Although the latest version of Xara's Photo and Graphic Designer (version 10) was released last summer, I failed to notice until recently. We're still several months away from version 11, so let's see what's new in this version.
Xara has been around for a long time. Back in the dark ages, Corel established a marketing agreement with Xara, but that seemed to be designed more to give Corel access to Xara's functions than to sell Xara products. At the end of the agreement, Xara once again became responsible for its own future.
Photo and Graphic Designer is intended to work both with bitmap images (digital photos, for example) and with vector images (those made of geometric shapes).
The past few versions have concentrated almost exclusively on the photo part of the program. Version 10 includes several welcome new and improved photo functions, but the graphic designer part of the program has also been improved.
One of Xara's premiere strengths is and always has been its speed. You won't find the breadth and depth of features offered by Adobe's numerous products, but you will find an excellent selection of useful tools in a program that's faster than the competition and lower priced, too.
One feature I'd like to see in some later version of the product is the equivalent of Adobe's Camera Raw application, which has the ability to modify raw photographic files in their native format. Camera Raw achieves this by means of a "sidecar" files that are associated with the raw files and carry information about what changes Camera Raw made. The advantage is that you retain the original file, with access to the modifications, but without modifying the original file.
Xara achieves a similar result by opening the raw file and converting it to the Xara native format. This ensures that the original file is retained, but changes made in Xara are not available in other applications because those applications can't read the XAR file format.
The inability to save changes in raw format is a minor issue and you may find that the extra features Photo and Graphic Designer 10 offers and its lower price are well worth the trade off. Adding text, clip art, and other items to photographs is easy because of the many built-in features on the Insert Menu, the Design Gallery, and the Online Content Catalog. The online resource is relatively limited; selelcting arrow smart shapes, for example, offers only 8 options, but once the shape has been imported into the image, it can be modified.
In addition to Smart Shapes, you'll find Font Awesome symbols, a library of 519 open-source pictographic icons that can be colored and resized. Font Awesome content is used on most up-to-date websites. (Yes, TechByter Worldwide uses Font Awecome shapes.) The library is maintained by Dave Gandy (https://github.com/FortAwesome/).
Xara has enabled these inside the Insert menu and any of the shapes is easily inserted.
I certainly wouldn't recommend that you do what I've done to this photograph, but an individual effect can add information and interest to an image.
You can see how easy it is to get carried away with the special effects. Use them sparingly.
New users in particular will probably spend a lot of time using the Insert Menu (1) and the Design Gallery and Bitmap Gallery (2), but many of the program's most powerful features remain in the Tools Menu (3). In the example, I've selected the bevel tool and I'm adjusting the angle of the light. Because the light on the cat is from the right, the light on the arrow has been modified to come from the same direction.
Click any of the smaller images for a full-size view.
Press Esc to dismiss the larger image.
The finished image.
Although the underlying image is a photograph, all of the additions are vector-based. They can be made larger or smaller without loss of quality because vector images are mathematical descriptions of an object.
Bitmap images, on the other hand, can generally be reduced in size without suffering significant harm, but enlarging the images results in jagged-looking, fuzzy images.
One of the most common problems photographers encounter occurs when a dark subject is photographed against a light background, particularly when the camera's automatic setting mode controls the exposure. The result is usually something like this picture of a banner outside the New York Public Library looking east along 42nd Street toward the Chrysler building. The red and blue NYPL banner is in shadows and the Chrysler building is in direct sunlight. The result is not a pleasing image.
Here I've allowed Xara Photo and Graphic Designer to make the automatic changes that it thinks are best. This is an improvement for the banner, but the already too bright Chrysler building is even brighter.
The levels adjustment allows me to get a bit closer, but it's still not quite what I'd like to see. Even worse, this is an image that's nearly 8 years old (meaning that camera sensors have improved considerably in the interim) and it's a JPG image (meaning that much of the original scene's detail is already lost). So it's an up-hill battle.
You may have noticed that the buildings on the left appeared to be leaning. That's because the camera wasn't level. I had pointed the lens upward slightly to include the top of the Chrysler Building.
