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Xara Xtreme 4 Pro Upgrade Soft ware -
Xara has announced a new release of Xara Xtreme, the World's fastest graphics program.
World's Fastest Graphics Program:
Up to 10 times faster vector rendering than other graphics software*
The World's fastest photo rendering, now with real-time bicubic image display.
Real-time enhance, scale and rotation of huge multi--megapixel photos.
And Xtreme Pro now supports multi-core processors, making the World's fastest graphics software even faster.
* Benchmarked against Illustrator CS3
New in Version 4: The world's fastest, slickest, and highest quality vector 3D extrude tool.
• Simply drag on the face to rotate in 3D
• Drag on the side to adjust extrude depth
• Dozens of bevel styles - with real-time adjust
• 3 colored lights - with on-page dragging
Revolutionary photo handling with a new integrated, ultra-fast, non-destructive photo tool - 10 times faster than other photo tools, 10 times smaller files.
A complete new 'website creation' feature - build complete multi-page websites, with mouse-over and easy pop-up effects. The world's most advanced WYSIWYG web page layout.
Unbeatably fast and flexible text handling with top quality rendering, now offering real-time 'liquid' text flow around shapes. Plus a new font menu including Live Preview, for instant preview of fonts on the page.
Xtreme offers support for a huge range of file formats, making it easy to exchange your work with other users and programs. This includes common bitmap types (eg GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, PSD, and RAW photos) and key vector types (eg PDF and AI/EPS, and EMF/WMF). For text Xara Xtreme supports RTF (Rich Text Format).
Xara Xtreme has full support for importing and exporting Adobe Photoshop® PSD files including layer support.
Xara Xtreme offers industry leading export of super-clean, very compact PDF files (including support for graduated color fills and flat / graduated transparency). Combined with the PDF import feature, this provides another way to interchange files.
Xara Xtreme Pro offers the ability to produce CMYK color separations. This includes on-screen preview of CMYK and spot color plates, PANTONE® color support, spot colors, on-screen printer gamut preview and a lot more.
Xara Xtreme Pro supports both XPS import and export. This is an entirely new ‘page description’ file format invented by Microsoft that's vector based, and so is ideal as a resolution-independent portable Sample format.
Xara Xtreme V4 includes a complete new 'website creation' feature - build complete multi-page websites, with the world most advanced WYSIWYG page layout controls.
Xara Xtreme offers the easiest way to create really efficient Flash animations.
Xara Xtreme has the world's most sophisticated, highest performance vector rendering engine. Quite simply this makes it the fastest graphics software to be found.
Xtreme Pro version 4 supports multi-core processors, giving an average 40% speed improvement for large or zoomed in graphics.
Version 4 includes a new photo rendering engine, also the world's fastest - and with real-time bi-cubic sampling it also offers new higher quality.
Xara Xtreme's Direct Action Tools allow you to create effects such as transparency, shadows, bevels or gradient fills in an interactive, fast and intuitive way. No distracting dialogs - simply drag on the object!
Many tasks in Xara Xtreme benefit from being able to use the drag and drop principle, which is the most intuitive way of working and a great time saver. It also supports drag and drop import of files, such as photos.
Instead of dragging outlines when you move, rotate or resize objects, Xtreme offers solid live object manipulation. Only Xtreme is fast enough to do this on complex vector graphics.
Being able to change what you have done is vital in a graphics package. Xara Xtreme allows unlimited undo, making experimentation easy.
The Zoom tool allows magnification up to 25,000%, perfect for detailed work. And it's super-fast and resolution independent too.
If this image was created in Photoshop with the same detail, the file would be 2000 x 3000 inches, take hundreds of megabytes of memory and file space. As a vector design it takes just 180Kbytes!
Xara introduced the world's first vector anti-aliasing to bring maximum screen quality.
With version 4 we introduce higher quality anti-aliasing, along with real-time super-fast bicubic photo handling.
Xara Xtreme photo handling beats other graphics programs on many fronts: It's much, much faster, produces files that can be 10x or more smaller.
Being entirely object oriented means completely non-destructive photo editing, and uses a fraction of the RAM required by other products. It can handle multiple very high resolution images with ease, even on a modest Computer. It makes the perfect photo composition tool.
Xara Xtreme's unique way of handling and storing photos (lossless vector-based photo editing, combined with embedding the original JPEG) means that files containing photos can be anywhere from 3 to 100 times smaller than with other programs.
Xara Xtreme offers unique non-destructive editing of photos - that means you can edit your photo as many times as you like without the loss of quality that is normal in other photo programs.
V4 of Xara Xtreme includes a revolutionary integrated, ultra-fast, non-destructive photo editing tool. It offers real-time photo enhance (brightness levels, sharpen, blur etc) plus real-time scaling and rotation even on 50 Megapixel images. Combine this with vector masking, layer blending, feathering - all in the non-destructive, memory efficient way - and you have something that no other photo tool can provide.
Perhaps the easiest to use panorama maker. Drop a series of photos on the page, click one button and you'll get a perfect, seamless joined panoramic image.
Xara Xtreme’s powerful bitmap tracer can convert your bitmaps – typically photos, line-art or logos – into editable vector shapes.
Xara Xtreme supports Adobe Photoshop® plug-ins. There's already a huge range of such plug-ins available, both free and commercial, for creating a variety of effects that would take a lifetime to explore.
In addition the Live Effects tool, the most advanced of any available, enables you to apply these plug-ins to photos and vector shapes for a range of amazing visual effects.
Version 4 includes more than 35 new built-in Live Effects.
The world's fastest, slickest, and highest quality vector 3D extrude tool.
Take any shape, and just drag on the face to create a beautifully lit and shaded 3D version. Drag on the sides to extend the extrude depth. It couldn't be easier.
Xara Xtreme is primarily a vector graphics application and includes a set of really easy vector line and shape editing tools.
The Freehand tool offers live smoothing after you've drawn your line, along with the ability to edit any outlines.
Xara was the first vector application to introduce transparency, and continues to this day to offer the easiest, most advanced transparency control of any software. With click-drag simplicity you can create graduated blends to any objects, photos, text, and vector shape.
Blend Tool
The blend tool tweens or blends from one shape to another. It's ultra-fast, click-drag simple, works with vector shapes, text and photos.
Soft Vectors
Xara was the first application to offer vector feathering, vector soft shadows. It still has the most advanced and enables high quality realistic images to be created more quickly and easily than on any other software.
