Our year-end gift to you: Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6, for free

Have you kept an eye on our amazing software giveaways this year? Hot on the heels of our first two amazing deals comes this, a free and fully functional copy of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6. This universally acclaimed design tool runs on Windows PCs and is capable of photo-editing, drawing, graphics design and even desktop publishing, all rolled into one super program.

And the best news of all? For a 48-hour period from midday GMT, Saturday December 29, you’ll be able to download this amazing app, worth $89, for free thanks to Downloadcrew Giveaway.

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 basically becomes your one-stop shop for design, allowing you to do away with a hotchpotch of tools and concentrate on honing your skills within one easy to use program. Version 6 debuted a brand new interface, attractively styled in dark and grey, boasting new icons, flyout tools, dockable panels and a much more intuitive feel than previous versions.

What tools you see depend on what you’re doing with the application. Open a photo, for example, and you’ll find the usual gamut of photo-editing tools from red eye correction and other adjustment options to clone and perspective correction tools.

Fancy doing something creative? Fire up the Designs Gallery and take your pick from a range of projects from greetings cards and brochures to Flash animations and photo albums. Pick one you like and then download it to your hard drive for use now and in the future.

And then there’s the vector design tools, with 3D extrusions, transparency and blending controls, shadows, bevels, contours and more. A Page and Layer Gallery replaces the old Objects gallery, providing you with an easy way to order your objects by hierarchy, helped with the thumbnail previews. Look out for the Solo mode, which makes it easy to isolate elements for working on without affecting the rest of your image or publication.

One of Xara’s standout features is its raw power and speed, delivering amazing results even on older machines. Even complex drawings don’t slow it down, so you can go to town on your designs without worrying about your PC grinding to a halt in the background. It’s so fast Xara is even capable of filling and stroking objects and paths as you add them.

One final standout feature: Content Aware Scaling. This basically lets you focus in on the important parts of a bitmap image when scaling, while Xara automatically – and intelligently -- removes distracting and unwanted elements.

Upgrade Offer

If you’re suitably impressed with Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6, then you’ll love the latest version of Photo & Graphic Designer 2013. New features include support for text styles, a new Share menu for quickly sharing your content online and improved colour selection, hue adjustment and shape eraser tools. Still undecided? Check out our review for a more in-depth look.

Suitably impressed? Excellent. You can upgrade your copy of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 to 2013 for just $59, a saving of $30 on the MSRP. Just visit the Xara upgrade page.

So there you have it. Download Giveaway continues to amaze and excite with the very best in free software giveaways this holiday season. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 requires a PC running Windows XP or later, and registration for your free product key is handled within the program, so all you need to do is make sure you visit Downloadcrew Giveaway from  midday (GMT) Saturday December 29 until Monday December 31 to download your free copy.