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Xara version 4 is out as of today, there are a LOT of nice new things in there.
- Just look at the 3d extrude functions…wow
- and the 10 faster than the competition new phototool…this might be useful for my digital pics
- a new complete website creation wizard … also handy
- liquid flow around texts, just look at the demo on the website when they drag in an elipse shape in a piece of text, this will look great.
Ok… It seemed only yesterday that I upgraded to version 3.2 hmmm less than a year ago I paid $52 to upgrade, let’s see how much it cost me this time….
Hmmm… $39 to upgrade to Xtreme 4 or $159 to upgrade to Xtreme Pro 4.
Hmmmmm…. this text extruding looks very cool….hmmm…. let’s go through it:
- An integrated, ultra-fast, non-destructive photo tool – more info
The new photo tool offers instantaneous editing for even huge photos. All operations are non-destructive, meaning the original image is not affected and all edits are object orientated and undoable. This also means edits like this take practically no file space and so allows ultra compact lossless files. The features include:
- Ultra-fast, live & interactive Enhance (brightness, sharpness, saturation etc)
- Levels (histogram, color correction and more)
- Interactive crop. Again this is non-destructive so you can adjust or un-crop images at any time.
- An automatic panorama maker photo-stitching feature.
- The world’s fastest, highest quality vector 3D extrude tool – more info
Xara3D has been integrated so you can now extrude objects in 3D. This provides industry leading speed, usability and quality of 3D rendering compared with any other drawing package. It provides live on-canvas 3D dragging and extrude, 3 colored lights than can be dragged around in real-time, and Xara’s renowned high quality 3D rendering.
- Major text tool improvements, including real-time ‘liquid’ text flow around shapes – more info
- A new text repel feature allows text to flow around shapes and photos. As you’d expect from Xara this provides super-fast text re-formatting allowing live and interactive flow of text as you drag the text objects
- New live reformatting while resizing text columns and frames
- Text underline
- A new ‘website creation’ feature. Build complete multi-page websites, with the world’s most advanced WYSIWYG page layout controls – more info
Many professional graphic designers already use Xara as their primary web graphics tool. Now it can save complete HTML web pages (using XHTML and CSS standards) and using layers it is easy to add mouseover effects and even add pop-ups.
The advantage of using Xtreme to create web pages is that you get almost complete freedom to position graphics and text anywhere on the page – including semi-transparent graphics and even rotated text – things which would be difficult or impossible with normal web authoring tools. Plus the multi-page feature can be used to create complete multi-page websites. And Xtreme creates all the HTML for you.
- New super-high quality vector and photo rendering – more info
A new simplified Quality Control provides five quality steps:
- Outline only. This is now fully anti-aliased for higher quality screen display
- Outline with blend steps
- Full color (no anti-aliasing)
- High Quality (full anti-aliasing. Same as previous top quality. Provides image smoothing)
- Very high quality (new higher quality, industry best anti-aliasing. New bi-cubic photo display considerably improves the quality of scaled down photos).
- Multi-page documents – more info
Xara Xtreme now supports multiple page documents, which means you can use Xtreme to produce leaflets, newsletters and much more. Pages can be single or double page spreads (left and right sides) and are arranged vertically, like a word processor or DTP program, with full support for text flow across pages. Xtreme’s ultra-fast rendering means you can scroll through pages quickly and smoothly, even on very large documents.
- Photo Levels – more info
The new Photo Tool 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.
- RAW file import – more info
You can now import RAW digital camera files (either using the Import menu option or just drag n drop the file onto the Xtreme window).
- Improved color picking and editing including an enhanced eye dropper color picker on the color line – more info
- You can now use the eye-dropper color picker directly without having the color editor on screen.
- The Color line now indicates the color under the eye-dropper as you’re dragging around, highlighting the named or palette color.
- There are new live color values shown next to the eye-dropper as you move over objects, showing not just the RGB color but the correct named color and color model of the object under the pointer. e.g. whether it’s a spot, Pantone, CMYK or RGB color, and its value.
- The current fill and line colors are now indicated on the color line even if they are palette colors, not just named colors.
- The Name Gallery now shows used palette colors and edited colors, not just named colors.
- Flexible new Selector tool options – more info
- A new option for marquee select provides an Adobe-like selection so that any objects that the marquee rectangle touches are selected. An alternative option selects only those objects entirely inside the marquee rectangle.
- Selection has been made live – objects are selected as you drag, rather than only when you let go. This mkes it easier to know whether objects are or are not selected as you drag, rather than waiting until you let go of the mouse.