Feathering, combined with transparency provides great photo compositing features, as well as great vector shading.
Live Effects
Live Effects are plug-in effects that be applied to any object, including vector drawings - they are called Live Effects because the vector object remains editable even after applying the effect. Most modern Photoshop plug-ins work as Live Effects.
Shadows, Bevels, & Contours
Xara Xtreme offers several powerful tools that allow you to add realistic effects with a single click. Apply, remove, and modify semi-transparent (or 'soft') shadows to any object with the Shadow tool. Use the Bevel tool to add bevels to any object, giving them the realistic appearance of depth. And add contours around objects with the Contour tool. All resolution independent (don't lose quality when you scale them)!
Features:
General
Speed
Xara Xtreme has the world's most sophisticated, highest performance vector rendering engine. For the user this speed means less wait, and a more satisfying working environment. It also means more productivity and the ability to create more complex drawings, in less time.
Many graphics packages will keep you waiting a few seconds while objects are drawn on the screen. In a complex Sample that can mean you waste a significant amount of time. With Xara Xtreme, when you create an image it appears instantly on the screen.
Speed isn't just restricted to creating and moving objects though - any time you manipulate an object by using one of the Direct Action Tools or the Color Editor for example, any changes you make also appear instantly. This constant live-preview of all actions contrasts dramatically with other programs where you typically have a 'try it - wait - try it again until you get it right' approach.
Import and Export
Xara Xtreme is used by many different types of customer in a spectacular range of uses - for drawings, text and photos, for print and the web - so we understand how important it is to offer compatibility with other products and users. Xtreme offers support for a very large range of file formats, making it easy to exchange your work with other users and programs.
Xara Xtreme supports all the common graphics formats, including bitmap types like GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF and PSD, and the import of photos as RAW or the new Photo HD (Xtreme Pro only). Plus it supports the key vector types like PDF and AI (Adobe Illustrator)/EPS, EMF (extended metafile) and WMF (Windows metafile), SVG (export only);early versions of CorelDRAW CDR and CMX and many others that are not so well known.
For text Xara Xtreme supports RTF (Rich Text Format). You can import and export text in RTF format so it includes style information such as font, font size, color, margins, special and foreign characters (Unicode supported).
If you're working on the web, then Xara Xtreme also offers integration with Adobe's Dreamweaver and can export Flash, Animated GIF and HTML pages.
Plus there's clipboard compatibility with the common Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Word.
PSD Support
Xara Xtreme offers full support for importing and exporting Adobe Photoshop® PSD files including layer support (Xtreme layers are exported as PSD layers and PSD layers are imported as Xtreme layers), including alpha channel and (in Xtreme Pro only) 16-bit color and CMYK layer conversion.
Adobe Photoshop® is the industry standard bitmap editing solution, and for many professionals Xtreme is their standard vector graphics tool. Now the two are more closely integrated than ever.
PDF Support
Xara pioneered vector transparency and now that PDF version 1.5 supports basic transparency we've created a PDF export tool allowing super-clean, very compact PDF files to be created. This includes support for graduated color fills and support for flat transparency and graduated transparency. And when you export as PDF everything remains pixel perfect, resolution-independent vector graphics*.
The PDF exporter has also been designed to allow the files to be opened by Adobe Illustrator®, so providing significantly improved Illustrator compatibility. For the first time vector artwork including graduated color and transparency can be imported cleanly into Illustrator versions 9 onwards.
Xara Xtreme also offers reliable PDF import.
*PDF can only support the basic Xara graduated fill and transparency types of flat, linear and radial. Other graduated types are automatically rasterized (flattened) to any required resolution on export.
Direct Action Tools
Xara Xtreme's Direct Action Tools allow you to create effects such as transparency, bevels or gradient fills by selecting the tool then dragging over the image itself to affect the required change. For example you can drag across an object to apply a graduated color (in the fill tool) or transparency (in the transparency tool), or drag on a shadow to position it (in the shadow tool), or drag on an object to rotate it in 3D (in the 3D extrude tool).
Traditionally, to apply these sort of effects you would need to enter values in a dialog box and they are transferred to the drawing. With Xara Xtreme's Direct Action Tools, you can apply all these effects on the object itself - without having to enter any numbers in a dialog box! And the changes take place instantly - it's as close to using your hands as you will get with a graphics package.
This is a BIG advantage, because it not only saves time, but also keeps the creative work and the image itself at the center of your focus. It makes experimenting with effects and settings much easier too.
Direct Action Tools include the Bevel, Shadow, Transparency, Fill, Contour, 3D Extrude and Blend tools.
Drag and Drop
Many tasks in Xara Xtreme benefit from being able to use the drag and drop principle, which is more intuitive and a great time saver.
For example, when changing the color of an object, you can just drag a color from the Color Line and drop it onto the object, or its outline. And with color gradients, you can drop colors along the gradient path and make multi-color fills.
Drag and drop also comes into play when using the galleries. You can place any gallery item on a page simply by drag and drop.
Xtreme also supports drag and drop import of files, such as photos.
Solid Object Dragging
Xara Xtreme offers one of the world's first live solid dragging, scaling and rotating of objects, for the ultimate in WYSIWYG editing. That means that as you reposition, resize or rotate an object the whole object moves, rather than just an outline, making it far easier to judge the effect of your edits in real time.
Undo / Redo
Being able to change what you have done is vital in a graphics package. Xara Xtreme allows you to easily Undo your most recent changes to a Sample.
Undo allows you to get rid of changes which you've applied by mistake, those which went wrong or ones which you simply don't like the look of. Undo is a very powerful tool when combined with Redo because it gives you the freedom to experiment with a drawing, secure in the knowledge that you can always undo any changes or if you eventually decide you do actually like the changes, to redo them again.
Some graphics packages only let you undo a limited amount of actions, but Xara Xtreme has an unlimited undo so it remembers everything you've done.
Zoom
The Zoom Tool allows you to alter the magnification of the current Sample, giving you a closer, or more distant view.
Using the Zoom Tool you can zoom to the whole page, so you see the complete Sample, you can zoom to the drawing, which magnifies just the drawn image as opposed to the whole page, or you can select an object and then zoom to that selection.
Another method is to zoom to a particular area by clicking and dragging the tool over the area.
The Xara Xtreme Zoom Tool is capable of zooming in to 25,601% - that's over 25,000 dpi (dots per inch).
