PixBuilder Studio

There are photo-editing programs available to match every skill set, whether you just need to rotate and resize your images or you have some serious correcting to do. PixBuilder Studio falls somewhere in the middle, with an uncomplicated interface that holds a surprisingly comprehensive set of features. Although PixBuilder Studio isn't going to replace any of the big-name photo-editing programs, it might be just the thing for serious amateurs and even some professionals.

The program's interface is familiar and intuitive, with menus across the top, a toolbar down the left side, and a set of panels down the right. The first thing we noticed about PixBuilder was that it supports the use of layers, an important feature for anyone who's halfway serious about editing images. There are the typical adjustments for brightness and contrast, colors, levels, saturation, and so on, and the effects menu contains familiar favorites like Gaussian blur and sharpening tools. A variety of selection tools and a mask mode made it easy to manipulate specific elements of images, and separate panels for zoom, tools, layers, undo, and channels gave us easy access to a variety of useful tools. The program comes with a well-written Help file that won't teach you everything you need to know about image editing but will explain the basics of what the program can do. Overall, we think that PixBuilder studio is a great choice if you want powerful image-editing features but you don't want to drop a bundle of cash on editing software. This is one of the best free programs we've seen in this genre.

PixBuilder Studio installs and uninstalls without issues.