Xara Designer Pro 7.1.2

Xara Designer Pro (formerly known as Xara XtremePro) is a versatile application with tools for all your graphics and design needs.

You could simply use the program to edit photos, for instance. Open an image and you can rotate or crop it, optimise brightness and colours at a click, manually tweak levels if you prefer and then sharpen or blur the photo. Support for Photoshop plugins means access to all the effects you'll ever need. And new features include Clone and Perspective Correction tools, while content-aware resizing enables you to zoom in on the subject of a photo, while preserving other parts of the image.

If you'd like an easy way to get creative with your photos, then look no further than the Designs Gallery, which includes templates for greeting's cards, invitations, scrapbooks, certificates, photo albums, CD and DVD covers and labels, brochures, business cards, Flash animations and more. (Only a few of these are available in the trial version, but thumbnail previews of the others provide a good idea of what you're getting.)

Whether you're working on a built-in template, or creating a project from scratch, you'll appreciate the many powerful design tools: vector drawing, 3D extrusions, transparency and blend tools, shadows, bevels, contours and more.

There's a complete WYSIWYG web design tool, allowing you to create complex, multi-page sites with pop-up and mouseover effects, navigation bars and menus (no HTML experience required). Customise these with widgets to add e-commerce, media sharing, social networking and other features, then preview and publish your work in a couple of clicks.

You also get Panorama Studio, a useful tool for creating photo panoramas; multi-core CPU support to improve performance; colour separation and PANTONE colour support; and export options that now include PDF, PDF/X and XPS.

Note the above review applied to Xara Designer Pro 6 This is the brand new v7 which ships with a whole host of new features, such as a Photo Magic Erase Tool which will remove unwanted objects from photos, 'magic snap' for object alignment, tabbed document windows and lots of new features for web designers. See the What's New information for more detailed v7 new features.

Xara Designer Pro is a very powerful graphics and illustration tool. The built-in design templates help you get productive early on,