Anti-Aliasing
Xara introduced the world's first vector anti-aliasing to bring maximum screen quality. It still pioneers with the fastest, highest quality anti-aliasing available form any drawing program.
Anti-aliasing improves the quality of on-screen images by smoothing the edges of objects. It does this by blending the edges with the background. This has the effect of smoothing lines and edges and of appearing to improve the resolution of the display. Anti-aliasing is particularly useful for web graphics.
When you do use anti-aliasing in Xara Xtreme, it works in real-time so you can see the effect straight away. You can use anti-aliasing when working with vector images and bitmap images.
Color support
Xara Xtreme has a comprehensive color system which enables you to alter the colors of objects directly or create your own colors, with names, which you can apply to multiple objects.
With Xara Xtreme unique Linked Colors feature, it is very easy to create a drawing containing many shades of a color and with one alteration, immediately change the color of the whole picture. Simply pick a new master theme color and all linked shades and tones adjust automatically.
You can work in CMYK, RGB, HSV, greyscale or Hexadecimal RGB web color mode.
There is also a color sampler which, like an eye-dropper, you can use to select the color of any object on the screen, even in other applications, and easily apply it to other objects. Or just drag and drop colors from the color line onto an object to change its colors.
The fill tool allows you to quickly and easily apply color graduations to any object, simply be clicking and dragging across the object, so like many features in Xara Xtreme, color editing is interactive and immediate.
Text handling
The Text Tool allows you to enter as many lines of text as you want, at any place in your Sample. And Xara Xtreme's industry leading screen rendering makes it easier to read text on screen, especially at small sizes or rotated.
You can enter your text at any angle and you can also set your text along a path - so you could draw a line or curve and make the text follow it, curves and all. Additionally, just like any drawn object in Xara Xtreme, you can grab hold of the corners of the text object and resize it on the page, and apply any of the effects, such as transparency, fills, molds and so on - and yet the text remains editable.
Like any word processing program, you have full control over the text style - you can change the font, size, color and justification of the text, alter the line spacing and kerning, and have bold, italic, superscript or subscript. Recent improvements to the text tool provide high-end DTP-like features, such as margin and tab control (left, center, right and decimal tabs), 1st line indent or outdent control to provide support for hanging indents such as numbered or bulleted lists, word and character count of text stories.
Xtreme supports three types of text object: Simple text, text columns and text areas. You can have linked flowing text stories across text areas and columns, in any order or direction. And it also supports multi-page documents. New in V4 is automated text flow around objects. This brings Xara Xtreme well into the Desk Top Publishing arena. Along with the lightning fast screen update, Xtreme is now perfect for producing documents such as brochures and flyers.
Multi-page documents
Xara Xtreme includes support for multiple page documents, which makes Xtreme a great option for producing leaflets, newsletters and more. Pages can be single or double page spreads (left and right sides) and are arranged vertically, like a word processor or DTP program.
Xtreme's ultra-fast rendering means you can scroll through pages quickly and smoothly, even on large documents.
Multi-page documents can also be used in combination with the HTML feature to create multi-page websites.
Printing
Xara Xtreme provides a wide variety of options for printing your documents. For example, you can choose paper orientation, how to fit images on the paper (including 'best fit' and 'automatic fit'), which layers to print and so on. You can display print borders and there's also a useful 'simulate print colors' option to give you guidance on how your printed colors might look (compared to on screen colors).
Xara Xtreme also supports PDF and PostScript output.
The Clipart Gallery
Xara Xtreme includes a clipart gallery full of useful clipart, photos, ready-made templates (such as cards, photo album layouts, stationery etc) and inspiring example illustrations, offering more than 3000 images in total.
The example illustrations include inspirational drawings and photo work offered by existing owners of Xara Xtreme to demonstrate techniques and possibilities and the sheer variety of styles achievable. The gallery is updated regularly and new images can be downloaded directly to the gallery at any time.
Xara Xtreme also includes a font and texture fill gallery including 250 TrueType and PostScript fonts and 500 textures.
Templates
Templates include greetings cards for every occasion, business stationery of every sort (letterheads, business cards etc), photo frames, a large selection of photo album layouts, newsletters and newspapers, calendars and many more categories. If you have the Xtreme trial, can see a small selection of the total set in the clipart gallery (click Get Clipart to Soft ware them).
Simply enter your own text and/or drop in your own photo (enhanced in the integrated photo tool if necessary) and you can have professional looking results in minutes. It’s even easy to change the colors, using Xara Xtreme’s unique Color Linking feature (just change the master theme color and all linked shades and tones adjust automatically). All templates are designed using Linked Colors.
Name Gallery
The unique and powerful Name Gallery sees an end to the days when graphic designers had to put each object within their image on a separate layer, just so they could easily select them when they wanted to make an alteration.
The Xara Xtreme Name Gallery automatically lists all fonts, bitmaps, colors and Named Objects in a Sample - and you can name any object or group of objects within a Sample. It means you are able to see at a glance all the objects you have in a Sample and you can then use the Name Gallery to select objects you want just by clicking on their name in the list.
You can also edit objects at group level - for example, you could change all the occurrences of Times New Roman within a Sample and apply a shadow to each instance. This saves valuable time because in the past each item would have to be edited individually.
When naming grouped objects, you can then make group alterations, or export them all in a particular way.
Shortcut Key Configuration:
Users can configure the Xara Xtreme Pro key shortcuts and save / load custom configurations (for example to achieve compatability with another program).
Color Separation Support:
Xara Xtreme Pro offers the ability to produce CMYK color separations. This includes on-screen preview of CMYK and spot color plates, PANTONE® color support, spot colors, on-screen printer gamut preview and a lot more. Xtreme is now able to produce professional CMYK print results either via PDF/X support or via direct four color and spot-color separation via the print dialog.
Both options include crop and printer's marks. The direct separations printing includes control over print screening and screen types, emulsion side down and other advanced settings.
Pantone Color Support:
Xara Xtreme Pro includes PANTONE® color libraries for use as both spot color and PANTONE® process color equivalents.
PDF/X export:
PDF has become the industry standard way of transferring documents of all types from one person to another, ensuring exact WYSIWYG fidelity.
Xara Xtreme Pro offers class-leading PDF support including these features: • Choice of PDF version from version 1.3 through to version 1.6, as well as PDF/X-1a 2001, x-1a 2003, X3-2002, and X-3 2003 standards.
