Photo Calendar Studio 2016 for Windows

Photo Calendar Studio 2014 is an all-in-one tool for creating, personalizing, and printing attractive calendars using your own photos or images from a huge library of clip art for all occasions. Templates make it easy to format your creations, which you can customize in endless ways. Photo Calendar Studio resizes and fits your photos for you, so it's easy to turn holiday or vacation snapshots into great gifts for family and friends. When you're ready to print your calendar, you can use your own printer or take it to your local quick-print shop on a thumb drive or CD. Photo Calendar Studio 2014 is free to try with watermarked output.

The highlighted dark gray tones popular with graphics tools serve well in Photo Calendar Studio's user interface, which seems a bit busy at first but is actually logical in layout. A ruled main display is bracketed by the Insert tool palette on the left and a right-hand sidebar tabbed for Object, Layer, Effects, Page, and Settings, the default tab, with sub-tabs for Project Settings and Program Settings. Like the interface, the process is easier than it seems at first, notwithstanding a wide variety of options and settings. For instance, we chose a preconfigured format, clicked "Insert," browsed to a pal's pic, and had the first page of a custom calendar done before we were quite sure how we did it! A Help manual is available, but the easiest (and most fun) way to learn Photo Calendar Studio's ins and outs is to just start trying things. You can't go wrong, since you can change or edit anything before it's printed.

While you may be able to do as much with freeware or full-featured graphics packages, there are few options that are as easy to set up and use as Photo Calendar Studio 2014.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Photo Calendar Studio 2014 1.14.