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Xara Xtreme
Wednesday, 04 May 2011MAGIX are a reputable name in multi-media software. Despite a somewhere annoying website, their software is tried and tested and a solid purchase.
Xara Xtreme is an amalgamation of two previous products, MAGIX Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer 1. Since it is the first in a new line, it feels a little disjointed and unintuitive - not helped by the fact that MAGIX go against convention by naming editing tools differently from the competition. If you are new to photo editing you wont notice this, and is only a consideration for those who are upgrading from other software.
So how does Xara Xtreme stack up on our buyer guide points?
Editing effects
Xara Xtreme is packed with editing features such as scaling, cropping, color balancing, brightness, contrast, focus/sharpening and text overlays. There are also some more quirky features not found in other titles, including liquid color and lasso to move objects around.
Wizards and one click operations
Most of the most common operations, such as red-eye removal, blemish removal, brightness, white balance, auto color, horizontal levelling, color saturation and clone are one-click operations making the software very user-friendly.
File formats
All major file formats supported, including those with vector support
Organization and sharing
There is no ability to create albums in Xara Xtreme and so you will need to rely on your default OS system or another software solution. You can easily rate and label images and search your hard drive within the software. There are no options for sharing images directly to photo sharing websites such as Flickr or Facebook.
Tutorials and training
There are plenty of tutorials and knowledge base questions to get you started and keep you improving. The learning curve is modest and you will know all you need to know in a fairly short space of time.
Help and support
Support for the product is fairly good. There is a multi-media community available in a variety of languages, and the company will deal with any software issues promptly via an email ticketing system.
Overall a good product which will improve with future upgrades
| Other names: | Xara Xtreme, Zara Xtreme, Xara Extreme |
| Requirements: | Windows XP | Windows Vista | Windows 7 |
If you need help deciding between Photo Editing software look at our comparison chart to quickly compare titles and download trial software.
Not sure what features you're looking for? Read our Photo Editing buyer's guide.
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Gary Bouton
Sun 30th Jan, 2011
Because Xara Xtreme is in a class of its own—it's a vector drawing program that thinks it's a bitmap editor—a direct comparison to DreamWeaver, Flash, Illustrator, or CorelDRAW is unfair. Let me please provide a definition instead of a comparison: it's 10 x faster than, and 20x more intuitive to use than any vector drawing program I've every used, and I've used all the major players. Somewhat subordinately, Xara can be used to enhance images, and also to build sophisticated looking websites.
If you need an HTML editor, Xara is not it. If you need Photoshop, Xara is not it. But if you need a solid drawing program and have entry-level to intermediate web and bitmap editing needs, Xara Designer 6 is about half the price of other graphics programs and outperforms all vector drawing programs, not in feature set, but in its core capability to make scalable vector artwork.
whyme1989
Thu 11th Feb, 2010
I bought this product for its web designing. It's not a Dreamweaver replacement but is quite good at creating simple web pages in a WYSIWYG way.
But then I realised it was an image editor too, that can also make Flash banners. It's a massive bundle and well worth the price tag. But if youre just looking for image editing or photo editing you might get a lot of unnecessary stuff.
