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.
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