Thread: Magix Photo and Graphic Designer

This suite from Magix includes Xtreme Graphic Designer and Magix Photo Manager, but we'll be concentrating on the Xtreme Photo Designer 7 element in this review. It's also available as part of the larger, more expensive, Magix Xtreme Photo Video Graphic Suite, which contains other programs including Xtreme Graphic Designer, Xtreme Movies on CD and DVD, and Xtreme Photo and Video Manager.

The main picture window sits below a horizontal toolbar and a tool options bar, a vertical toolbar on the left accommodates an assortment of basic editing tools and a filmstrip window at the bottom of the screen can be toggled to display a thumbnail effects browser.

The first thing your eye is drawn to is a 'I-click' button on the horizontal toolbar which provides exposure, colour and white balance corrections via a dropdown menu. This made a reasonable job of brightening slightly underexposed photos during testing, but performed poorly with overexposure - on occasions making things worse.



The Task Assistant provides guided editing from a panel, which replaces the toolbar on the left of the screen. Projects are organised on three tabs¬Optimise, Edit and Creative - with a handful of tasks on each.

The optimise exposure task assistant provides an Auto Exposure button which generated similar results to the I-click button. Sliders are also supplied for adjusting shadow, mid tone and 'lights'. These produced quite crude results that in some cases worsened, rather than improved our test images. Dragging the 'lights' slider in either direction on bright photos caused the highlights to disappear and, even more disconcertingly, returning the slider to its original position didn't restore the image to its previous state.

Correct image focus is a sharpening tool with three settings (light, medium and hard), but there are no intermediate settings and no explanation of why, when or how you might want to use this effect.

The interface can be inconsistent in places. On the Main Task Assistant tab the exposure tool is called 'Optimise exposure' and when clicked it becomes 'Optimise lighting'; again, there's no mention of what kind of photos might need their exposure or lighting optimised, nor how. Likewise 'Correct image focus' turns into 'Correct image sharpness'. To make a selection you 'select all' or use one of the selection tools. To deselect you 'remove mask'.

Adjustments and effects are all rolled into one on the Effects menu, but are at least categorised here; in the effects browser they are lumped together, so you have to scan them all to find what you want. Most of the effects on the colour filter sub-menu of the effects menu are included. The effects thumbnails use a sample image. When you click a thumbnail it is applied to the full-resolution open image - a process that takes several seconds - before the filter controls appear. And you can't try another effect without cancelling the first.

The Clone brush provides a variety of presets and blend modes, and you can feather the brush edge and change the size and pressure, but there are no align modes. It's neither simple enough for beginners nor sufficiently sophisticated for advanced users. The Levels control provides no histogram - there is a separate histogram display, but it's modal- you can't do anything else (such as adjust levels) while it's visible.

Given the availability of superior free and low-cost alternatives, it's hard to imagine circumstances in which this would be a worthwhile purchase.