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Just spotted that Photo & Graphic Designer 10 has been released today.
http://www.xara.com/photo-graphic-designer/
Some nice new features, but a nothing particularly exciting. Looking forward to seeing what's in the Pro version upgrade next month.
Rich
Donloaded it and gave it a try.
And it leaves me wondering.
a/ What's so smart about smart shapes? They don't stick onto something. Or do I miss something?
b/ Wacom pen doesn't work out of the box. It's THE professional tool that artists use so it should have been picked up from the start. (I'll delve into the registry and fix it, but it's a shame this hasn't been resolved yet and it shrinks my anticipation for the PRO version)
c/ The 'Insert"menu is awkward and anachronistic. (or maybe I am ...) I prefer to drag and drop items in my drawings. It's still possible, i know, but the addition of an extra menu item is confusing.
d/ The online content is f no use when one is working off line (e.g. with a customer ...) and the turn to online content is not something I was waiting for.
e/ after enabling Wacom pressure sensitivity: the fast drawing circles bug still remains
d/ back up bug by disabling tabs still remains...
On the other hand, it's still blistering fast and fun to use.
Custom Install to avoid SimpleClean !
( Can't be sure because I didn't do the regular install, but the custom defaults to installing SimpleClean )
d/ The design gallery is still there :)
I wrote a First Look review here http://xaraxone.magix.net/PGD10/
I think there is a lot of cool new stuff, especially some of the new photo filters. Have a look.
Nice review Gary, like how you brought out the new shadow and colour tools, I had fun playing around with them :)
Isn't XDP the sum of the other products, like Web Premium + P&GD + P&LD? If that holds true, then once P&LD is released, we'll know what all is in XDP. Which so far, the list leaves me...uninspired (or worse).Quote:
Originally Posted by planetsquid
Hopefully, the new Content Whatever thing is simply what Corel went to in CorelDraw et al. I really hope it works better/faster than Corel's version. Because CD's version sucks.
I see there's a kind of "transform along path" in the smart shapes arrows, hope to see this feature working with any shape.
Any PDF I/O improvement is always welcome.
Marc
Rob - The attached is a pair of photos that did not make it into my First Look because of the space required.
The photo on the left is before and the photo on the right is after applying both the Shadow and Highlight Brightness filters.
The books are dark blue and tend to go much darker. The lamp shade and even the brass have bleached out a bit. Using these two filters brought out the detail in the dark books and brought out more detail and shape in the white lamp shade.
I have always been a big proponent of the Brightness Levels dialog but I have not been able to match the the effectiveness of the Shadow and Highlight Brightess filters.
Having worked with Photo & Graphic Designer 10 for a few weeks while I wrote my review, I have found that when I work in Designer Pro X9 that I really miss these two filters plus the Insert menu. I did not think I would like it but I like it a lot.
SmartShapes, such as the arrows and the pie chart smart shape offer an incredible amount of control quickly and effectively while at the same time maintaining the ability to go back and modify them. I can do a lot of the things to a not smart shape but I cannot go back at a later time and return to the original shape without quite a lot of work.
@Gary...is this like Where's Waldo? I cannot easily (i.e., at all) really see a difference in the side-by-side comparison.
Look at the faces on the blue books.
I could not find my original photo but it was even more dramatic. In my original photo the books were almost black and they opened up very impressively while not effecting the rest of the photo.
And there is a bit less burnout on the white lamp shade.
Here are two more examples. Look at the detail in the snow. And look at the driveway and how the areas in shadow are brighter and there is a little more shape to the clouds.
Hi Gary,
Your First Look and the driveway images do show a good contrast/difference pre-/post-processing.
The bookshelf image? Not so much. The screen shot shows a color picker at the same 2 locations. The difference between the picker for locations 1 & 2 are off by a couple data points, likely because of not picking the exact same location on each version. The color picker locations for #s 3/4, however, are identical likely because I clicked at the same location on each version.
Which is why I said something.
Mike
Attachment 102835
Mike - You're correct.
Attached is a screen shot of the two images before I exported the pair as a JPEG.
I just tried to make a bitmap copy with no alpha channel and the two images are almost identical.
Same thing with the driveway photo. No difference. I should have looked at those before I posted.
