Review: Magix Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer graphics suite

A suite of three applications, Magix Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer comprises a photo editor, vector graphics application and a photo manager.

The problem with budget software suites that claim to do it all is that they rarely do one thing particularly well. So, is this the exception?

One of the things a software suite should do is integrate the individual programs so that you can move content easily between them, but Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer doesn’t feel like an integrated suite.

When the suite launches, a start centre provides a selection of options divided into four categories ­ Photo, Design, Web design and (online) Services.

Logically, you’d expect the photo tasks to launch the photo editor, but fast photo optimisation launches the vector application, which has a photo tool offering basic adjustments and corrections like red-eye removal, levels, saturation and auto enhance.

Other options on the Photo tab, such as detailed photo editing and the album, calendar and photo distortion and retouching tasks, open Extreme Photo Designer 7.

This appears to be the same application we reviewed in our photo-editing group test in the June 2008 edition of PCW. All of the new features in this release apply to the Graphic Designer 2 vector program.

It’s a shame Magix hasn’t paid more attention to Extreme Photo Designer 7, because it’s the weakest element of the suite. The interface is inconsistent and the editing tools are neither sufficiently well-designed to be useful to novices, nor sophisticated and powerful enough to appeal to more advanced users.

Often the single-click enhance filters make little difference to problems such as bad exposure or colour casts, and in some cases they make things worse. Guidance, in the form of a Task Assistant panel that replaces the toolbar on the left of the screen, lacks sufficient explanation of what the adjustment tools do, all the more confusing when they’re not that effective in the first place.

Bizarrely, the image-editing features of the vector application have been upgraded, so in some areas it’s superior to the photo editor. You can, for example, open camera Raw files in Graphic Designer 2, but not Photo Designer 7. So if you shoot Raw, you have to convert your photos using the vector application before editing them in the photo application.

The vector application itself is surprisingly good, with an excellent selection of tools for freehand and Bezier drawing, primitive shapes, 3D and live effects, and support for transparency and blending. It can be used as a web design tool and includes a well-stocked template library, as well as elements such as nav bars and buttons. The HTML export command will slice a page up and save the images and an HTML page for you.

You can also export Flash (.swf) files and, while there’s no support for a lot of Flash authoring features like shape tweening, it does provide an inexpensive route to producing animated banners in Flash format.
The other notable addition is a standalone facial editing application called Facefilter Studio 2 SE, which uses distortion filters to manipulate facial features and, in the right circumstances, can be quite effective.

We’ve no problem recommending this on the strengths of Extreme Graphic Designer 2, but as a software suite, it needs work. Magix could start by improving Extreme Photo Designer 7, and making it much easier to produce content using the two applications together.