Photo Tools
Design & Useability Enhancements
Web Authoring / Web Publishing
Other Minor Enhancements
Clone Tool (Clone and Magic Erase)
The Clone Tool has been significantly improved. When you clone, copy or magic erase an area it now uses the current edited photo as the source, instead of the original photo (for manual clone and magic erase objects), which makes the whole process far more WYSIWYG.Color Select / Erase tool
This powerful new tool serves two purposes; to erase (make transparent) parts of photos based on colors, and secondly to allow only those color-selected areas to be adjusted using the Photo Tool Enhance operations (such as Brightness, Blur, Hue Adjustment etc).
So you can, for example, easily adjust the brightness of the blue sky in your photo or remove a colored background, or change the color of a flower, without affecting other parts of the picture.
If you want to adjust the brightness, sharpness, or color, etc, or a color-selected area rather than simply erasing it, then you can use the ‘Make soft mask’ option to turn the color-selected areas into a mask, so that subsequent Enhance operations affect only those selected areas.
Here are a few examples.
One of these photos shows the real colors. Can you guess which one?
Note that a wide range of shades of the flower color, from light to dark, are being re-colored, but the green leaves are not. And as with most operations in Designer this is fast, real-time, and non-destructive in nature!
Note that a wide range of shades of the flower color, from light to dark, are being re-colored, but the green leaves are not. And as with most operations in Designer this is fast, real-time, and non-destructive in nature!
Hue Adjustment
The Photo Enhance tool now includes a new hue adjustment feature, allowing a photo (or parts of a photo when using a soft mask or the new ‘Color Select’ tool) to be tinted with any color.
Other Photo Improvements
- An updated ‘Optimize all images’ function will scan all graphics and images in your document - now including PNGs as well as JPEGs - and convert them to the optimum size and optimum image type. This can substantially reduce memory use and .web file sizes. (NB this is a destructive operation).
- You are also given the option to optimize images to JPEG when importing, if Designer recommends it.
- The integrated Panorama stitching tool now stitches up to 8 photos (previous limit was 6) and processing is multi-threaded for higher performance on multi-core computers.
- Photo replacement is now smarter. When you drag and drop a photo onto an existing one, other existing copies of that image are not all replaced together by the new photo, unless they are inside the same soft group.
Shape Builder Tool
The Shape Builder Info Bar provides controls over brush size, the roundness, brush tip angle and the softness, as well as a smoothness control which adjusts how accurately the brush stroke follows your mouse movement.
Note: This tool can be used on photos, but it’s only useful to enlarge an already edited or cropped photo outline.
Text Styles
What’s more we offer ‘live’ Style preview; Simply select some text and then traverse the Style menu - the selection will change to show your text in each Style. It’s a quick and easy way to try out your Styles without having to actually select and undo each in turn.
Designs Gallery, new templates and UI improvements
New content & usability improvements:
- We’ve added a selection of modern new print templates, including greeting cards, brochures, business cards, CD covers and certificates, plus a selection of new clipart.
- The Designs Gallery has been completely re-arranged and re-ordered to be more easily navigable.
- Live Designs Gallery. The Designs Gallery is now completely server linked, so we can update and add more templates, clipart, Widgets etc.
Page & Layer Gallery improvements
It’s now possible to select more than one page in the Page & Layer Gallery and re-position them with drag & drop. Plus there’s right click access to menu options to Delete, Cut or Copy the selection of pages to the clipboard. You can go into another document and paste whole pages.
You can now also drag objects into and out of ordinary groups in the Gallery (note this is not supported for special groups like anchored groups, repeating groups, etc).
Resizable Color Editor
Shape Eraser Tool
Hard Erase
When used with a hard edge, it’s a fast and direct way of adjusting the vector outline of a shape inwards. If you stroke around the edge of a shape with your mouse, it just moves the outline inwards. (In Pro: It acts as a great complement to the above ‘shape builder’ tool in that it can be used to adjust the vector edge of shapes and photos.)
