Photo display quality

Xara can display photos in one of five useful quality levels. The top two settings smooth the screen pixels so avoiding visible pixels or rough sections along the edges (anti-aliasing). Change the quality level using the Quality entry in the Window menu.

Very High Quality (default)	Displays images using bicubic sampling. This displays images at the best quality, particularly for large hi-res images that are scaled down or zoomed out a lot.
High Quality	Anti-aliasing on, but images are rendered faster and at lower quality.
Full Color	No anti-aliasing, thus showing individual pixels. This can be useful when you're zoomed in and you need to clearly see the separate image pixels. The downside is that images generally look poor when reduced or enlarged, resulting in clearly visible pixelation and jagged "staircase" edges, especially if you rotate the image.
Outline with blend steps	Is particularly useful for seeing outlines of the various steps of a blend. Blends are not supported but imported .xar files could contain blends.
Outline	Only object outlines are shown. This is useful for finding and selecting objects that are difficult to see due to other objects in front of or behind them.

There is an additional control that allows you to stop all image smoothing or anti-aliasing on images that are scaled up or zoomed in. In other words, instead of a smoothed image, you see all the pixels when zoomed in. Open the Bitmap Gallery and right click on the image and select "properties". In the dialog un-check the "Smooth when scaled up" option. Now, no matter what viewing quality you select the image (and all copies) will always show the un-smoothed pixels when enlarged or zoomed in.

Note: If you use the Photo Tool sharpen / blur control then images have to be displayed at maximum quality. So if you think the viewing quality has stopped working, it's almost certainly because you have sharpened or blurred the image with the Photo Tool.