• Full support for vector transparency (PDF version 1.4 or later)
• Font embedding and font subsetting options
• Export any selected page range
• Optional down-sampling of large bitmaps (reduces the size of PDFs for designs containing large photos)
• Full control over bitmap embedding options and compression (native, Flate, JPEG)
• Full control over bitmap transparency flattening, bitmap effect rasterization, to any required resolution and compression type
• Embedding of native JPG files for lossless JPEG transfer
• Support for Adobe Reader Layers. For PDF 1.5 and above you can now output and control Xtreme's layer visibility in Adobe Reader
• File embedding. You can embed .xar files into your PDF and launch them from Adobe Reader
• Full pre-press PDF/X support including: • Embedding page crop and printer's marks
• ICC color profiles, including all the common paper stock options (e.g. US Web coated, ISO, etc)
• Embedding of custom ICC profiles
• Sample encryption, with full control over Sample permissions: • Password protect any PDF file, with 40 or 128-bit encryption
• Control over exact permissions, e.g. allow / disallow printing or commenting or text copying or extraction.
• Spot color support
Thankfully for those that do not require such full control over PDF features, Xtreme Pro provides a simple choice of 4 typical PDF profiles for the novice user: Draft, Email, High Quality and Commercial Printing, as well as the option for custom settings.
XPS Support:
Xara Xtreme Pro supports both XPS import and export.
XPS is an entirely new ‘page description’ file format invented by Microsoft. The benefit of XPS format is that it’s vector based, and so is ideal as a resolution-independent portable Sample format. Fonts are embedded into the Sample and so you are assured of a very high quality WYSIWYG Sample. If you’re using Windows Win 7 you can view and print these Sample directly. If you’re using older versions of Windows you can obtain a free XPS Viewer Soft ware from the Microsoft web site to provide viewing and printing of these files.
It should be noted that the Xara XPS export does not use the Microsoft standard XPS print system, but writes XPS files directly which ensures a far higher fidelity, and far smaller XPS files.
XPS supports advanced vector features such as transparency, CMYK colors and embedded fonts.
Multi-core Processors:
Xara Xtreme has always had by far the highest performing graphics rendering engine, up to ten times faster than Adobe Illustrator. Now with new support for multi-core processors in Xara Xtreme Pro it's even faster! Tests show approximate speed gains of 40% for a dual core processor with large screen images, and greater gains with more cores. Large full screen photos can render up to 75% faster on a dual core processor.
Photo:
Photo Handling Overview
Xara Xtreme photo and bitmap handling is faster and more powerful than you'll find in other graphics programs. Xara Xtreme uses compression techniques that means that Xara files including photos can be up to ten times smaller than equivalent images in other drawing programs, with enormous benefits for speed and usability. Plus Xara's unique non-destructive editing maintains the high quality of your original photo, however many times you edit it, and gives you the ability to undo any edits you've made to your photo, even after saving and reloading. As a result many people use Xara Xtreme as their primary, general purpose image composition tool.
Almost anything you can do to vector drawings you can also do to photos/bitmaps in Xtreme. For example, you can edit the shape, alter the transparency, including graduated transparency, use bitmaps as fills on any shape, add a drop shadow, feather the edges and a lot more - all in real-time.
Xara Xtreme supports all the common bitmap formats, for both import and export. 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 also includes an integrated photo editing tool. We don't pretend this makes it either a painting program or pixel editor but it does provide the most common photo editing features such as cropping, rotating, enhancing, sharpening, red-eye removal etc with a fast, interactive, live-preview of all edits. Plus the new V4 includes an effective photo panorama creator. The photo tool will continue to grow in capabilities with future releases of Xara Xtreme.
Xara Xtreme includes a fast bitmap tracer to help convert bitmaps to vector shapes.
Xara Xtreme also supports third party plug-ins such as Adobe Photoshop plug-ins to expand the range of available effects that you can apply to your photos.
Finally Xtreme includes a collection of professionally designed, fully editable templates that include photo frames and photo album layouts.
File Size
Xara Xtreme embeds your 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 in your image, 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.
This plus the amazingly compact nature of Xara Xtreme’s native file format means that such files are much faster to save and reload. The instant redraw makes working with photos a pleasure, even photos from modern, very high resolution cameras. And this is an added bonus if you are exchanging files via email with other Xara Xtreme owners.
Magic undo
By keeping track of the original master photo and a list of edits performed, Xara Xtreme offers the seemingly magic ability to undo changes to saved photos.
Say you've altered the brightness of a photo and saved the result. If you load this in the future you can undo the brightness change. This does not take the saved image and alter the brightness (that would result in cumulative distortion). Instead it re-creates a new image, identical to the one just loaded, from the original master. Perfect copies every time, plus the ability to alter or undo any edit
Un-crop
Try this with any other photo editing software:
• Load a photo, crop just a small section and save this cropped image
• Quit the program
• Now load the cropped version back in and try to Undo or recover the cropped parts.
With Xara Xtreme you can!
Maintaining Photo Quality
A fundamental problem with conventional photo editing software is that each time you load and save a JPEG image, it deteriorates slightly. Load and save an image more than a few times and this becomes noticeable. This cumulative distortion is unavoidable if you use JPEG format photos.
Xara Xtreme overcomes this problem by keeping a track of the original 'master' image, much like keeping a photographic negative. When you re-load any JPEG photo saved from Xtreme, it finds the original master and uses that as the source for all further processing, so Xtreme's photo editing is 'non-destructive'. It remembers all edits you ever performed to any photo and lets you undo or alter those at any time.
Xara Xtreme has another trick to help with photo quality - a new bi-cubic photo display that considerably improves the on-screen quality of scaled down photos compared with all other photo software. Simply select the 'very high quality' option on the View Quality slider.
Integrated Photo Tool *NEW*
V4 of Xara Xtreme offers a new integrated, ultra-fast, non-destructive photo tool, with instantaneous editing of even the largest digital photos.
Features include a fast, live and interactive photo enhance tool, interactive crop tool, photo panoramas and red-eye removal.
Single click auto-enhance
Many photographs from digital cameras are under-exposed - too dark. Making individual adjustments of brightness, contrast, and color controls can be both time consuming and a confusing process for a great many users. The integrated photo tool provides an automatic single-click enhance which can instantly improve almost all badly exposed images (although you can still manually adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness and color saturation individually if you wish to).