Dragging a hard-edge erase stroke completely across an object will cut it in two and create two separate objects. If you click and hold (i.e. don’t perform a brush stroke), it will simply cut a hole in the shape.
Soft Erase
You also have a soft erase option; strokes over any object (which can be any shape, text or photo) will erase, ie make transparent, the brush-stroked area. The softness control adjusts how soft the edge of the brush stroke is.
Non-destructive editing
One of the great things about this soft erase feature is that it’s not destructive, that is it doesn’t change the underlying erased shape or photo at all, unlike most other photo editing programs.
This has some important benefits: not only can change your mind at any point and re-adjust the erase, but you can also un-erase and even remove all the erase strokes and recover the original, unmodified shape, text or photo. What’s more you can, for example, apply a soft erase across some text, or perhaps a 3D extruded shape, and then still edit that text, or adjust the 3D extrude, after the erase has been applied.
Support for inline graphics
Media Exchange via the Share Menu
The new Share Menu puts the MX (Media Exchange) into Designer! All titles in the MAGIX/Xara range can share media files with each other and with some important third party services.Using the new Share menu, the current selection (whether it’s a photo, or any other object) can be passed as a JPEG to other installed MAGIX MX applications (eg Movie Edit Pro MX), to MAGIX Online Album, and to Flickr and Facebook.
Import & Export
- 'Import graphics from the Web' has been improved and now imports graphics and text from a web page, and places them in the right position on the page. Note that since most websites use scripts, mouse-over effects and hidden objects and text, this will rarely produce a WYSIWYG result, but it is very useful for importing all graphics and text from an existing website.
- Improved Copy / Paste of HTML items from other applications such as web browsers (Note the same restrictions apply as above).
- SVG Import. It's now possible to import most SVG files (we say ‘most’ because there is no industry agreement for SVG format - for example different web browsers support different sets of features).
- Beta import of OpenOffice Impress (.odp) and PowerPoint (.pptx).
- Improved PDF import.
- Update of camera RAW import.
Pantone Update
The set of Pantone colors in the Color Gallery has been updated to Pantone’s latest offerings.Automatic object positioning & smart page resizing
No longer! Designer Pro now has the ability to make growing text areas automatically push other objects down the page, and also lengthen the page automatically to accommodate the enlarged text areas. Creating websites based on templates will now be considerably easier and faster.
MP3 player
Just drop an MP3 audio file on to your web page to add audio to your website. You can choose whether or not the audio starts automatically when your page is viewed.New Chart & QR Code Widgets
There is a new chart drawing Widget included which lets you create interactive charts and graphs for your website.
The Charts use interactive DHTML and SVG to render the chart in the browser, which responds to mouse-over to highlight particular chart values. You can also click on the key names (in this case John, etc) to redraw the chart with those values excluded.
The new QR Code widget allows you to communicate text or the web address of the page that it is inserted on.
Click here to see the chart & graph Widgets.
Presentations
We've enhanced presentations in Designer Pro in a number of ways.
- Slide navigation
Move your mouse to the lower left corner of the browser window in any page of your presentation and you’ll now see a pop-up page navigation control that includes a menu of all slides, allowing you to jump directly to any slide. Plus there’s handy Previous, Home and Next controls. - Layer-less bullet lists
The new graphical bullet and numbered list feature (see below for more info on this feature) creates automatic presentation steps (each bullet or numbered item is treated as a separate step in the presentation). This makes a huge improvement to usability and productivity when creating lists. - Page & Layer Gallery - Change page transition
You can now select multiple pages in the Page & Layer Gallery – this is handy for presentations because you can then use the right-click menu ‘Web page properties’ to alter the page animation transition for all the selected pages.
Graphical bullet & number lists
You can use any of the in-built drawing and text tools to create your own bullet and number graphics and we also supply a collection of ready-made examples in the Designs Gallery.
New web templates
- 3 new web themes (usually sold for \$10 each) and new web graphic templates.
