A service that was previously only available to those who reside in the U.K. is now available to U.S. residents. The Free Your Avatar portion of xbox.com allows users to create a custom image using Avatars and some very random clip art. Users are also able to import their own items to place in the editor and create custom sizes to display for profile pages.

I hate to rip on a free service but Free Your Avatar is extremely limited and basically worthless. There is no way to manipulate the images in any meaningful way, you can only move them and zoom. Even if you use the zoom feature it is enlarging a small image which becomes incredibly distorted.

Instead of using Microsoft’s editor, I recommend downloading your Avatar images from this previously known link. Just change the gamertag portion of the URL to your own gamertag. Fire up any image editor and voila, you have a much better Avatar editing service.

If you aren’t computer savvy enough to do that, I guess the Free Your Avatar service is more for you. Good luck.