Photo Edit Attributes

All edits performed using the Photo Tool, such as any altering of the brightness, contrast, color, blur or sharpen values, or even the more advanced levels adjustment, are all just stored on the photo as attributes. See the terminology section.

Just as you can alter the color of a shape or line without altering the underlying shape, so Photo Tool attributes alter the visible appearance of the photo without affecting the original image (this is called non-destructive editing). Another way of looking at this is that Xara just stores a list of edits applied to your photo, and you can change, remove or add new edits. You can always recover the original untouched photo, even after the brightness, resizing, even clipping or cropping.

Attributes can be copied and pasted between objects. Not only does this apply to traditional attributes such as line color and thickness, it also works with all the Photo Tool attributes including the Levels settings. So this means you can easily copy all the enhancements made on one photo to any other using the copy / paste attribute feature. For example to apply the same white balance adjustment (made using the levels control) to another photo, just copy the edited photo to the clipboard and then select the "Edit -> Paste attributes" menu on any image to which you want to apply the same corrections.

This also applies to some other attributes of the photo, such as line width and shadows, etc.; all these can be copied from one photo to another using the same technique.