- Existing themes in Pro have been updated to support new features, such as the smart page resizing or graphical bullets and numbers.
Embedded fonts
Designer Pro’s font embedding technology overcomes the serious design limitation of having to stick to the very small selection of so called ‘web safe’ fonts. Our technique is compatible with the vast majority of modern web browsers and works by embedding a special version of the font on your website which the web browser can download and display.
New re-sizeable JavaScript Widgets
Unlike Flash Widgets they are compatible with all modern devices including iPhone, iPads and Windows Phone 7, and do not require a Flash plug-in.
Click here to see the Widgets.
This is an example image effect Widget in mid-transition from one photo to the next. You can now resize this Widget to any size you require, and Web Designer automatically optimizes any images to be right for the website. It’s also possible to overlay any objects, text or graphics on top of Widgets, as shown here.
Enhancements to Widget handling
- You can now preview a Widget in the Widget document directly (you do not need to Close & Save it back to the original).
- When linking to other pages of your website from within a Widget editor, you’ll now see a list of all pages, making it very easy to link to any page in your website from within a Widget.
Pop-Up Layer 'click to close' option
You can now choose whether you want your pop-up layers to close automatically, or only when a viewer clicks a close box.
In document pop-up link checker
When you click on any item with a web link in Designer Pro (not on the web page), a small pop-up appears giving you the option to follow the link, change it, or remove it - very useful if you want to test a link or view the linked page while you’re working on the document.
Incremental Publishing
Improved Incremental Publishing, making it smarter about publishing updates.NavBar button ordering
We’ve added an option to make the button order in a NavBar match the order of pages as shown in the Page & Layer Gallery. With this option on, if you re-order pages your NavBar buttons will reflect this change.Alt text on images
Images that are created during the export process from objects that include text, now have that text set as ‘Alt’ text on the image. So for example a graphical heading that shows the text “Widgets From John Smith” will now have that text set as image Alt text. This means the text can be indexed by search engines even though it’s presented as an image on the page, and it will be picked up by ‘read aloud’ tools used by the visually impaired.Fly-out galleries
A new option to turn off the fly-out galleries.Easy access previewing
The 'Preview Page' and 'Preview Website' buttons have been placed beside each other on the top bar, for easier, quicker access and provided with new F5 and Shift+F5 key short cuts.Auto showing of guides
Page Guides are now turned on and 'snap to guides' enabled automatically if you attempt to drag a guideline onto a page when the guides are turned off.Ctrl+rotate alignment
When rotating objects if you hold Ctrl down it now snaps any significant straight edge to the horizontal or vertical. This applies to text lines, columns and blocks, photos, Quick Shapes, lines and even freehand drawn shapes that have significant straight edges.Link handling on iOS devices
Also v8 is smart about the lack of mouseovers and mouse pointers on iOS devices – the first tap on a button or link will now follow the link, a second tap isn’t necessary.Optimize all images
An updated 'Optimize all images' function will scan all graphics and images in your document - now including PNGs as well as JPEGs - and convert them to the optimum size and optimum image type. This can substantially reduce memory use and .web file sizes. (NB this is a destructive operation).You are also given the option to optimize images to JPEG when importing, if Web Designer recommends it.
Free domain name
One year's free top level domain name included with the free MAGIX Online World hosting.Character based languages
Improved formatting support for character based languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.Right click options
Right clicking over any empty area of the button bars on the Web Designer window will show a context menu to quickly enable or disable any tool bar.Lock page size option
A new 'Lock page size' option has been added in the 'Page Options' dialog. This can prevent accidental drag resize of the lower or right page edge.New keyboard shortcuts
| Delete Page: | Delete |
| Move Page Up: | PageUp |
| Move Page Down: | PageDown |
| Push margins dialog: | Ctrl+Shift+H |
| Toggle Push attribute on selection: | Ctrl+H |
| Preview Website: | F5 |
| Preview current web page: | Shift + F5 |