How often have you admired a landscape or grand scene, only to find that your camera can't take the wide angle photo? Worry not! There is a quick and easy way to solve the problem. Simply take a series of photos and stitch them together. Stitching them together is as simple as a single click of a button using Xara Photo & Graphic Designer or Xara Designer Pro and I will show you how. Below is the final panorama: But first… here are some guidelines for taking your photos for a panorama. Stand still with feet firmly balanced in one position. Hold your camera level and take your photos by swinging it around its centre to keep it as close to the start position as possible. Imagine that you are the tripod stand from which your camera is rotating. Ensure that you have sufficient overlap in the photos. If you have a manual metering mode you may wish to select it to ensure that the exposure on all of your series of photos remains constant. But don't worry if you don't have it on manual, you'll be amazed at the results in Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. Now to create the panorama. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer can stitch up to 6 photos into one panorama. Load your photos by dragging them from your computer folder. Drop the first one onto the program’s title bar to open it as a photo document (or drag it into the empty black editor). Photo documents are designed specifically for storing photo data so that no matter what changes you make, you can always return to the original (or ‘master’) high quality image. Position the photos in the correct order so that they overlap in roughly the right place. Don’t worry if the photos don’t line up horizontally at the top and bottom. (If your photos are too large, you may need to drag the corner handles to reduce them in size, in which case simply resize them to roughly the same height). With the Selector tool selected, make a lasso rectangle around all the photos to select them all. Now go to the Panorama tool in the Photo tool fly out bar (in the top left of the editing area in the screenshots) and click. That’s it! You will see the progress bar identifying the various steps in the top right as Xara Photo & Designer goes into action. It automatically detects the joins and creates seamless blended edges to give you the perfect panorama. Once stitched it places the new image below the existing images. Let's look at some of the detail to see the stitching. You really can't tell that this is several photos joined together and even the sky and water have both blended to give a consistent color. To save your panorama, select it and click File > Export as JPG. Your original photo and the panorama will be saved along with a copy of the original in a Masters folder. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer and Xara Designer Pro incorporate a fast and non-destructive set of photo tools. As well as the panorama tool described above these include: • Enhance Photo, which you can use to crop images, adjust brightness, color and contrast and sharpen or blur photos • Clip, which provides more advanced cropping options • Clone, a quick and easy way of removing and replacing unwanted objects in your images • Red Eye Removal, which, as its name suggests, reduces and removes red eyes in your photos taken with flash photography • Content Aware Photo Resize, which allows you to stretch or squash photos without distortion, retaining the photo's natural proportions • Brightness Levels dialog, which can lighten or darken a whole image or just parts of it • Perspective Correction, this can automatically correct common perspective defects in a photo • EXIF, which shows the embedded EXIF value of a JPEG image.

How often have you admired a landscape or grand scene, only to find that your camera can't take the wide angle photo? Worry not! There is a quick and easy way to solve the problem. Simply take a series of photos and stitch them together. Stitching them together is as simple as a single click of a button using Xara Photo & Graphic Designer or Xara Designer Pro and I will show you how. Below is the final panorama: But first… here are some guidelines for taking your photos for a panorama. Stand still with feet firmly balanced in one position. Hold your camera level and take your photos by swinging it around its centre to keep it as close to the start position as possible. Imagine that you are the tripod stand from which your camera is rotating. Ensure that you have sufficient overlap in the photos. If you have a manual metering mode you may wish to select it to ensure that the exposure on all of your series of photos remains constant. But don't worry if you don't have it on manual, you'll be amazed at the results in Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. Now to create the panorama. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer can stitch up to 6 photos into one panorama. Load your photos by dragging them from your computer folder. Drop the first one onto the program’s title bar to open it as a photo document (or drag it into the empty black editor). Photo documents are designed specifically for storing photo data so that no matter what changes you make, you can always return to the original (or ‘master’) high quality image. Position the photos in the correct order so that they overlap in roughly the right place. Don’t worry if the photos don’t line up horizontally at the top and bottom. (If your photos are too large, you may need to drag the corner handles to reduce them in size, in which case simply resize them to roughly the same height). With the Selector tool selected, make a lasso rectangle around all the photos to select them all. Now go to the Panorama tool in the Photo tool fly out bar (in the top left of the editing area in the screenshots) and click. That’s it! You will see the progress bar identifying the various steps in the top right as Xara Photo & Designer goes into action. It automatically detects the joins and creates seamless blended edges to give you the perfect panorama. Once stitched it places the new image below the existing images. Let's look at some of the detail to see the stitching. You really can't tell that this is several photos joined together and even the sky and water have both blended to give a consistent color. To save your panorama, select it and click File > Export as JPG. Your original photo and the panorama will be saved along with a copy of the original in a Masters folder. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer and Xara Designer Pro incorporate a fast and non-destructive set of photo tools. As well as the panorama tool described above these include: • Enhance Photo, which you can use to crop images, adjust brightness, color and contrast and sharpen or blur photos • Clip, which provides more advanced cropping options • Clone, a quick and easy way of removing and replacing unwanted objects in your images • Red Eye Removal, which, as its name suggests, reduces and removes red eyes in your photos taken with flash photography • Content Aware Photo Resize, which allows you to stretch or squash photos without distortion, retaining the photo's natural proportions • Brightness Levels dialog, which can lighten or darken a whole image or just parts of it • Perspective Correction, this can automatically correct common perspective defects in a photo • EXIF, which shows the embedded EXIF value of a JPEG image.