An English firm, Xara has a tough challenge ahead. Its brilliant Xara Xtreme is simply superb for creating digital drawings of all kinds for documents or the Web. But it goes toe to toe against Adobe Illustrator, the $500 heavyweight widely considered a standard.

You compete against industry titans on two obvious levels, one of them being price. Xara Xtreme sells for $79 yet offers composition and editing tools that stand out in the rapidly growing vector graphics field. And if low price can improve its market share, Xara is getting more aggressive still with the announcement that it will convert its products to an open source format and make them freely available to Linux developers (a Mac OS X version also looms).

But quality is even more significant than price, and here Xara defers to no one.

For one thing, Xara Xtreme offers the full package of drawing and illustration tools with a software engine that delivers remarkable redrawing and rendering. You not only work quickly but with real-time results, editing images instead of waiting for the PC to catch up when you apply complicated effects.

The program combines sophisticated bitmap and vector graphics capabilities in a single package, an unusual blend at such a low price. A vector-based graphic is an image whose file contains a mathematical description of every object in the image and all its relevant properties. Changing that descriptive data allows the image to be manipulated easily, making vector graphics useful for design and layout applications, which is where both Illustrator and Xara Xtreme shine.

While vector-based images produce their effects through the use of geometric objects like curves and polygons, a bitmap works pixel by pixel. In essence, a bitmap image is a data file that represents a grid of pixels, with each pixel's color individually defined.

One problem with bitmaps is that they can't be scaled up to a higher resolution without losing quality, whereas vector graphics adapt easily to such changes.

You can probably work out how this affects software. A bitmap graphics program is usually best for photographs, and here most people think of Adobe Photoshop as the gold standard.

But Photoshop CS2 is a $600 program. The $79 Xara Xtreme can't match it, but it does include a full suite of photo editing tools that allow for standard features like cropping, red-eye removal, contrast and brightness adjustment and numerous image tweaks.

A large number of plugins are available for special effects as you enhance your photographs, and the program provides a "live effects" tool that lets you apply filters to bitmaps or vector graphics images with fully automatic updating. In other words, your edits move swiftly because they are applied onscreen as you work.

Xara Xtreme's interface is straightforward. You'll find yourself counting on a finely tuned option bar that updates as you move between available tools. If you already edit photos, you may have decided as I have that a digital darkroom requires more than the program that came with your camera. But I'm not willing to shell out big bucks for Illustrator or Photoshop when I can get everything I need for photos and drawing too in one inexpensive package.

Take a look at the Xara site (www.xara.com,) where you can walk through some of the more than 80 demonstration videos the company makes available with Xara Xtreme. They answer many questions and display the program's tools in a working environment.

Can this gutsy outfit hold its own against not just Adobe but Microsoft, which is intent on dominating the same space? The odds are long, but users who are realistic about their needs may find Xara much to their taste.

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