Photo Designer includes a number of interesting presets to turn your image into a painting, drawing, or other style of artwork. These filters worked relatively quickly, but not very well, and certainly nowhere near with the same finesse as , a free tool that excels at turning images into fine art. I found myself adjusting the settings manually to differentiate Photo Designer's preset effects from one another.

If you're looking for a free image editor to manipulate specific parts of your images---down to a pixel by pixel level of detail---or make quick changes, Photo Designer 7 may be a good fit for you. It's a little clunky and unpredictable, especially compared to sister product Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, but the ability to 'Shop images for free is worth the tradeoff.