Xara Xtreme Pro 3

Xara Xtreme Pro is one of those apps that you feel like you should buy, don’t know why, but in the end put it off and make do with your current toolset. But if you’re after a vector illustration application, have a bit of artistic talent and some time to put in, buy it, because Xara is, for want of a better word, ace.

It would be nice if Xara focused just on illustration, because that’s where it’s strongest, and Xara already has a fleet of specific web-drawing editors in Xara Web Style, as well as a 3D app in Xara3D 6. In terms of illustration, Xara has a speedy redraw, great preview and excellent precision tools.

But don’t be fooled – to get the kind of photorealistic results shown on Xara’s website will take a lot of talent and plenty of patience. However, the toolset does enable you to quickly create blends, transparencies and other vector objects that give the illusion of a raster image. The advantages of this approach to graphics? You can scale to large sizes without loss of quality.

One thing we particularly like about Xara is the live solid object scaling and dragging – eliminating the bounding box approach, because the whole object moves as you scale, drag and so on. Live Effects are nothing new, but are useful as an illustration solution. The usual envelopes, bevels, drop shadows and so on complete a thoroughly comprehensive illustration toolset.

Xara’s photo-editing tools are pretty run-of-the-mill. The now mandatory quick editing tool, labelled XPE (Xara Picture Editor), along with support for Photoshop plug-ins and levels controls are okay, but nothing that you probably haven’t already got in another app.

Multi-page DTP support alleviates the pain of separate documents if using it for newsletters (we suspect this isn’t going to be used in a professional publishing environment), as does the ability to flow text from one frame to another. Support for separations is a boon, too.

Improved Office integration, as well as better file interchange performance (ie, better file format support) makes Xara more versatile in a semi-pro or amateur creative environment. There are also new tools for creating Flash-based animations, but we doubt you’ll be ditching your current web workflow for a Xara-based one. Those dabbling with Flash-based content for the first time may find some use for the tools on offer.

There’s no doubt that Xara is a great application, but forget the DTP and Flash animation stuff and concentrate on the fantastic illustration tools. With patience and effort, it soon becomes a tool you’ll pick up again and again for photorealistic vector ‘painting’ – seriously rivalling Expression and thoroughly spanking Illustrator’s bottom (in terms of features for price anyway). Even if you’ll only use the illustration tools, Xara Xtreme Pro is well worth splashing out for.