MAGIX Photo Designer

Conceived as an introduction to professional image editing, MAGIX Photo Designer offers an interesting mixture of one-click presets and more sophisticated settings to allow all kinds of users to edit, improve, enhance, and correct their photo collections at no cost and in the most intuitive way.

With support for a wide range of well-known (JPEG, BMP, TIFF, GIF, PNG...) and less-known (EMF, WMF, PPM, RAS, LBM, TGA...) image file formats, this free app will help you to upgrade more smoothly to the Xara suite of products. It shares a large number of tools and features with the great majority of photo editors available, both commercial and free. The program’s interface is simple enough for anyone to get used to it in minutes, and it combines the typical vertical button group on the left-hand side of the screen with standard menus and a set of 1-Click tools and FX filters for those with less experience in image editing. These will allow you to optimize your photos in terms of exposure, contrast, sharpness, etc., in no time. The program’s effects preview mode will let you pick the right effect just by clicking on the corresponding thumbnail.

You can perform all the standard edits you would expect from a photo editor (crop, rotate, mirror, change colors, red eye correction, etc.) and then move to more sophisticated features, such as the collage creator, the panorama builder, the object removal tool, or its photo restoration utilities. The program’s support for various wands and brushes will let you make the most of these features. Thanks to these tools, you can now remove unwanted objects and replace them with a similar background in seconds, change the light and exposure of a specific section, and restore your old or damage photographs by removing small blemishes or scratches in just a few clicks.

The list of functions and enhancing features provided goes on and on, but that’s for you to discover. As it happens with most photo editors that are in between two categories, MAGIX Photo Designer shows a strange yet useful mixture of easy-to-apply features and of more specialized functions. This will help novice photo editors to get the hang of image correction and enhancing while offering more expert users the chance to test their creativity and jump to more pro-like tools from here.