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Xara is a company that has a well-deserved reputation for developing excellent graphics software. Its first product so impressed Corel that it licensed the software which was then sold as a product entitled Corel Xara alongside its main CorelDRAW offering. More recently Xara has spent several years creating small graphic utilities aimed at specific tasks that were both easy to use and fast. With its latest product, Xara seems to have returned to its original roots with Xara Xtreme which combines drawing capabilities and photo editing tools.

Xara Xtreme consists of two elements, the main program and a Picture Editor of which more later. The main Xara Xtreme is currently available on Windows with Linux and Mac versions to follow. Having worked with a number of Xara's earlier products, I was rather surprised by the slow loading of this title. In this respect it was nearly 50% slower than Paint Shop Pro 9. Fortunately, in other respects, speed of completion was well up to the high standard I've come to expect from Xara.

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The first time you run this program you will need to enter a registration number before being presented with a fairly standard Windows interface of a centrally positioned work area with various toolbars and palettes running along three sides. Plenty of help is provided in the form of animated movies to ease the user into the program's features. In addition, Xara provides resource material that consists of business related templates, greeting cards, CD designs, photo frames and a clip art gallery.

All the usual tasks are well catered for in Xara Xtreme. You can draw freehand, add geometric shapes and text (including on a curve) before applying attributes such as a shadow, transparency, bevel, contour and blend. One of the major new features in this product is the Live Effects tool.

This tool allows Adobe Photoshop and Xara plug-in effects to be applied to vector graphics and photos. Several plug-ins are provided as standard and these include 3D Bitmap, bitmap shadow or feather, page curl, water ripple and adding fur to a shape or text. You could easily spend a great deal of time just experimenting with the Live Effects tool. You also get improved compatibility with Adobe Illustrator, faster rendering, dockable galleries and the ability to apply transparency to a group of objects.

Although you can double click on an image within Xara Xtreme to transfer it to the Picture Editor, this module can be run as a standalone application. In this latter mode, it will require the user to select an appropriate image from the last folder to be accessed by the program or move to another folder. You can then carry out various tasks such as rotate, resize, enhance, crop, remove red eye and use the various plug-ins.

The Picture Editor allows you to view a history listing of all actions within the current session and then delete individual or all items. Almost Mac-like in its appearance with icons that spring out at you when touched by the mouse, Picture Editor is quick, easy to use and capable of producing eye-catching results.

Xara Xtreme will run on any Windows system from 98 onwards with a Pentium processor, 64MB of RAM and 20MB of hard disk space. It can be purchased from the Xara website for $79.

http://www.xara.com/products/xtreme/default.asp?t=