Crop & Rotate
The Xara Xtreme integrated photo tool offers supremely intuitive crop and rotate tools, and Xara’s unique photo handling technology means that it’s real-time, interactive and completely smooth.
To crop your photo simply select the Crop tool and then click and drag over your photo to define the crop area, which can be subsequently repositioned or resized. And you can uncrop a photo later – even after it’s been saved! Rotating a photo is even easier - just click the rotate arrows.
Photo Panoramas *NEW*
The Xara Xtreme integrated photo tool offers supremely intuitive crop and rotate tools, and Xara’s unique photo handling technology means that it’s real-time, interactive and completely smooth.
To crop your photo simply select the Crop tool and then click and drag over your photo to define the crop area, which can be subsequently repositioned or resized. And you can uncrop a photo later – even after it’s been saved! Rotating a photo is even easier - just click the rotate arrows.
Red Eye Removal
One of the most common requirements for anyone working with photos is red eye removal. The photo tool in Xara Xtreme offers an intuitive red eye removal tool that is fast and simple.
External Photo Editors
Xara Xtreme's integrated photo tool can handle all the most common photo requirements, such as control over brightness, sharpness and color saturation (including a one-click auto enhance option) photo panoramas and red eye removal.
However Xtreme also offers the ability to select an external photo editor - whether it's one of the two bundled options (Xara Picture Editor and MAGIX Xtreme Photo Designer or any external editor such as Corel Paintshop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. What's more, Xtreme monitors the photo file being edited, and detects when it's updated by the photo editor and then re-imports it back into Xtreme - and that means you can continue to have your photo editor open while working on the drawing in Xtreme. So whenever the image file is updated in your photo editor (when you click Save) your drawing is updated showing you the updated picture in context.
RAW photo import
You can now import RAW digital camera files (either using the Import menu option or just drag and drop the file onto the Xara Xtreme window).
Supported cameras
Adobe Digital Negative (DNG)
Apple QuickTake 100
Apple QuickTake 150
AVT F-145C
AVT F-201C
AVT F-510C
AVT F-810C
Canon PowerShot 600
Canon PowerShot A5
Canon PowerShot A5 Zoom
Canon PowerShot A50
Canon PowerShot A610
Canon PowerShot A620
Canon PowerShot A630
Canon PowerShot A640
Canon PowerShot Pro70
Canon PowerShot Pro90 IS
Canon PowerShot G1
Canon PowerShot G2
Canon PowerShot G3
Canon PowerShot G5
Canon PowerShot G6
Canon PowerShot S2 IS
Canon PowerShot S3 IS
Canon PowerShot S30
Canon PowerShot S40
Canon PowerShot S45
Canon PowerShot S50
Canon PowerShot S60
Canon PowerShot S70
Canon PowerShot Pro1
Canon EOS D30
Canon EOS D60
Canon EOS 5D
Canon EOS 10D
Canon EOS 20D
Canon EOS 30D
Canon EOS 300D / Digital Rebel / Kiss Digital
Canon EOS 350D / Digital Rebel XT / Kiss Digital N
Canon EOS 400D / Digital Rebel XTi / Kiss Digital X
Canon EOS D2000C
Canon EOS-1D
Canon EOS-1DS
Canon EOS-1D Mark II
Canon EOS-1D Mark III
Canon EOS-1D Mark II N
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
Casio QV-2000UX
Casio QV-3000EX
Casio QV-3500EX
Casio QV-4000
Casio QV-5700
Casio QV-R41
Casio QV-R51
Casio QV-R61
Casio EX-S100
Casio EX-Z4
Casio EX-Z50
Casio EX-Z55
Casio Exlim Pro 505
Casio Exlim Pro 600
Casio Exlim Pro 700
Contax N Digital
Creative Computer-CAM 600
Epson R-D1
Foculus 531C
Fuji FinePix E550
Fuji FinePix E900
Fuji FinePix F700
Fuji FinePix F710
Fuji FinePix F800
Fuji FinePix F810
Fuji FinePix S2Pro
Fuji FinePix S3Pro
Fuji FinePix S5Pro
Fuji FinePix S20Pro
Fuji FinePix S5000
Fuji FinePix S5100/S5500
Fuji FinePix S5200/S5600
Fuji FinePix S6000fd
Fuji FinePix S7000
Fuji FinePix S9000/S9500
Hasselblad CFV
Imacon Ixpress 16-megapixel
Imacon Ixpress 22-megapixel
Imacon Ixpress 39-megapixel
ISG 2020x1520
Kodak DC20
Kodak DC25
Kodak DC40
Kodak DC50
Kodak DC120
Kodak DCS200
Kodak DCS315C
Kodak DCS330C
Kodak DCS420
Kodak DCS460
Kodak DCS460A
Kodak DCS520C
Kodak DCS560C
Kodak DCS620C
Kodak DCS620X
Kodak DCS660C
Kodak DCS660M
Kodak DCS720X
Kodak DCS760C
Kodak DCS760M
Kodak EOSDCS1
Kodak EOSDCS3B
Kodak NC2000F
Kodak ProBack
Kodak PB645C
Kodak PB645H
Kodak PB645M
Kodak DCS Pro 14n
Kodak DCS Pro 14nx
Kodak DCS Pro SLR/c
Kodak DCS Pro SLR/n
Kodak C330
Kodak P850
Kodak P880
Kodak KAI-0340
Konica KD-400Z
Konica KD-510Z
Leaf Aptus 17
Leaf Aptus 22
Leaf Aptus 65
Leaf Aptus 75
Leaf Cantare
Leaf CatchLight
Leaf CMost
Leaf DCB2
Leaf Valeo 6
Leaf Valeo 11
Leaf Valeo 17
Leaf Valeo 22
Leaf Volare
Leica Digilux 2
Leica Digilux 3
Leica D-LUX2
Leica D-LUX3
Leica V-LUX1
Logitech Fotoman Pixtura
Mamiya ZD
Micron 2010
Minolta RD175
Minolta DiMAGE 5
Minolta DiMAGE 7
Minolta DiMAGE 7i
Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi
Minolta DiMAGE A1
Minolta DiMAGE A2
Minolta DiMAGE A200
Minolta DiMAGE G400
Minolta DiMAGE G500
Minolta DiMAGE G530
Minolta DiMAGE G600
Minolta DiMAGE Z2
Minolta Alpha/Dynax/Maxxum 5D
Minolta Alpha/Dynax/Maxxum 7D
Nikon D1
Nikon D1H
Nikon D1X
Nikon D2H
Nikon D2Hs
Nikon D2X
Nikon D40
Nikon D40X
Nikon D50
Nikon D70
Nikon D70s
Nikon D80
Nikon D100
Nikon D200
Nikon E700 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E800 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E880 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E900 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E950 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E990 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E995 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E2100 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E2500 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E3200 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E3700 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E4300 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E4500 ("DIAG RAW" hack)
