Xara Photo & Graphic Designer

My needs are not particularly complex. Typically I may want to improve a photograph, maybe editing it a bit. Nothing fancy - not starting with RAW, for instance. And often I will want to overlay text and simple graphics on an image.

I used Photoshop back in the nineties and thought it particularly unintuitive - and, at that time, horrendously expensive. Then I discovered Picture Publisher. Now that really was intuitive, a great little (and cheap) piece of software. Unfortunately JASC bought them simply to grab their market for their inferior PaintShop Pro - and promptly stopped support for PP. Then Corel bought JASC so now, of course, PSP got heavier and heavier.

Until recently I had been using an old and much-loved XP machine and eventually I had to stop using PSP. So then I switched to Serif PhotoPlus. It could achieve most of the same things, though I found it even less intuitive. And its custom brushes for fancy line effects were cumbersome to create and of only raster quality. But it worked. Recently though, I've at last switched to Win10 and had to find yet another replacement photo/graphics package. I tried, and fought with, Affinity Photo for a week or so. At the end of that I'd still not drawn onto a photo a simple line comprising a string of little arrows.

Today I downloaded and installed a trial copy of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. Within 20 minutes I had drawn my line.

I won't rate the app yet because I have had so little experience of it, but first impressions are very good.