A totally worthless piece of software

[Judi A]

What a waste of R&D money! There is no way this product could ever make it as a stand alone product. I was hoping for a nice easy to use product that I could give to my daughter so she would quite sending me bloated pictures with redeyes.

The software that comes with digital cameras is much better and since it is geared to the novice is also easy to use.

It has no feature to decrease the huge megabyte size and physical size most novice digital camera users default to. It cannot decrease the physical size or have the ability to increase the compression of jpg's for sharing pictures on the internet.

If it was only meant as a add on for Xara, it was still a waste of R&D because I really doubt any avid Xara user will bother with it.

Off Soap Box

[Judi A]

What a waste of R&D money! There is no way this product could ever make it as a stand alone product. I was hoping for a nice easy to use product that I could give to my daughter so she would quite sending me bloated pictures with redeyes.

The software that comes with digital cameras is much better and since it is geared to the novice is also easy to use.

It has no feature to decrease the huge megabyte size and physical size most novice digital camera users default to. It cannot decrease the physical size or have the ability to increase the compression of jpg's for sharing pictures on the internet.

If it was only meant as a add on for Xara, it was still a waste of R&D because I really doubt any avid Xara user will bother with it.

Off Soap Box

[raynerj]

"It has no feature to decrease the huge megabyte size and physical size most novice digital camera users default to." - Judi

How often can you recapture a moment in time? I myself get one chance. If 6 months later I am asked for an 8X10 I want the ability to give them an 8X10. So... I disagree about novice digital camera users. (99.9% of all professional high end digital cameras grab as many meg as they can get for a pic.)

Sending multiple surprise 10Meg pics in email is a trick of novice cable modem computer users, not of professional photographers. They warn you before stuffing your box.

I do not know if what we see here is the stand alone XPE or not. I imagine some kind of input/output would have to be included... I think what we have here is the meat of the program, the icing is yet to be applied.

[RAMWolff44]

Well the meats frozen still then!! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

I just checked it out and after reading the main "What's new in XaraX" page:

http://new.xara.com/products/xarax/whatsnew.asp

it clearly states that there is support for plugins, which I am very interested in since there is still no 32bit image support for plugins in Xara X1! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif I know that Charles has put this on the list to fix, but there is no pluin support in XPE either so I still have to go outside the program to apply the more high end plugins that need a 32bit alpha mask.

I'm also quite dissapointed with the "Special Effects" area for bitmaps in Xara X1. Still the same ole' boring filters and that interface is so danged small I gotta squint to see what the preview has to offer, not worth it. I don't know why Charles didn't just remove it from Xara X1 all-together, kinda useless, really... I guess the XPE will have to come in handy for those types of opperations (sharpen and blur are about the only things I use from the "Special Effects" dialog anyway and XPE supplies this operation with a descent preview, so that is a plus. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

In all honesty, the page about the XPE DOES state that:

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Xara Picture Editor is currently only available integrated as part of Xara X¹ and does not yet have all the features described on this site. We intend to release it as a separate product later this year, with an expected price of $20. <span class="ev_code_RED">All Xara X1 owners will get a free copy of the completed product when it’s ready.</span> <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

So I guess this is not finished so I will shut up then.......... http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/rolleyes.gif

[raynerj]

There are some grand plans for this. That is sure. If anybody can pull it off, Xara can.

[Charles Moir]

Quite correct. It is not finished yet.

The XPE does already provide significant benefits to Xara X owners and that's why it's shipped and supplied now. That includes image rotation, crop, auto-enhance, interactive blur & sharpen and other operations that were not available to Xara X before now.

On top of that the Xara Picture Editor provides some unique features you'll find nowhere else. Starting with a 2Mbyte JPEG image from a digital camera - pretty common nowadays - try these things is in any other program:

1) Copy the photo as many times as you like in Xara X. Mess with each copy as much as you like. e.g. feather them, alter the transparency, use the Intersect options to slice to crop into funny shapes. Save your file and see how large it is. It will be around 2Mbytes still and take a fraction of a second to save and load. Because we embed the original JPEG in the file and use smart image expansion and smart image cloning features we can do this. Do the same in say Adobe Illustrator, or other software, make only three copies and you have a file 80Mbytes large that takes a twenty times longer to save. In fact you rapidly get an unmanageable file.