Nikon E5000
Nikon E5400
Nikon E5700
Nikon E8400
Nikon E8700
Nikon E8800
Olympus C3030Z
Olympus C5050Z
Olympus C5060WZ
Olympus C7070WZ
Olympus C70Z,C7000Z
Olympus C740UZ
Olympus C770UZ
Olympus C8080WZ
Olympus E-1
Olympus E-10
Olympus E-20
Olympus E-300
Olympus E-330
Olympus E-400
Olympus E-410
Olympus E-500
Olympus E-510
Olympus SP310
Olympus SP320
Olympus SP350
Olympus SP500UZ
Olympus SP510UZ
Olympus SP550UZ
Panasonic DMC-FZ8
Panasonic DMC-FZ30
Panasonic DMC-FZ50
Panasonic DMC-L1
Panasonic DMC-LC1
Panasonic DMC-LX1
Panasonic DMC-LX2
Pentax *ist D
Pentax *ist DL
Pentax *ist DL2
Pentax *ist DS
Pentax *ist DS2
Pentax K10D
Pentax K100D
Pentax Optio S
Pentax Optio S4
Pentax Optio 33WR
Pentax Optio 750Z
Phase One LightPhase
Phase One H 10
Phase One H 20
Phase One H 25
Phase One P 20
Phase One P 25
Phase One P 30
Phase One P 45
Pixelink A782
Polaroid x530
Rollei d530flex
RoverShot 3320af
Samsung GX-1S
Samsung GX-10
Sarnoff 4096x5440
Sigma SD9
Sigma SD10
Sigma SD14
Sinar 3072x2048
Sinar 4080x4080
Sinar 4080x5440
Sinar STI format
SMaL Ultra-Pocket 3
SMaL Ultra-Pocket 4
SMaL Ultra-Pocket 5
Sony DSC-F828
Sony DSC-R1
Sony DSC-V3
Sony DSLR-A100
Sony XCD-SX910CR
STV680 VGA
Bitmap Tracer
Xara Xtreme’s powerful bitmap tracer can convert your bitmaps – typically photos, line-art or logos – into editable vector shapes. The Tracer offers great flexibility, with control over the number of colors, the fidelity of the trace to the original and a useful ‘noise’ cleaner that can remove imperfections from your bitmap (for example caused by scanning photos). So if for example you need to edit your logo and all if you have is a bitmap, all is not lost!
Adobe Photoshop® Plug-ins
Xara Xtreme supports Adobe Photoshop plug-ins. There's already a huge range of such plug-ins available, both free and commercial, for creating a variety of effects that would take a lifetime to explore - metallic effects, color and image distortions, glows, water ripples, crumples etc etc.
These plug-ins can be used with both bitmaps and vector drawn images.
We have bundled a selection of the best plug-ins with Xara Xtreme, including examples from Alien Skin, Redfield, AV Bros and Mehdi, plus more than 35 new plug-ins from Magix with V4.
Levels control
For the advanced user the integrated photo tool of Xara Xtreme now includes a Levels control to adjust brightness levels of images. This single controls offers:
• Histogram view of the brightness levels of the image
• Control over input black, white and gamma and output black and white levels. These controls provide a far more powerful way of adjusting brightness, contrast and gamma than the traditional simple brightness and contrast controls.
• Single click before and after compare
• Color correction e.g. to adjust for a color cast from using the wrong white balance settings
• Overlaid before and after histograms. As you adjust the levels you can see the original and the modified histogram.
HD Photo import:
Xara Xtreme Pro imports the new HD Photo format, also known as Windows Media Photo. Files can be saved in this HD photo format by Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 plus Microsoft Expression Design.
Panorama Studio:
Xara Xtreme Pro has a more advanced version of the photo panorama feature, called Panorama Studio, which offers:
The ability to stitch together any number of images
Advanced control over cropping, sharpening and enhancing of the resulting stitched image
Create web based 360 degree panoramas, perfect for showing off your restaurant interior and that type of thing.
Illustration:
3D Extrude *NEW*
The new extrusion tool in Xara Xtreme uses the 3D rendering technology developed for Xara's popular Xara3D tool, to bring high quality 3D extrusion capabilities to Xara Xtreme. It provides a fast, easy way of creating simple 3D shapes from any 2D shape or outline, rendered with high quality shading and light reflections.
Creating 3D images couldn't be simpler: on screen dragging allows real time 3D object rotation, dragging of the extrusion depth, and adjustment of the lights in 3D space around the object.
Drawing Tools
Xara Xtreme uses two types of drawing tools: Freehand tools and Shape tools.
The Freehand tools allow you to hand-draw lines or shapes on the page. You can simply drag on the drawn lines to convert them into curves, or 'push' and 'pull' them in a very intuitive way. You can choose in advance how closely you want the computer to follow your movements, or you can smooth out any minor bumps with Xara Xtreme's retroactive smoothing. You can even draw one shape, then add another bit to it by drawing some more and joining up with the original object.
Shape tools, like the rectangle, circle/ellipse and Quickshape tools allow you to draw pre-set shapes very quickly and easily.
Any object you create, either Freehand or Shape, can be resized or rotated by simply dragging its handles.
Transparency
Any object you create (including text and bitmaps) can be made transparent using the wide variety of transparency options available.
Like real-time anti-aliasing, Xara was the pioneer of vector transparency. Transparency can be used in a number of ways - one of the most common is to simulate glass, but it can also be used to create subtle reflections and highlights that are very difficult to achieve in any other way.
Another common use is to overlay parts of your drawing with additional transparent objects which can then be used as filters to modify colors or contrast in your image, for example. Xara Xtreme also allows you to create textured transparencies by using bitmaps of your choice to give a special effect to any graphic or selection of graphics.
Transparency can be applied in a linear graduation, or in fact in a variety of shapes such as diamond or conical to get some very unusual effects. Transparency can be applied in any direction and is independent of color - simply select the transparency tool and then click and drag on the image to apply the transparency, completely interactive and immediate.
