Xara Photo & Graphic Designer


Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is an image editing program incorporating photo editing and vector illustration tools created by British software company Xara. Xara Xtreme LX was an early open source version for Linux.
The Windows version was previously sold under the names Xara Studio, Xara X and Xara Xtreme, and traces its origin in the late 1980s to a title called ArtWorks for the Acorn Archimedes line of computers using RISC OS. There is a pro version called Xara Designer Pro.
The current commercial version of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer runs only on Windows, although Xara documents can be edited in a web browser on any platform using the Xara Cloud service. Versions up to 4.x can be run on Linux using Wine.

History

VersionDescriptionRelease date
Xara Xcommercial version2000
Xara X¹commercial version2004
Xara Xtremecommercial version with commercial plugins2005
Xara Xtreme XScommercial version, a light version of Xara Xtreme without plugins or bevel/shadow/outline tools2006
Xara Xtreme PROcommercial version with enhanced functions2006
Xara Xtreme for Linuxopen source version2006
Xara Xtreme,
Xara Xtreme PRO 3.2
improved typography May 2007
Xara Xtreme,
Xara Xtreme PRO 4.0
April 2008
Xara Xtreme,
Xara Xtreme PRO 5.0
June 2009
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6,
Xara Designer Pro 6
GUI redesign and tool updates and enhancementsJune 2010
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 7,
Xara Designer Pro 7
May 2011
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 2013,
Xara Designer Pro X
May 2012
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 May 2013
Xara Designer Pro X9combines photo, graphics, page layout, and web designJuly 2013
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 10,
Designer Pro X10
July 2014
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 11 June 2015
Xara Designer Pro 11 July 2015
Xara Photo & Graphic Designer with Update Service May 2016
Xara Designer Pro X with Update Service July 2016
Most recent Update Service update October 2018

Features

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is known for its usability and fast renderer. It provides a fully anti-aliased display, advanced gradient fill, and transparency tools.
Among vector editors, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is considered to be fairly easy to learn, with similarities to CorelDRAW and Inkscape in terms of interface. Alongside the vector illustration tools, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer also includes an integrated photo tool offering manual and automatic photo enhance, cropping, adjustment of brightness levels, red-eye fix, 'magic' erase, photo healing, color and background erase, panoramas and content aware resizing. Designer Pro includes a wider range of tools for other design tasks including the creation of web pages and websites, and text and page layout tools for DTP with the aim of providing a single solution for all graphic and web design tasks.