January Entry: An invitation you can’t refuse

[Gamerprinter]

Great to see someone try out Xara Xtreme, you won't regret it. If you have any feel for a graphics app, you should figure Xara in a day or two. Oh, maybe not every nuance of the app, but its very easy to figure out.

In Photoshop, for example, you open a raster image, apply a filter to see the result - as far as memory usage goes, PS creates a duplicate of your original to apply a filter to it. Once applied PS creates a duplicate again to show you the results. Just to do a simple operation eats 3 times as much memory as necessary - hence filled scratch disks on large projects.

In Xara, you open the raster image, select a filter or option, this is applied to the original image and you see the same image as result. Xara never created a duplicate at anytime - no reason too. If you click undo, you are undo the applied filter, the original is viewed without filter, still original image. This is a much more efficient use of memory - that's why Xara is so fast.

Xara has some ultimate size restrictions compared to Adobe products - its not the perfect proggie in every way, but fast, powerful and easy to use. Post a WIP of your first project using Xara and explain detailed steps, I'd be interested - in helping to educate the rest of the Guild...

Good luck!

PS: I've got a couple light duty Xara Xtreme Tutorials in the Software Discussion Forum - look for entries around July/August 2007, that's when I uploaded them.