Xara Xtreme photo and bitmap handling is faster and more powerful than you'll find in other graphics programs. Xara Xtreme uses compression techniques that means that Xara files including photos can be up to ten times smaller than equivalent images in other drawing programs, with enormous benefits for speed and usability.  Plus Xara's unique non-destructive editing maintains the high quality of your original photo, however many times you edit it, and gives you the ability to undo any edits you've made to your photo, even after saving and reloading. As a result many people use Xara Xtreme as their primary, general purpose image composition tool.

Almost anything you can do to vector drawings you can also do to photos/bitmaps in Xtreme. For example, you can edit the shape, alter the transparency, including graduated transparency, use bitmaps as fills on any shape, add a drop shadow, feather the edges and a lot more - all in real-time.

Xara Xtreme supports all the common bitmap formats, for both import and export. Add to this the ability to handle multi-layer 32-bit alpha channel (semi-transparent) bitmaps and Xara Xtreme is a supreme image composition tool.

Xara Xtreme also includes an integrated photo editing tool. We don't pretend this makes it either a painting program or pixel editor but it does provide the most common photo editing features such as cropping, rotating, enhancing, sharpening, red-eye removal etc with a fast, interactive, live-preview of all edits. Plus the new V4 includes an effective photo panorama creator. The photo tool will continue to grow in capabilities with future releases of Xara Xtreme.

Xara Xtreme includes a fast bitmap tracer to help convert bitmaps to vector shapes.

Xara Xtreme also supports third party plug-ins such as Adobe Photoshop plug-ins to expand the range of available effects that you can apply to your photos.

Finally Xtreme includes a collection of professionally designed, fully editable templates that include photo frames and photo album layouts.