PhotoDonut is a powerful cross-platform photo processor which provides a host of interesting ways to enhance and improve your images.

You could use the program as a quick way to enhance any photo. Open the picture, choose a lighting or colour effect from options like “Gold Sun” or “Columbian Parrot”, and save the result as a JPG, PNG, TIF, PSD and more.

This isn’t just about bizarre colour combinations you’ll never use. There are also texturing effects, black and white stylings, vintage and retro effects, and you get a lot to explore. “Monochrome” isn’t a single effect, for instance– it’s a folder with 18 presets to try.

There’s more, with multiple ways to transform your images into artworks in assorted styles: drawings, paintings, sketches, engravings or illustrations.

Choose effects, tweak their settings or combine them in layers

That’s impressive, but PhotoDonut isn’t just about one-click special effects. You can also choose from a set of “Building block” styles with many of the core features you’d expect from any image editor: sharpens, blurs, brightness, contrast and curve adjustments, colour tweaks, lighting effects generators, geometric effects and others.

Many of these tools and effects can be tweaked with settings of their own, and you can combine them in layers for even more creative possibilities.

Reinforcing the professional approach, you can even run the program as a Photoshop plugin.

A Style Shop provides more styles you can buy, or you can purchase a subscription ($5.99/ month, $59.99/ year) to get access to everything, including some premium features: batch processing, a style editor, freehand painting tools and more.

PhotoDonut has some issues, in particular with the interface, which seems to ignore many conventions in favour of “making it up as you go along”. It’s not difficult to use, at all, but you might have to spend longer mastering the basics than you’d expect.

Overall, though, it’s a great program which can be used for everything from simple colour filtering, to photo > artwork conversions, to in-depth image processing. Give yourself a Christmas present and download a copy immediately.

PhotoDonut is available now for 64-bit Windows 7 and later and Mac.