Xara Group has announced the release of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 11, its one-stop photo editor, graphic design and publishing tool for Windows Vista+.

Art Brushes are a highlight, a new technology which smoothly stretches bitmap or vector brushes in real-time along a freehand path. There are new brushes to emulate paint, chalk or watercolours, or you can create your own as required.

Dropbox and Google Drive sync sees document edits on one Photo & Graphic Designer installation automatically updated to the others. That can be useful, even if you’ve only one installation, as it also gets you online backup with versioning.

New Art Brushes smoothly stretch bitmap or vector brushes along freehand lines

Smarter text tools include “search and replace” for fonts, easier document styling, automatic hyperlinking, configurable text expansion (type an abbreviation and have it expanded automatically), a new text background colour option, and more.

There’s also new shape editing tools, smarter blend mode and transparency types, improved PDF import/ export, CYMK PNG support, and more.

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 11 is available from new for $89.99, or you can update from v10 for $35.

A trial build is available for Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1.