PhoXo 8.1

PhoXo is a feature-rich image editor that allows modifying, enhancing and manipulating pictures in a convenient manner. It can be considered a lighter version of the popular Photoshop program, as it offers a lot of features, options and image editing tools, while being much simpler to use.

It’s indeed a very powerful application. It offers a lot of image editing and manipulation tools such as brushes and layers, but it also allows applying artistic effects such as blur and emboss to the photos. Specialized photo enhancement and retouching tools like a red-eye effect remover are also available. This handy tool also includes a nice collection of clip arts, a frame library, and text editing effects (text gradients, shadows, etc.).

Despite coming packed with a lot of features and functions, PhoXo manages to be simple and intuitive. Using it is easy even for beginners thanks to the straightforward, self-explanatory interface. It can load image files of numerous formats, supporting not only the popular JPEG, GIF and BMP formats, but also PSD files.

To sum it all up, I like every aspect about this tool pretty much, and considering that it’s also free, it gets to be one of my favorite image editors.