I have just downloaded the trial version of Xara Designer Pro X10 to evaluate. I have 30 days left before the trial ends and need to determine if this software will work for my project. So far I definitely expect it will but need get more familiar.

I have true color scans of about 150 World War One photos that I need to process with the hopes of publishing them into a book.

I am working on developing the general processes to use but I know I will have questions as I go so I expect to be posting here but also hope not to overdo it!

Now my first few questions:

1 – Can someone point me to the correct support area to contact the Xara folks to determine how much it will cost to upgrade? I own Xara X1 so should not have to pay full price but with my limited budget I can’t afford a full new version or even the upgrade if it is too much. I don’t want to get all excited about the “new to me” photo processing features only to not be able to afford them.

2 – I need to crop the album pages to a common size. I was thinking to create a rectangle of the proper (standard) size and use that as a guide to overlay on the photo to use as a crop guide. How do I do that? Or at least, what is the best way to get some sort of standard size crop area to use on all the album pages?

3 – I’m just starting so haven’t researched this yet, but if someone can point me directly to tutorials about working on black and white photos it would be appreciated. This will cut down on time lost to looking for tutorials so I can spend my remaining evaluation time on actually learning the software.

In case you’re interested, below are some links that give more detail and examples on this project.

www.typicalfrenchkiddies.tumblr.com
www.typicalfrenchkiddies.com
www.facebook.com/typicalfrenchkiddies

Thanks in advance for any thoughts and help.

Paul
paulhurm@gmail.com