideas tan most other programs.

I think of Xara Xtreme as being like Lightroom and Aperture - valuable all because they are orthogonal to the normal photo design workflow. In Image Composition and Message Design, Xara Xtreme is exactly that - fast, quick to use and able to generate novel and extremely effective designs. Xara Xtreme is where I come when I want to let creative ideas and juices really flow. And at $249, Xara has a price per innovative photo composition that this photofinisher finds very attractive.