The point of Movavi Photo Editor is clearly stated up-front: to remove unwanted elements from your photos. While it does indeed carry out this function in an effective way, it hardly makes for a complete editing package. With just a few other features inside the program, Movavi is basic and highly compact. If you want to make a few quick edits Movavi Photo Editor is fine, but even beginners will probably find it lacking.

Simply drag and drop image files into the work space to start editing them. The program supports standard image formats but no RAW files can be used.

Cutting objects out of photos is useful. Sometimes a potentially great shot is ruined by someone walking past the camera at the wrong moment, or a cloud spoiling an otherwise perfect blue sky. Movavi Photo Editor makes it very easy to remove the offending elements with just a few clicks. Simply mark the object to get rid of, and click remove – voila, your photo is much improved. You can also put images from one photo onto another photo’s background by roughly drawing on the object to be moved, then clipping it and inserting another background behind.

The program gives you the chance to manually adjust the image parameters and add filters to the photo like sepia, oil painting, pixelate, acid, and black and white. The manual tweaks are simple – adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation, and exposure of the shot. You can also carry out quick cropping with crop tools, rotate, flip, level, and resize. Adjustments work on the entire image; we would have liked to see the feature target smaller areas or individual elements of the image in order to give the opportunity for more precise editing.

Use Magic Enhance for a quick adjust of the entire picture to set parameters. We don’t think this tool improved all the images we tried – it seems to work only occasionally, and because you can’t test it out on a small area first it is not always easy to know if it will make a difference. But when it works, it does provide effective, quick improvements.

Add personalized text onto the image to create title pages or watermarks. Adjust the size, color, and transparency of the text for cool effects, and you can also resize and move captions around on the image. The text element feature works with any font you have already installed on your computer.

Movavi Photo Editor doesn’t have any extra features. If you upgrade to the Movavi Photo Studio package you get Photo Editor as well as Photo Batch and Slideshow Creator. Photo Batch allows you to work on more than one photo at once – something that is definitely missing from the Photo Editor software. And the slideshow feature would have been good in the main package too. But Movavi Photo Editor is too basic to include these as standalone elements.

The interface is basic to the point of minimalist. It’s also rather dark, which may not be to everyone’s taste. You have all the tools down the right hand side of the screen and the work area in the center shows your picture editing in progress. To the left of the tool bar is the area for making adjustments to the edit such as crop size and color transparency. It is very easy to use – you are sure to be able to understand and use the different elements of the program within a short timeframe.

Movavi offers a Knowledge Base, How-tos, Video Guides, and manuals. The manual is straightforward and the features are all well-explained, but with the lack of advanced features you are not likely to need much in the way of explanation. One good point is the live chat feature – and you can also email support to get your questions answered.

Movavi Photo Editor isn’t our favorite solution for photo editing because it simply does not have any depth in its features. But if you want a simple solution for cutting out unwanted objects in your photos, and making some basic changes to pictures, this is an adequate package.