I have attached the screen capture of the before and after driveway photo.
SO, I am sending the file with the two photos directly to Xara. I fear this is a feature. (Bug)
OK. Update.
The two images export OK as PNG but not as JPEG.
So at this point, one could export as PNG, bring the image back into P&GD and then reexport as JPEG.
Further update. :O I was working with a pre-release version. I downloaded the PGD10 release version and the problem goes away.
Sorry for all the confusion.
Mike W -- downloaded mine earlier, will get into it later tonight. At first glance, old wine in an old bottle, with a bit of newly-added carbonation. Think sparkling wine. Not that this is bad. The $35 upgrade price from P&GD is a giveaway. Looking forward to exploring the Symbol collection, and the Smart Shapes... which, unless I'm wrong, might mean I'll not have to use PowerPoint anymore for that sort of stuff. Will also give that Color Enhancer a spin... Gary's article made it sound very useful for designers who want to quickly experiment with different colors. We'll see.
And, you keep coming back to the cost. So low. What, $89 for the thing? Self-employed, you COULD run a graphics business with it, and save thousands off the Adobe Creative Suite, or Symphony, whatever that's called this year. Sending PDFs off to customers or printers, would problably work out OK.
Last thought - amusing to see all these little companies jumping into cloud land. Store that art in Magix Cloud! Get your canned graphics from Magix Cloud! Pay extra for yet-to-come 'gotta have' graphics, coming your way from the Cloud! There's gold in them thar skies, yes indeedy...
I wanna say up front I am a good ol' capitalist. I believe in the system. Make that the former, we'll earn your money, system.Quote:
Originally Posted by jon404
Cloud storage of what use to be at the worse a content download is more of a pita than a convenience for the customer. Trying to monetize (or leverage) content isn't anything new, of course. Many applications have historically had extra content available for a fee. But the current schemes of Corel and Xara of putting everything as on-demand download confounds my mind. It is anti-customer and complicates being off-line and utilizing "included" content. And at least as regards Corel's CDN, it is prone to hiccups and stalls. Browsing for their fonts would be a nightmare if one depended upon the crappy fonts that ship with software. Hopefully I am wrong and a content installable is available.
Mixing both included content and "premium" content is simply soft advertising in the hope beyond hope someone will "just gotta have that premium-cost content." I personally don't like the scheme and smacks of desperation in the form of appearing "current" in order to squeak out a pittance of a sale.
Mike
Maybe a fortune in dimes? If I make a clip art, like an irresistable vector graphic of a 1935 Delage Lalique crystal hood ornament, and Xara-Magix (XMX?) sells it for 99 cents, will I get 10 cents? Great fortunes starting from small acorns, isn't that the idea... sort of like the stock photo services? Now, some might say this is a price-reduction race to the bottom, but hey, what do they know.
EDIT -- am very interested, Mike W, in your opinion of the claimed PDF improvements. Is it better... ready for prime time with both printers and Adobe software usage?
I didn't read that Xara improved the PDF exporting in the blurbs. I didn't spend much time on their web site, though.Quote:
Originally Posted by jon404
I did like the one about full PSD support. I hope that's the case. I have a PSD I can guarantee will fail sitting on my desktop. Well, at least it does in XDP X9...
I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has purchased this version and tried out the photolooks plugin.
Angelize -- I bought the upgrade to P&GD9, and tried the FX > Magic Bullet > Photolooks sub-program. It is, well, stupid. Cutesy captions. wildly overdone effects. The good news? It's free! the bad news? It's free! Get what you pay for kind of thing. Guess Magix is going for the kiddie market, like with the Font Awesome thing. Awesome, dude! Rad! Why not just include a bunch of .TTF symbol-type fonts, like Corel did, and probably still does?
Good stuff -- the new Photo tool > Shadow brightness control is pretty neat. And like Gary's article, the Enhance Color works much, much better than before, at changing the color of an object. Designer's dream.
Anyway, at the intro upgrade US $35, great value, even if it crashes a PDF now and then... took a file with a lot of shadows back & forth into P&GD 9 to make a PDF... but then you lose the Shadow brightness effect and sometimes other stuff. But for $35, I can live with that. By the time DP 10 comes out, they will have fixed the bugs.
