PhoXo (Version: 7.1 tested) is a lightweight but capable photo or image editor. It packs a good set of features into its 4MB download. One of the ways the developer describes it is that is a ‘mini Photoshop’ and that is not far from the truth.
Going through its menus it is easy to see that PhoXo is easily adequate for most uses.
The Select menu features all, none and invert selections and options for selecting with rounded corners and expanding, shrinking a selection.
The Image menu has the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, color tone (like sepia), black white (like grayscale), glow, self portrait (like old photo) plus options for gamma, different color palettes and auto levels. There is also size, adjust border, auto trim, flip, mirror, rotate. Finally soft edge, shadow, blur and sharpness effects are here as well.
Effects has the filters which include the usual noise, emboss, posterize, bulge, twist, wave, ripple, sunshine, glass tile, blinds, solarize, threshold, halftone, grid and the video effect, among others.
Tools menu’s interesting feature is create an ascii image and a batch watermark tool.
PhoXo also includes a clipart collection and frame library to add to images. Other tools available – again much like Photoshop – are magic wand, shape, color picker, clone, stamp, gradient fill and others. The website has many tutorials and an additional library for use with PhoXo.
PhoXo is freeware and available in 11 languages. It runs on Windows XP and newer.
