Quote Originally Posted by James Allen View Post
Hi Harry,

You can crop the photos very quickly in Xara itself. Click on the photo in Xara, and using the ‘Shape Editor’ tool (F4), marquee select the nodes you wish to move (say the two left side corners), and nudge them across to where the crop should be. You can also alt/arrow them across for the pixel nudge. See attached pic.

Another way to crop is to place a rectangle over the photo, where you wish to crop, and select both the rectangle and the photo. Then press subtract shapes (ctrl/2) to crop.

Or you can use clipview (Q). Place a rectangle over the photo that represents your crop (you would like the photo to fill and be the same shape as the rectangle). Place the rectangle behind the photo (ctrl/b), select both and press ‘Q’ to clip the photo inside the rectangle.

In order to edit a photo with Photoshop you can configure Xara to open PS when you double click a photo. Go to Options (shift/ctrl/O) and select ‘Effects & Plugins’. Under ‘Editing Bitmaps’ you can check the ‘Edit Bitmaps with this program’ and find Adobe Photoshop’s ‘Photoshop.exe’ file. It will probably be something like "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4 (64 Bit)\Photoshop.exe"

After that, just double click a photo to initialize PS, edit photo and save, and you’ll find it changed accordingly in Xara.

Still, cropping is much faster in Xara to begin with, so I would use PS for other things, not cropping.
Thanks for the excellent tips... all look useful in the extreme.
I did see the cropping ability, but I left out one step in my message. Maybe this can also be accomplished easier in Xara?

It was really two moves...

But first: All images have been pre edge feathered in photoshop so to maintain that look the steps below need to be taken instead of just a bare crop.

1) Set some amount of feather on rectangle select tool. Rectangle select, (A rectangle leaving some amount around the perimeter. Invert the selection and delete the perimeter pixels leaving a nicely faded perimeter to the image and leaving the part to be cropped devoid of pixels.

2) Select with Crop tool far enough outboard from the fade line left in previous step and crop the image to a more sensible size leaving the new cut line nicely feathered

I'm wondering now if Xara may offer some sort of feathered masking that would have the same effect but not really necessitate cropping, also allowing all the work to be done in one application?

Mask to proper size with feathered mask and export.