There are several new features available in the ninth instalment of Photo & Graphic Designer. For the purposes of this review, we'll concentrate on the photographic features.

The Photo Healing tool is extremely similar to the Spot removal tool found on other editing suites such as Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. It essentially clones the skin to remove spots and blemishes without having to select an area to copy first.

Magic Eraser

Masking Magic Eraser

The Magic Background Eraser will remove any unwanted backgrounds allowing you to paste a subject over another background. It's similar to Vertus' Fluid Mask, although this is  easier in many respects. You only have to select a small area of the background and subject, staying away from edges. The program will then work out areas that need to be kept including fine areas such as hair. It works brilliantly with that, but we found small pockets of the background that hadn't been erased. We also had trouble with running out of memory while trying to perform this action. We had to reduce the resolution of the picture in the Utilities drop down menu (optimise images). This really shouldn't need to happen. If you want to blend two full size images, then you should be able to. It's a shame because the actual work-flow is much more intelligent than Fluid Mask.

There are lots of other photographic effects available as plug-ins such as Fake HDR, Tilt-Shift, Little Planet, Pencil or Thermal which creates a thermal image. However, these are only available on the 64-bit version of Photo & Graphic Designer 9.

Shadow Enhancer

One funny little feature for adding light to a localised area is done by selecting the area in darkness with the awesome Select tool. You then increase the light using Levels, use a graduated blend by selecting the Blend tool and dragging a line in the direction you want the light to move in. The marching ants will disappear leaving a hard selected edge. However, adjusting the feathering will remove this. It's a great little trick for if you're playing with light, love the picture but wish you'd thrown a little extra light into the dark side.

Performance

As we mentioned earlier, a lot of time and effort has been put into making Photo & Graphic Designer 9 as fast as possible. It shows. We were astounded as it read our directory of photographs in a flash. The only action that seems to take any time is optimising the picture for adjustment such as cutting it out to place it on another picture.

Without optimising, we found that we kept running out of memory and Photo & Graphic Designer 9 popped up instructions that bordered on ambiguous. Certainly, a newcomer to the program wouldn't be able to work it out without extensive research. The Help button is very useful but doesn't cover this issue plainly, we had to do a lot of digging.

Conclusion

We were initially concerned about Xara's seemingly blasé attitude to reducing the quality of the photographs, such as optimising which lowers resolution and removes information. But then it occurred to us that this a program that has to strike an even keel with both photographers and graphic designers. The latter working exclusively online and don't need  - or indeed want – large resolution images.

The features of Photo & Graphic Designer 9 are intelligent, intuitive and, above all, fast. However, they're not as powerful as other, more dedicated programs and certainly not exclusive. For example, the Xara offers Levels and it works, it just seems more clumsy than what's available in Photoshop. However, we love the masking feature and how it doesn't have to be a precise art like what you'd have to do in Fluid Mask.

We can't see thaPhoto & Graphic Designer 9 is a program that dedicated photographers would use exclusively. It's a great back-up tool for using on images that will be exhibited online. That way, you can reduce the quality and increase the speed of your work-flow. It will also benefit anyone creating websites for photographers. The support from the website is good with lots of pages although we had trouble finding a decent troubleshooting guide. For the sake of £66 that it costs, it's a pretty decent back-up tool if you have a heavy online presence and enjoy playing around with photographs.

Ratings (out of 5)
Features	4
Ease-of-use	3.5
Value for money	4.5

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