Advanced photo work
Xara Xtreme photo and bitmap handling is faster and more powerful than you'll find in other graphics programs. As a result many people
use Xara Xtreme as their primary, general purpose image composition tool.
Almost anything you can do to vector shapes you can do to bitmaps. You can edit the shape, alter the transparency, including graduated transparency, use bitmaps as fills on any shape, feather the edges and a lot more all in real-time. Xara Xtreme supports all the common bitmap formats. Its high quality rendering makes it an ideal web graphics tool (all graphics on xara.com are created with Xara Xtreme)
Add to this the ability to handle multi-layer 32-bit alpha channel (semi-transparent) bitmaps and Xara Xtreme is a supreme image composition tool.
Xara Xtreme embeds the master JPEG in the Xara file, resulting in huge file size savings. A 5 Megapixel JPEG photo from a digital camera would expand to be typically 20Mbytes in other graphics programs. Use two or three such photos, or make copies to edit and you've now got a file that might easily be 60Mbytes large. The Xara Xtreme file will be ten times smaller, and correspondingly faster.
The Xara Picture Editor is a new tool integrated into Xara Xtreme. Neither a painting program or pixel editor it does provide the most common photo editing features such as cropping, rotating, enhancing, sharpening, etc with a fast, interactive, live-preview of all edits. This is an expandable modular program in its own right and will continue to grow in capabilities.
Xara Xtreme includes a fast bitmap tracer to help convert bitmaps to vector shapes. Finally Xara Xtreme and the Xara Picture Editor support third party plug-ins to expand the range of available effects.
See the demo movie (right click and select Save Target As) to see it in action and why Xara Xtreme is better than any other drawing program at handling high-resolution photographs.
(21Mbyte download. Broadband connection recommended)