Photo & Graphic Designer version 15 – very happy with it

This will be a bit of a rant but I will try to spare you the raving ;)

My story is that I was reluctant to upgrade my version of Designer Pro 7 to a more current version of Designer Pro.
It is just that personally I have no need for the web design features.
My Photo & Graphic Designer version was at 8.
Then the upgrade offer came for PGD 15. I was more than pleasantly surprised that all prepress features made their way into PGD – a wise decision by XARA/Magix and that was the top incentive for my upgrade.

While I can relate to designers using several applications, I much prefer to be able to accomplish a large variety of tasks in just one application. Lately, I did a lot of testing and running trial versions of several programs. For example Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer: Quite impressive what Serif came up with, beautiful interface – including an option for a light-coloured UI in the latest version. I found the interface well-structured, and yes, although developed from scratch, the interfaces cannot hide their Serif Plus product range ancestry. That may be a good thing and I don’t see while Serif Plus range users should feel deserted much longer. On the flip side I found Affinity’s offerings too resource-hungry and missing features that are essential for my work. I am also not a fan of the layer/artboard logic in Affinity Designer.

Next test drive was the CorelDraw Suite, not the very latest version 2017, but Version X8. While Corel remains an impressive set of tools and features in my book, I experienced severe performance issues with their newer versions. (So, I will stick with my version X6 for accessing older files)

So, PGD 15 is the clear winner for all the good reasons such as performance, intuitive interface and tool sets, convenience, and now prepress features from the Pro Version as well. I am glad to have an up-to-date application for the vast majority of my design tasks once again. And then there is that Xara-factor which is hard to define. Like looking forward to a working session, which I do not have with other design application much.

Axel
Germany

That is some recommendation and great research Axel. Thanks for sharing.

Does P&GD now have the Pantone colors in it?

I use them all. My favorite is XDP by a mile for anything but type. AD does have great OpenType support. However, the means of accessing stylistic sets and alternates in CD is simply brilliant for a vector design application. I don't have (and didn't have) the performance issues in CD (currently having only CD2017 installed). But I have read the threads about such things. If I had issues I also would use X6, it was a solid performer once the first 3 patches came out.

One of my concerns about "downgrading" to P&GD is I need all the XDP features sans the webby stuff. Once that is all in it, I would be more than happy to do so.

Mike

Mike - No support for Pantone colors. I just checked. But the same range PDF and PDF/X filters as DPX.

Thank you, Gary.

Same image setting options in the Print Dialog for printer's marks, overprinting black, etc? (But why those options are also not in the export to pdf dialog after all this time still boggles my mind...)

Mike,

Still boggles my mind too ;-)
On top of that, I must admit that only very recently I found out that "overprint line / overprint fill" is just a right-click away with an object selected within the document at the design stage.

Hi Axel. Thanks.

By default Xara products knockout black (it shouldn't). Doing so with every black object is onerous.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gwpriester

Mike - No support for Pantone colors. I just checked. But the same range PDF and PDF/X filters as DPX.

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Page & Layout Designer (which I'm very happy with) has Pantone support but you forfeit the artistic brushes from the line gallery - win some loose some ;)

Exactly, win some lose some.

The good thing, though, is that you can always define a colour to be a spot colour, even if Pantone support is not implemented.
You could even give that colour a Pantone name. Makes no difference for the printing house – it is just a 5th film/plate – in the case of one spot colour in addition to CMYK, whether Pantone or not. Well, that is for files with one spot colour, which is very common in my work. It may get tricky at the designing stage if you have to use 2-3 spot colours.