- New and improved import and export of industry standard graphics formats – more info
This includes:
- Improved PDF import
- Improved international font and text (Unicode) handling – more info
Improved Unicode support for foreign language alphabets, such as Chinese.
- A new hierarchical Font menu with WYSIWYG font display – more info
Completely new WYSIWYG Font menu, now showing fonts grouped in families, showing full length font names and rendered in the corresponding font (high quality anti-aliased, compare with Word), so making it much easier to preview a font before selection. This is a hierarchical menu, so it’s more compact and shows all variants of each family in a sub-menu.
- Live in-document font preview and live font size selection – more info
Live Font Preview. As you traverse the font menu, the selected text in the document is updated. Similarly there is now a live font size preview, and a new interactive font size pop-up slider for fast, live, fine grained text size control.
- Many new Live Effects added – more info
There are nearly 40 new Live Effects plug-ins, including Art, Color, Deformation, Distortion, Sharpen & Soften filters.
- A large number of new fully customizable templates including HTML web pages – more info
A large collection of new top quality editable templates have been added, including more brochures / flyers, newsletters and new categories such as web pages and scrapbooking.
- A completely new automatic panorama photo stitching feature – more info
This is a new photo plug-in included in all copies of Xara Xtreme. It offers:
- Automatic stitching of photos to create a panorama
- Automatic detection of overlap and join positions
- Automatic calculation of focal length
- Adjustment of pictures to reduce fish-eye or focal length distortions
- Seamless blending to remove dramatic color changes in the sky, for example.
The best bit is that it’s utterly simple to use. Import your pictures, position them in the correct left to right order and then just click the Panorama button for them to be automatically stitched together.
- Flash export is now automatically clipped to page size - more info
Flash export is now automatically clipped to the page size. So, for example, if you want to create a banner ad at 468×60, you can set the page size to 468×60 and all animations on or around the page will be clipped to that page size.
- Quick & easy photo optimization option – more info
A new optimize photo / bitmap feature to reduce resolution and convert images to embedded JPEGs (to make designs smaller and photo operations faster).
- Improved shape intersection – more info
Path clipping has been improved, so Combine Shapes operations are now more accurate.
- Improved photo handling including a new ‘photo document’ – more info
There is a new concept of a ‘photo document’. These are documents that consist primarily of a photo, as opposed a design on a fixed sized page. When working with a photo document, Xara Xtreme works in a way that is more consistent with traditional photo editors – but with all the vector tools still available of course. A photo document is created automatically when you open a JPEG or drop a JPEG onto a blank Xtreme document. The page dimensions are set to the match the dimensions of the photo, expanding automatically if you add any objects such as text or a shadow. So you don’t need to continually manually adjust the page dimensions and, unlike most photo editors, you don’t need to plan in advance the dimensions of your finished photo. On loading a photo the document zoom is set so that the photo fills the view, and the photo tool is selected.
- Zoom out now retains the image in the center of the screen even down to small zoom
- Photos show the Megapixel size in the bitmap gallery
- Single tile bitmap fills now show transparent around the outside, in order to avoid edge aliasing effects (and it’s also more compatible with Adobe clip regions).
- New ‘import to new page’ option in the clipart gallery
- Improved feather slider (and pop-up sliders generally)
- An option to maintain the geometry of a photo fill when you drop a different photo on the fill
- Optional automatic underlining of hyperlinks on text
- Ability to save original imported JPEG data from Bitmap gallery
- Outline mode is now anti-aliased, giving a much higher quality display.
- You can now right click copy / paste text when in Text tool
Ok…. that convinced me!
Strange, on the form it says $52.88, however when I paid it said : We have successfully charged $37.08 to your card 
(I assume they now have a HUGE problem with all the users upgrading…) update: negative, I had earned $15 from the affiliate program (I actually referred 1 person to also buy Xara ) and this was discounted. So… Please click on one of the banners on top or down this posting if you want to also buy it. I’m a huge addict and I’m sure you will become also.
I got the following confirmation:
Please allow up to 28 days for your product to arrive.
While you wait for the CD, you can unlock a fully working version of Xara Xtreme.
Xara Xtreme
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If you do not already have the trial you can download it from here:
http://downloads.xara.com/downloads/software/xaraxtreme4dl.exe
Run the trial and click on the ‘Enter activation code’ button. Enter your code and then click ‘Activate’.
Here we go! Downloading…
