2013

270
www.xara.com
Optimizing Photos and Bitmaps
With the ever increasing resolution and file size of digital camera JPEGs, if you have a
document containing many images, the file size can quickly become very large. For
example, a multi-page document containing 20 full resolution JPEGs, each of 5mb,
would produce a .xar file of over 100mb*.
Furthermore, these photos are often unnecessarily high resolution. Reducing a photo
from a 8 megapixel digital camera to be 2 inches (5 cm) wide on the page will result
in this image being around 1500 dpi. Whilst a very high resolution image gives
greater flexibility for printing (and you can zoom in, or enlarge small parts of the
photo), this is far higher than required for even the best quality commercial printing,
and even more so for web graphics or HTML production.
If you clip to a small part of the image, or cut-out only a small part of your photos,
there could be large parts of hidden image outside the visible area. For editing
purposes this "live crop" is a great feature, as you can un-crop, alter the size, position
and scale and everything remains as sharp as possible. But for finished documents
you may want to remove the invisible parts.
The cut-out butterfly image still has the rest of the photo attached. If you go into the
FILL TOOL
you can easily see this by resizing the fill inside the outline. So the parts of
the image outside the butterfly will probably be superfluous in your final document.
Right click a photo and choose
OPTIMIZE PHOTO or choose "UTILITIES" > "OPTIMIZE
PHOTO.."..
This dialog performs three important functions: