Photo & Graphic Designer 10 Released

[gwpriester]

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.

[mwenz]

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

[gwpriester]

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)

[gwpriester]

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. I was working with a pre-release version. I downloaded the PGD10 release version and the problem goes away.

Sorry for all the confusion.

[jon404]

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...

[mwenz]

...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.

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

[jon404]

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?

[mwenz]

...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.

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...

[angelize]

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has purchased this version and tried out the photolooks plugin.

[jon404]

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...