Magix is a leading German software supplier best known for its sound and music software.

With the acquisition of the UK company Xara, at the beginning of this year, it's also strengthened its graphic side and has now launched Xtreme Photo, Video & Graphic Suite.

This combines the earlier Photo & Video Manager, Photo & Videoshow Deluxe, Movies on CD & DVD 6 and Photo & Graphic Designer.

The Photo & Graphic Designer is what used to be Xara Xtreme, a very versatile graphics editor, for both standard pictures and photos (known as bitmaps) and vector graphics.

This program provides most of the standard editing tools, but often goes about implementing them in clever, more intuitive ways. For example, when you load a photo to fill any shape, a single tool can rotate, resize and reposition the image within the shape’s boundary. It takes a little getting used to, but ends up being very quick to use.

There's a good range of tools in the graphics editor and a separate image-editing tool which includes up-to-date features, such as horizon adjustment and one-click automatic correction for brightness, contrast, gamma and other settings. It includes full support for layers and Photoshop plugins (which add extra features to the program). There is also a wide range of templates for cards, newsletters, brochures and collages, where you can just slot in your photos and text to make professional-looking documents.

Xtreme Photo & Videoshow Deluxe isn't a full video editor like Adobe's Premiere Elements or Pinnacle Studio, but will take video clips and single photos, and create slide shows or combined videos from them, and burn the result to CD or DVD. It can be used to put menus onto the resulting shows, too. Xtreme Movies on CD & DVD 6 is designed for archiving video tapes and recording TV programmes to CD or DVD for future viewing, and it supports high-definition recordings.

Xtreme Photo & Video Manager is a management tool which can import and export photos, print them, burn them to CD and create slide shows for on-screen playback. The new version supports wide screens and can make adjustments to colour balance and exposure as well as red-eye removal on photos and videos.