And DP 10 will probably have much more new stuff, right? Hopefully, a way to publish to Apple iBook format, or to .Epub? Needs to have something compelling to get users away fro Adobe software, like the $10 Photoshop they are selling for tablets...
I wondered about the photo looks, because it seemed similar to Perfect Effects by onOne. I got perfect effects a few months ago on a special promotion and I use it as an external editor with DP9. There are a few things like needing to make a bitmap copy to get the photo to load into PE but it makes quick work of a lot of complicated tasks and has masking tools. I think that I might be sticking with PE but we'll see once Designer Pro 10 comes out.
sadly no as far as I can see - it's just carefully positioned preset gradientsQuote:
Originally Posted by MarcT
it does not have 'full PSD support, including layers' - [how the heck could it have full PSD support, other than including layers I ask myself] - for a start clipping layers do not come in clipped, so 'full support' is just advertising crapQuote:
Originally Posted by mwenz
....
so what do I think...
colour select: it's mimicking what can be done, often better, elsewhere - but I guess if you only have the one program, useful
smart shapes: has potential, but needs more; for example unless I missed it there is no option to vary a line width non-uniformally and save as a stroke shape, that would have been cool
font awesome: pretty run-of-the-mill stuff
nothing here for me really so:
Attachment 102846
maybe the pro version will be better.....
PS: I did not notice any problems with my wacom bamboo pressure sensitivity - [I do have the wacom software installed] - but yes the fast drawing is same as ever, because of the time taken to recalculate the screen I understand; an example of vector being slower than raster...
The PhotoLooks presets have some similarities, actually a lot of similarities, but what is useful and offers a lot of potential is that each effect has several controls that allow you to either modify (improve?) upon the effect, or create your own effects using the extended photo editing tools.
At any rate, you can apply different effects until you find one that works well with a specific photo.
Quote:
Originally Posted by handrawn
Yeah, I knew it was marketing hype...which at its over the top nature just leads to frustration for people who are not smart enough to try before they buy.Quote:
Photo & Graphic Designer has full support for importing and exporting Adobe Photoshop® PSD files including layer support.
I looked and the only blurb I saw was about improved importing. Which is always a welcome thing in my book.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon
Not certain what to say here. I have had few issues exporting to PDF the type of assets I use in ID, QXP or PP. Much of the time I will actually export to EPS and use that in the mentioned applications which, in theory, ought to be more difficult to get right for those applications. I have had issues with some TG members' work produced as PDF in trying to help them. And there are absolutely some things that need fixed (like print on all plates), larger document size, etc, which would make XDP more useful to me. Oh, and PDF/x-4 (which likely will never happen).Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon
But I mainly make assets for these other applications and the web. In that regard, CMYK and RGB output, whether as an illustration, ad, or web asset has always been the colors as designed, placable, and gone through those applications PDF routines just fine.
Now that was funny. Not that you intended it to be so, Jon.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon
Now that ePub3 is becoming more used, an application like XDP for the creation of fixed ePubs would seem to be a no brainer...though I likely would still use Jutoh now that it is up to their 2.x release, it works great for them.
After seeing what is in P&GD 10's release, I have fairly low expectations over the forthcoming XDP release. I hope I am not disappointed.
I was interested in this. I just tried a PDF I had played with before. Before most words came in separately, now it has paragraphs that are much easier to edit. I will look more closely later.Quote:
Originally Posted by mwenz
Anyone know if Xara intend to extend their Page and Layout Designer functionality? I'm thinking of a TOC ability mainly.
I never know what's better, the program or your description of it :-)Quote:
Originally Posted by gwpriester
Six of each and half a dozen of the other methinks.
Thanks for First Look, it makes a person very eager to try all the new goodies.
Have downloaded it as I write :-)
Grenou
@ Mike W -- another Jutoh user! Made my day.
Can we create our own custom Smart Shapes?
This it would be a great feature!
Best ePub creator there is on the PC. Especially for its price, I don't know why it isn't used in place of ID/QXP/PP by anyone on a PC...but it has always been in active development and it simply works. If you don't have version 2.x and still are making ePubs, I believe it is a free upgrade.Quote:
Originally Posted by jon404
Mike
@luciandesign - No, you cannot create your own SmartShapes but it's a great idea.
@Grenou :star