Areas of an image can be selected with the marquee tools or sections based on similar colour with the magic wand tool. Floating a selection turns it into an object and adds it to the Objects palette. This allows precise management of opacity and blending modes. Imported files and text are automatically treated as objects. Primary channels contain the colour information in a file, so that a RGB file will have separately editable channels for each of the red, green and blue components of an image.
Alpha channels are additional channels added to an image to store selections and to create masks.
Masks are used to protect selections of an image from editing and also for the creation of fade effects between objects. For advanced prepress work it is possible to work on any of the CMYK plates and to control exactly how the black plate is created. Pantone colours can be used, but there is no option to create duotones. Also disappointing are the lack of lighting effects and, more fundamentally, a clear dithering of the image in any monitor mode other than true colour. In other words, for high-end photo editing, xRes is capable but unexciting.