Blend Tool
The Xara Xtreme Blend Tool allows you to blend or merge between any two objects. These objects can be any of the available object types (text, bitmaps, shapes), or even other blends.
Using the tool creates a set of intermediate objects so you get a transition from the start object to the end object. You can change the number of steps in the blend and also have more than one stage so you can blend between several objects.
Blends can be used to create complex highlights, blurred edges on objects, repetitive patterns and many other effects. You can even edit objects within the blend once you have created them. You can also set blends along a path, such as a curve.
For fine tuning, blends also have a profile control for adjusting the rate of change of steps and other attributes across the blend.
Xara Xtreme performs blending in a very quick and memory-efficient way compared to other drawing packages - meaning less waiting for you and less draining of your systems resources.
Soft Vectors
Feathering is a technique of slightly blurring the edges of objects to help them blend into the background - until recently impossible in vector drawing programs.
Simply by selecting an object - any object including shapes, text, photos and even clipviews - and moving the slider on the feather bar, it makes the selected object merge into background objects and avoids a sharp line at the boundary. This is particularly useful when overlaying bitmaps.
Xara Xtreme allows you to change the feathering profile, altering the transition across the feather. You might want a regular rate of change or a more pronounced change towards one end or the center.
Note that feathering affects only the object's edge and no other part of the object.
Shadows
Creating realistic shadows has commonly been the realm of the bitmap graphics package. Xara Xtreme's Shadow Tool changes all that and lets you apply, remove, and modify semi-transparent (or 'soft') shadows to any object, with a single click. The transparency of soft shadows increases towards the edge, which gives a very realistic effect. Shadows are resolution independent in Xara Xtreme, which means you can scale them without losing quality.
There are three different shadow types to choose from - Wall, Floor and Glow. Wall shading produces drop shadow effects, the Floor option works like a sundial would and Glow creates a halo effect around an object.
Any shadow you make can be manipulated in a number of ways, allowing you to change the color, blur, transparency and profile. Again, the Shadow tool takes advantage of the direct action feature.
Bevels
Bevels give objects the appearance of depth instead of being flat on the page. They are particularly useful when creating buttons or headings for web pages.
The Xara Xtreme Bevel Tool allows you to quickly apply customized bevels to any object you draw. There are a range of set bevel types to choose from, such as flat, frame and rounded, and each one can be altered to make it unique. You can alter the depth, contrast and lighting elevation (unique to Xara Xtreme) and angle, and you can choose whether the bevel should be inside or outside the object.
Xara Xtreme also allows you to treat a bevel like you would any other object in a Sample - so you can apply transparencies, color bitmap fills and so on. And again, the Bevel Tool takes advantage of Xara Xtreme's direct action feature.
Bevels in Xara Xtreme are resolution independent, which means you can scale them without any loss of quality.
Contours
Creating contours around objects is easy with the Xara Xtreme Contour Tool. Contouring is a special effect which adds evenly-spaced concentric rings inside or outside an object. These rings can be made to fade in to the background, or progress through a rainbow of colors.
When you have applied a contour to an object, if you resize or alter the object, the contour changes with it. The contour itself can be edited and you can change any of its properties, including the distance between the steps, the number of steps, contour width and profile.
The Inset Path button lets you convert your contoured object into a larger or smaller shape, removing the actual contours. This gives you more flexibility than simply resizing an object, as it deals with thickness as opposed to size.
Fills
You can fill an object with a color or multiple colors, or even with a photo, bitmap or fractal effect. Xara Xtreme offers a wide range of fill types - flat, linear, circular, conical, elliptical, diamond and three and four color fills.
You can apply fills to Quickshapes, shapes and even text. If you apply a fill to a compound object (a blend, mold or group) it affects all the objects in it.
Once you have applied a color fill to an object you can change its size, position, direction and the colors it uses as well as the way the colors change across the fill. With bitmap fills you can change the bitmap used and with fractal fills you can change the resolution and grain of the fractal.
One of the strongest features of Xara Xtreme is the simple and interactive way that color fills can be applied and edited. Just drag a color from the color line and drop it onto the object you want to fill, then drag the fill arrow to adjust the position and angle of the fill or drop new colors onto the arrow to create a multi-stage fill. This direct action makes working with fills much easier than any other graphics program.
Live Effects
Live Effects are plug-in effects that be applied to any object, including vector drawings (they are called Live Effects because the vector object remains editable after applying the effect - when you edit the object, the live effect is re-applied automatically to the new shape).
Adobe Photoshop® plug-ins, both free and commercial, already exist for creating a range of effects that would take a lifetime to explore - metallic effects, color and image distortions, glows, water ripples, bevels etc etc. We have included a selection of the best in Xara Xtreme and you can find information on many others elsewhere on our site.
Molds / envelopes
Molds allow you to distort any object you select according to a set shape - rather like a jello mold does.
There are two types of mold - Perspective Molds and Envelope Molds. Perspective Molds are ideal for creating banners and three-dimensional effects. They distort an object by making it appear to have perspective. With Envelope Molds you can have curved sides and you can distort and warp a shape using the four corners of the mold shape.
Molds and Envelopes can be applied to shapes, bitmaps and text, and all objects remain editable.
ClipView
Xara Xtreme has several ways of using objects to "mask" or "clip" other objects. You then see part of the objects through that mask.
ClipView is one of these methods, but it is different from the others because it is dynamic. It lets you use an object as a 'window' onto other objects. You see only those parts of other objects that are within the window. We call this creating a ClipView. You can move the window object to change your view while the window object remains visible.
Brushes
The real-time brush feature of the Freehand and Brush Tool is a fun but extremely powerful feature.
It enables you to create any shape, then use it to 'draw' with, giving endless possibilities. One such possibility is to create airbrush-like effects. There are also a number of pre-defined brushes that you can use. The brush feature's power lies in the fact that you have complete control over the way the brush paints to the screen. You can alter the size of instances, color, spacing, rotation and offset properties, and each of these has a randomize option which can give a less ordered look.
When using brushes, you can also take advantage of Xara's pressure sensitive feature by setting the brush to adjust the scaling or transparency of brush strokes according to how hard you press with your graphic pen.
Each brush you create is saved along with the Sample it's used in, so you can re-use them whenever you wish.
Pressure sensitivity
The closest thing to actually drawing for real comes from using a graphics tablet.
With Xara Xtreme using a graphics tablet can be even more realistic if you take advantage of the pressure sensitivity feature in the Brush tool.