Xara Photo and Graphic Designer also includes a perspective correction tool. I used it here to automatically straighten the buildings.
New tools allow the highlights and shadows to be manipulated individually in addition to providing access to controls that modify the overall brightness and contrast of the image. I've gone a bit overboard here because light "blooms" are visible around both the banner and the buildings.
Additionally, the adjustments are so aggressive that an unwanted posterization effect is beginning to appear in the banner.
Then I repeated the process, being much less aggressive on both the highlights and the shadows.
There still a bit of light bloom around the banner, but it's virually gone from the buildings and the overall result is far better than either the automatic process or the manual process using the levels adjustment.
When saving an image that you've modified, the recommended procedure is to save in XAR format because this retains the unchanged original file. Raw-format files must be saved in Xara format because each camera manufacturer maintains its own proprietary format for raw images. Original JPG images should be retained because each time the file is modified and saved, some of the information is lost.
If you want to modify a color or range of colors, Xara Photo and Graphic Designer makes the process easy. Start by placing one or more selection points on the color you want to modify. This tool is often used to intensify the color of the sky without modifying other colors in the picture. In this case, I'm going to modify the color of a pickle that my younger daughter was holding in Katz's Delicatessan several years ago. Pickles are generally green.
But what if I wanted her to be holding a purple pickle instead?
Well, here you go.
No pickles were harmed in the creation of this image.
After purchasing Xara Photo and Graphic Designer, users are given access to a number of additional features that can be downloaded and installed.
One of the add-ons is PhotoLooks 2, an application that Red Giant sold for $200.
PhotoLooks 2 includes more than 100 presets ranging from vignettes to cinematic looks. After starting with one of the presents, the user can modify the look to create a custom effect that fits the image.
I started with a picture of a D training running above ground in Brooklyn and thought that I'd like to create an antique photo look.
This is what I came up with. The presence of a modern train with the modern orange D marking in the window clearly indicates that this is not an antique image.
The effect would be quite believeable, though, if I had started with an image that did not contain the train.
Xara Photo and Graphic Designer Offers Powerful Features at a Budget PriceAs usual, Xara packs a lot of useful features into this $90 package (upgrades are $60). Besides the application's photographic and design functions, it can also be used to develop websites. It's well worth looking at
if you need to perform any of those tasks and it's an uncommonly responsive program, particularly considering the impressive feature set.
Additional details are available on the Xara website.
Once upon a time, people (Murrow, Huntley, Cronkite, Brinkley, and Sevareid to name a few) told the American people about things they should know. Then big businesses discovered that they could make a great deal of money by telling people what they wanted to hear. In short, that explains today's "24-hour news cycle" in which people who are called journalists scamper after the current hot story until another hot story breaks.
Now a team at Harvard University has developed an app that will allow all of us to scamper after the next hot story. BriefMe is a "news ranking system" that displays the highest-ranking news articles in real time, "determined by the BriefMe Score."
This sounds like an application that strikes another blow for lowest-common-denominator journalism and against knowledge, but let's consider what the developers have to say.
"In today's endless news cycle," says BriefMe CEO Max Campion, "staying informed is a tall and overwhelming task." Campion says Huffington Post alone publishes more than 1200 articles daily. The New York Times, Washington Post, Columbus Dispatch, Bellefontaine Examiner, and thousands of other newspapers add more content.
"BriefMe's ranking system was specifically developed to filter through the noise," according to Campion. He says that this makes it easy to quickly find "the most important articles of the moment."
But what does "the most important articles of the moment" mean? Last week, the "most important story" might well have involved a dress that was either blue and black or yellow and gold. It certainly received a lot of coverage, but was it important?
The team says BriefMe's proprietary algorithm "uses article and topic relevance in addition to analytics from the billions of people on social media to calculate the top articles." The app works only on Apple's IOS devices and is available from the Apple Store. According to the BriefMe website, an Android version is coming soon.
The company says that BriefMe will re-define front-page news. "Instead of relying on an editor to determine what's newsworthy, the app defines top news by what people are reading and sharing most."
