The new photo tool offers instantaneous editing for even huge photos. All operations are non-destructive, meaning the original image is not affected and all edits are object orientated and undoable. This also means edits like this take practically no file space and so allows ultra compact lossless files. The features include:

• Ultra-fast, live & interactive Enhance (brightness, sharpness, saturation etc)
• Levels (histogram, color correction and more)
• Interactive crop. Again this is non-destructive so you can adjust or un-crop images at any time.
• An automatic panorama maker photo-stitching feature.

Xara 3D Maker has been integrated so you can now extrude objects in 3D. This provides industry leading speed, usability and quality of 3D rendering compared with any other drawing package. It provides live on-canvas 3D dragging and extrude, 3 colored lights than can be dragged around in real-time, and Xara's renowned high quality 3D rendering.

• A new text repel feature allows text to flow around shapes and photos. As you'd expect from Xara this provides super-fast text re-formatting allowing live and interactive flow of text as you drag the text objects
• New live reformatting while resizing text columns and frames
• Text underline

Many professional graphic designers already use Xara as their primary web graphics tool. Now it can save complete HTML web pages (using XHTML and CSS standards) and using layers it is easy to add mouseover effects and even add pop-ups.  

The advantage of using Xtreme to create web pages is that you get almost complete freedom to position graphics and text anywhere on the page – including semi-transparent graphics and even rotated text - things which would be difficult or impossible with normal web authoring tools.  Plus the multi-page feature can be used to create complete multi-page websites. And Xtreme creates all the HTML for you.

A new simplified Quality Control provides five quality steps:

• Outline only. This is now fully anti-aliased for higher quality screen display
• Outline with blend steps
• Full color (no anti-aliasing)
• High Quality (full anti-aliasing. Same as previous top quality. Provides image smoothing)
• Very high quality (new higher quality, industry best anti-aliasing. New bi-cubic photo display considerably improves the quality of scaled down photos).
  

Xara always had by far the highest performing graphics rendering engine, up to ten times faster than Adobe. Now with support for multi-core processors it's even faster. Tests show approximate speed gains of 40% for dual core processors with large screen images and greater gains with more cores. Large full screen photos can render up to 75% faster on a dual core processor.

• You can now use the eye-dropper color picker directly without having the color editor on screen.
• The Color line now indicates the color under the eye-dropper as you're dragging around, highlighting the named or palette color.
• There are new live color values shown next to the eye-dropper as you move over objects, showing not just the RGB color but the correct named color and color model of the object under the pointer. e.g. whether it's a spot, Pantone, CMYK or RGB color, and its value.
• The current fill and line colors are now indicated on the color line even if they are palette colors, not just named colors. 
• The Name Gallery now shows used palette colors and edited colors, not just named colors.

• A new 'scribble select' feature allows you to select objects by just drawing a freehand line over the page - all objects that the line touches are added to the selection.
• A new option for marquee select provides an Adobe-like selection so that any objects that the marquee rectangle touches are selected. An alternative option selects only those objects entirely inside the marquee rectangle.
• Selection has been made live - objects are selected as you drag, rather than only when you let go. This mkes it easier to know whether objects are or are not selected as you drag, rather than waiting until you let go of the mouse.

This includes:

• Improved PDF import
• New XPS import (beta)
• New JPEG 2000 import / export and some other minor formats
• HD Photo import. This is a new high quality photo format from Microsoft, also known as Windows Media Photo.

Improved Unicode support for foreign language alphabets, such as Chinese.

Completely new WYSIWYG Font menu, now showing fonts grouped in families, showing full length font names and rendered in the corresponding font (high quality anti-aliased, compare with Word), so making it much easier to preview a font before selection. This is a hierarchical menu, so it's more compact and shows all variants of each family in a sub-menu.

Live Font Preview. As you traverse the font menu, the selected text in the document is updated. Similarly there is now a live font size preview, and a new interactive font size pop-up slider for fast, live, fine grained text size control.

This is a new photo plug-in included in all copies of Xara Xtreme. It offers:

• Automatic stitching of photos to create a panorama
• Automatic detection of overlap and join positions
• Automatic calculation of focal length
• Adjustment of pictures to reduce fish-eye or focal length distortions
• Seamless blending to remove dramatic color changes in the sky, for example.

Xara Xtreme Pro includes a more advanced version of the same feature, called Panorama Studio (owners of the standard version of Xara Xtreme can upgrade separately). Pan Studio offers:

• The ability to stitch together any number of images
• Advanced control over cropping, sharpening and enhancing of the resulting stitched image
• Create web based 360 degree panoramas, perfect for showing off your restaurant interior and that type of thing.

A new optimize photo / bitmap feature to reduce resolution and convert images to embedded JPEGs (to make designs smaller and photo operations faster).