The Brush tool gives you the option of relating the size and/or the transparency of the brush stroke to the pressure applied to the pen. You can choose whether you want the pressure to affect scaling or transparency - or both, or neither.
Profiles
When adding a blend, transparency, contour, fill or shadow to an object, you can change the attributes or properties of the effect by using the Profile dialog box.
What the Profile dialog box actually allows you to do depends on which effect is being used, but in all cases, you can either choose one of the set profiles or use the sliders to create your own.
With transparency and fills you can change the rate or shape of change from start to end, while with blends and contours you can alter how the steps are spaced and how attributes like the colors, line thickness and transparencies are used. With shadows you can change the rate of change of transparency across shadow. It's all about giving you that extra little bit of control over your effects that can make all the difference.
Altogether, the Profile dialog box makes a very powerful tool to help get your graphics just right.
Web:
HTML Export *NEW*
With Xara Xtreme you can now easily create web pages, and even multi-page websites, with full WYSIWYG using the HTML export option.
The advantage of using Xtreme to create web pages is that you get almost complete freedom to position items anywhere on the page, to include as many graphics as you like (even semi-transparent graphics) with text - even rotated text - wherever you like! And Xara Xtreme will create all the HTML for you.
Xtreme can create multi-page websites using the multi-page Sample feature.
Animated Flash Export
Xara Xtreme offers one of the easiest ways to create really efficient Flash animations.
Flash animations use vector graphics. Unfortunately existing Flash tools have a reputation for being unintuitive, difficult to master and over complex. As a result Flash has been restricted to those willing to dedicate substantial time to mastering these tools. On the other hand, the Xtreme drawing tools have the reputation of being extremely easy to learn and slick. So now we bring the ease of Xtreme to Flash animations.
Xtreme Flash animation doesn't use complex time-lines. Instead it's more like traditional animator's art, where you produce snap-shots or key frames of your animations at points in time. Xtreme automatically produces in-between frames to create smooth, really compact Flash animations.
Note: Xtreme Flash animation does not support complex advanced features such as scripting, sound or embedded movies. Instead it's Flash animation for the rest of us, perfect for creating banner ads, text and photo effects.
Navigation buttons
Buttons and navigation bars are an essential part of most web sites, but making them can be a time-consuming and frustrating experience.
The Xara Xtreme Button and NavBar Tool allows you to create standalone buttons or fully functional navigation bars within minutes. You can also create rollover buttons which change as you interact with them (like the buttons used on this web site) - and Xara Xtreme will write all the HTML and JavaScript for you.
The tool works by taking your design for a button and creating as many copies as you wish, either vertically or horizontally. Each button can then be edited - by changing the color, text, adding bevels, shadows and so on. When making rollovers, you can edit each button and each of its states.
Flash export (.swf)
Flash by Adobe has become a standard for vector graphic animations on the web. But, as web multimedia designers know, it's not the best tool for actually creating graphics.
Any static image you create in Xara Xtreme can be exported in .swf format, which can then be imported into a Flash movie and animated. Because the graphic is in the Flash format, it remains scalable, so you can resize it and manipulate it within Flash without losing any quality.
Xara Xtreme also has its own quick and easy Flash animation feature.
GIF Animation
Animated gifs are still a common form of animation used on the web. Used for banner advertisements, spinning buttons and character animation, animated gifs will be around for a long time yet.
The Xara Xtreme Frame Gallery allows you to create animations one frame at a time. It gives you complete control over every aspect of the animation from pauses between frames to the transparency of objects.
When exporting, Xara Xtreme is able to fully optimize animated gifs so they have as small a file size as possible, meaning you can create eye-catching animations without hindering the performance of your site.
Dreamweaver integration
Adobe's Dreamweaver is one of the leading web design packages and is used by designers across the world to create stunning web pages.
Xara Xtreme has a special option when exporting an image in a web format (gif, jpeg or png) which saves some extra information used by Dreamweaver, along with the graphic. Then, when you're making a web page in Dreamweaver, you can insert the graphic as normal, but if you want to edit it at any point, just click on the image and Xara Xtreme will automatically load up with the graphic open.
Note: only works with Dreamweaver 3 or higher.
Hexadecimal RGB web color
Being able to select colors based on their hexadecimal value is vital for web designers. That way you can match your graphics with colors from the standard web safe color palette, that you use on your web page.
Often a designer will want to match a graphic color with the background color placed in a cell of a table for example. As HTML uses hexadecimal values (eg. #CCCCFF) to represent colors, it is extremely useful to be able to specify these colors within a drawing package.
Especially for web designers, Xara Xtreme has a Hexadecimal RGB Web Color option which allows just this.
Image slicing
Large, complex graphics for web pages can produce large files, which take a long time to Soft ware over the Internet.
However, often these large graphics contain areas of flat color or little detail. To reduce the amount of data to Soft ware you can 'slice' the image into sections, which can be Soft ware separately.
The advantage is that areas of flat color/little detail can be saved at a lower quality (eg. as a 2-color GIF) than complex areas, which can be saved at a higher resolution. The 2-color GIF file takes less time to Soft ware, but it means you can still have high detail areas within your image.
Xara Xtreme not only slices and saves the images for you, it also writes all the necessary HTML too, so you can just copy it into your web page.
Image maps
Image maps are used in web pages to create clickable areas or hotspots on a graphic. For example, if you had a map of the United Kingdom - as shown in the example - you can use an image map with a hotspot over each country.
Xara Xtreme allows you to assign a web address to any object in a Sample. You can then export the complete image along with the necessary HTML required to make the image map work.
When assigning a web address to an object you have the option to make the hotspot fit the object exactly or roughly outline the area with a rectangle which can produce much less code than a complex shape.
You also get the option to select where the link should point to - to a new window, the current frame, the parent frame and so on.
Exporting and optimizing
Optimization of web graphics is an essential factor if you want to keep fast Soft ware times for your web pages.
In order to make graphics have the smallest file size possible, yet still look good, it is often necessary to optimize them. Xara Xtreme has fantastic built-in optimization for web graphics, and also allows you to take complete control of color palettes yourself.
This means that you can choose the exact settings you want, including: color depth, dithering and transparency. You can also lock specific colors to make sure they are retained within the image. You can preview every change you make so you can see what the result will be before committing yourself and in the Export Dialog you can compare different export options so you know which one is best.
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