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 Xara is very different to other graphics programs that you may be used to.

In Xara 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. 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