2) Double click on a photo to edit it in the Xara Picture Editor. Crop it and save it back. Makes as many copies as you like and edit them each using the XPE - alter the color, brightness contract, sharpness etc etc. See how much memory is required by each edited photograph. The answer is zero because the XPE used smart 'edit list' technology that you will not find anywhere else.

3) Save your .xar file containing all your edited pictures. Load it back in again at some future point and double click any of your altered photos, such as the cropped one. You will see that you can un-crop your bitmap and restore the missing parts.

4) But it's not just the crop you can undo. Every edit can be undone or altered the same way. You can remove or adjust a sharpen setting. This does not re-apply the sharpen (and you'd expect form other bitmap editors) but adjusts the existing value. So in effect you have infinite undo for all images. At any time in the future you can change you mind and alter or undo your edit settings.

A consequence of this is that you can repeatedly edit your photo. Load into XPE, edit, save back to Xara X. Load-edit-save as many times as you like and you always get a first generation copy. There is zero cumulative distortion. In other editors each time you load, edit and save the picture deteriorates slightly. Do it more than a few times and you've got noticeable image distortion. This is a result of JPEG lossless compression and in usually unavoidable.

With the XPE in Xara X there is no such problem - no cumulative distortion and you can edit as many times as you like AND you have zero memory overhead doing the edits.

You can do all this now, using the XPE in Xara X. I do not think these are worthless features. If you've ever tried manipulating large images in other drawing programs you'll know just how valueable these features are.

BUT the XPE is not complete and while it does all of the above integrated into Xara X, when we ship the stand-alone version, it will do this on any JPEG file on your hard disc. So yes you will be able to load a cropped JPEG and simply select un-crop and your missing bits will be restored. Think about that.

And yes the software that comes with Digital Cameras can do more. But my experience from having to help many non-expert users try to use their digital camera and watching them struggle with software from at least three different manufacturers (Motorola, Fuji and Nikon) is that the software is anything but easy to use and understand. The multi-megabyte file size issue being only one of the really confusing things for newby users.

XPE will be able to decrease JPEG image sizes, interactively as well. It will also support plugins to increase its future capabilities, including Photoshop plugins (and 32-bit ones), hundreds of which are available for free.

So we think it's useful now, and will be even more useful in future.

[diniel]

I think the XPE software is great!

I am a professional web developer, I use XaraX and Dreamweaver MX2004. They're loaded all the time, as is Outlook/Word/Excel 2003. Even with a fast processor and gig of RAM, my machine begins to slow when I fire up Fireworks MX2004 to sharpen/blur/brighten bitmaps. That's all I do with Fireworks, so XPE is great because it does all of that - and now within Xara X¹ as well.

The secondary part of my job is technical support. I can't tell you how many hours of phone support XPE will save me: software which comes from digital cameras is often shoddy. I can see myself buying XPE for several clients just to save explanations on the phone, trying to guess how their software describes JPEG compression (high, medium, low compression - or high, medium, low quality - or good quality - or small file etc).

I'm afraid therefore I'll have to disagree with you Juli: with both of my hats on, XPE is a godsend!

(I also trust Xara implicity, no issues with them doing a bunk and not sending on the registration code etc as I've had with other shareware registrations etc: I've used Xara products for the 10 years of my working life and at school before that too!)

[RAMWolff44]

Hi Charles,

Thanks for taking the time to answer questions and concerns but there was still no mentioning of PS filters. There was a mentioning on XPE's page but you did not address this here. Is the stand alone version going to be the one that has this functionality or will you kindly include this also within the plugged in version in Xara X1?? If you did include it then the 32bit issue would be past us and that would be great. But as I mentioned why not just lighten up the code a tiny be more and do away with, IMHO, the useless and tiny tiny tiny "Special Effects" dialog. With XPE being integrated into Xara then all I see is this being an unnecessary redundancy.

Thanks Charles!! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

[Judi A]

My error for not realizing it is not a finished product, I will wait until it is before assessing it further.

One thing I also must have misunderstood, Charles, I thought this was suppose to be an easy to use product for non-graphic software savvy people. I have done quite a bit of photo editing experimenting, but have yet to end up with a 80mb file from a 2 mb original?????
Judi

[raynerj]

Judi,

Do you have Photoshop or Photopaint by chance or maybe a copy of xara 1.0D. Every copy of a bitmap in these programs is a copy that takes up file space and bloats the file size usage (another separate image in the bitmap gallery). If this works as it should, you should be able to have 40 different variations of the same bitmap yet have the file size stay 2 meg instead of 80 Meg.