What do you like best about Xara Designer Pro X?

[gwpriester]

Chris Dickman, who runs www.Graphics.com and who makes galleries available for Xara art and a lot more, wants to publish a review of Xara Designer Pro X. But instead of the usual review, Chris thinks it might be better to let the users (that's us) tell the story.

So, if you'd like to participate, and help publicize the world's greatest graphics application, respond and list two or three things you really like about Xara Designer Pro X. If you want to compare it favorably to Illustrator or CorelDRAW, I think that would be OK.

So I'll start off.

I've been a Xara users since 1996. I use Xara Designer Pro X for everything I do with the exception of converting bitmaps to grayscale and CMYK. My primary uses are graphics and website design, which I do entirely in Designer Pro X. This includes all site graphics, all photo editing, web site design, and publishing the sites directly to the web. I also create 3D stereograms for books and magazines. I do everything except the actual compilation of the stereograms in Designer Pro X. I cannot think of a better application for graphic designers, and website designers.

One of the new features/tools that I use almost every day for my stereogram work is the Color Select Erase Tool. It lets me select a color or range of colors in a bitmap and either modify that selection with various Photoshop compatible filters, or erase the selected colors. You can add to the range or colors or select more than one color at a time. For me I use this to drop out the background on overlay images. The tool is not new to photo editing applications, but in a vector drawing application it's a breakthrough.