Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is a versatile graphics package which comes packed with editing, illustration and design tools.

A capable photo editor can optimise your image automatically, or gives you full control over brightness, contrast, sharpness, saturation, temperature and more. There are strong core features (crop, resize, fix red-eye, shadow/ highlights adjustments), many advanced tools (content aware zooming, photo healing, bitmap > vector conversion), 60+ built-in Live Effects and Photoshop plugin support, while professional options like layer blending, feathering and vector masking help ensure you get precisely the results you need.

The program's illustration abilities start with a host of shape, line and freehand drawing tools. 3D extrusion means you can drag any shape to create a properly lit and rendered 3D version. You're able to customise the results further with transparency, feathering, shadow, bevel and contour tools, or use the blend tool to blend from one shape to another (just drag and drop). There's a lot to learn, but fortunately editing is easy - even freehand work can be tweaked later.

Text features are impressive. You can position and rotate text as you'd like, make it follow a curved path, apply any of the other effects as required. The desktop publishing-type feel continues in the Designs Gallery, where you'll find templates for calendars, greetings cards, invitations, disc covers, more. A bundled clipart library also helps, and powerful print and various export options (including PDF and PSD) make it easy to share your creations with others.

Essentially, think of Photo & Graphic Designer as your one-stop tool for creating and editing your image requirements - it's like taking Adobe Photoshop and adding Illustrator on top, but with less of a learning curve.