Does that concern you? BriefMe quotes CNN's Senior Political Analyst, David Gergen: BriefMe "will not only provide a single destination for the latest news but tell me in real time exactly what articles people all over the world are reading and sharing the most." So now the news media will report what people are talking about. Gergen is also Co-Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
More information is available on the BriefMe website and when it's available for Android devices, I'll take another look. It may be that BriefMe will turn out to be just another tool, neither good nor bad in its own right, but something that can be used well or poorly.
"We don't need another app! What we need is better customer service!" That's the clear message from an online survey by Harris Poll.
The survey was sponsored by NICE Systems, a company that provides software used by businesses to provide customer service. The company's applications are also designed to ensure legal compliance as required and reduce financial crime.
The survey shows that the most frustrating aspect of customer service is dealing with service representatives who are not adequately prepared to resolve a customer's problem. The survey questioned more than 2000 US adults online.
NICE President Miki Migdal characterizes the research this way: "Dissatisfaction arises when organizations cannot deliver a consistent, effortless, and personalized journey across all channels and touch points."
Survey results indicate that nearly all (95%) of respondents felt that they had enough methods by which they could contact companies, but were frustrated by the result of actually contacting companies.
Migdal notes that several attributes can contribute to customer satisfaction: For example, management needs better visibility into all interactions between customers and the company. He also stresses the need for everyone in the company to understand customers' needs so that they can provide what customers need when they need it. To accomplish this, the company must ensure that the right person is available to customers at the right time and that this person is engaged, knowledgeable, and ready to help.
This survey by Harris Poll questioned 2030 people age 18 and older. Harris notes that the survey was not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.
Chinese electronics manufacturer Huawei introduced a challenge to Apple's upcoming watch this week at the Mobile World Congress in Spain. Both watches are "coming soon". Remember when companies announced software products that would be shipping "any day now"? These were called "vaporware" because sometimes they never shipped. With the advent of wearable computing devices, perhaps these should be referred to as "vapor-wear".
Apple's rectangular watch.
Huawei says the 1.4-inch round watch (Apple's is rectangular) has a touch-sensitive active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) display with a scratch-proof lens in a stainless steel frame. The watch will include a heart rate monitor and 6-axis motion sensors.
Huawei CEO, Richard Yu, says that people expect watches to be round. It will be available in gold, silver, and black; user will be able to choose from nearly 4 dozen watch straps.
The watch's display is 400 pixels across with a resolution of 286 pixels per inch. A high contrast ratio (Yu claims that it's 10,000:1) makes the image crisp and clear.
The watch is powered by a Qualcomm 1.2GHz processor running Android 4.3. This is probably the point at which I need to insert the obligatory reference to today's watches having more computing power than the devices that Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins took along when they visited the moon in 1969.
The Huawei watch includes 4GB of storage, 512MB of RAM, and Bluetooth 4.1. The company has research and development operations in the US, Russia, Germany, India, Sweden, and about 10 other countries. See more on the Huawei website.
Every router shipped comes with a default user name (usually "admin" or something similar) and a default password (blank, "password", "admin", and the name of the manufacturer are common). The admin user name often cannot be changed and if you don't change the default password you're asking for trouble.
Security writer Brian Krebbs discussed this recently on his blog. Krebbs became interested in security when he was working as a reporter for The Washington Post and has written more than 1300 blog posts on security, at least one book, and many accounts of security breaches.
"In case you needed yet another reason to change the default username and password on your wired or wireless Internet router," Krebbs writes, "Phishers are sending out links that, when clicked, quietly alter the settings on vulnerable routers to harvest online banking credentials and other sensitive data from victims."
This ploy has been seen in Brazil, where spammers crafted messages that were designed to mimic messages from Brazil’s largest Internet service provider. The messages describe an unpaid bill and offer a link for more information.
"The real danger of attacks like these," Krebbs warns, "is that they bypass antivirus and other security tools, and they are likely to go undetected by the victim for long periods of time."
Read the full article on Krebbs on Security.
