Photo editing in Google Photos is fairly limited, but you can quickly apply filters and tweak elements such as brightness and contrast, all of which is reversible, even if you come back to the photo much later.
Darktable lacks a little of the refinement and some of the more complex features of Lightroom or Luminar, but its ability to process a wide variety of raw files and use professional-quality color spaces is great for photographers on a budget.
Zoner Photo Studio For Mac
Apple Photos is also a capable photo organizer. Image management is via keywords, geotags, ratings and using favourites, and Apple Photos can search intelligently by recognising people and objects in your images.
Lightroom offers features such as Tethered Capture for taking photos right within Lightroom and lets Photoshop handle any major pixel-level editing, while Photo Studio skips the capture part and includes Photoshop-style image editing as the final stage of its workflow.
ACDSee has embraced the role of the smartphone camera, developing a mobile companion app available for the iOS and Android platforms. The app is extremely easy to use, allowing you to send photos directly from your phone to your Photo Studio installation.
Most of the tools are quite easy to learn and use for anyone familiar with image editors, and beginners should have no problem learning the basics. There are some user interface issues with the Edit module that can negatively impact ease of use, but this can be overcome with some practice. The mobile companion app is extremely easy to use, and makes it simple to retouch your photos before sharing them online.
I bought ACDSEE19 and it proved to be very disappointing. All the photos I did color correction on using ACDSEE19 looked OK in ACDSEE19 but had a shitty green tint to them when viewed by any other program. ACDSEE was absolutely no help to correct the problem. Weak customer suport
It is a complete RAW workflow, image editing, and library organization tool. While it doesn\u2019t have a devoted professional following as yet, it aims to be a complete solution for professional users as well as more casual and semi-professional photographers.
Home is much less capable, and can\u2019t open or edit RAW images at all, but still allows you to organize photos and edit JPEG images. As a result, it\u2019s probably not worth considering, since any photographer who is remotely serious about the quality of their work will shoot in RAW.
Adobe seems to have paid a bit more attention to the nuances of user interface and experience, while ACDSee has been focusing on creating the most complete standalone program possible. If you\u2019re already accustomed to the Adobe style of workflow you may not want to make the switch, but for budding photographers who still have to make that choice, ACDSee presents some serious competition at an attractive price.
Like Adobe, ACDSee has been around since the early days of digital photography. Despite its comparative lack of name recognition, the company's photo workflow and editing software, Photo Studio Ultimate, has partisans who prefer it to Lightroom. The 2023 version of the app includes Photoshop-like layer-editing capabilities, and some of the program's tools, such as its Light EQ adjusters, are particularly good. But it falls short of top competitors in initial raw camera file conversion quality, import speed, effectiveness of some corrections, and interface usability. For those, look to our Editors' Choice photo workflow app, Adobe Lightroom Classic.
No matter how you pay for the software, you need to sign up for an account and respond to a verification email. The program then restarts and has you choose a default photo folder. The next step is going through an introductory wizard with a quick start guide. It takes you through the program's setup and features and is thorough and helpful. After that, you're ready to edit photos.
After you decide which photo folders you want the program to monitor, ACDSee builds a catalog. This is a database that enables nondestructive editing, saving your edits separately from the original photo files. After editing, you simply export a version of the edited image. Lightroom uses a catalog in the same way. With either app, you can keep photos on whatever storage you like, and the catalog will keep track of its location. The catalog also stores any organization information you associate with a photo, such as keyword tags, ratings, notes, and more. As with most such software, ACDSee Photo Studio Professional prompts you to create a backup of the catalog file each month. If you're upgrading from an earlier version, you may need to convert your photo collection to the latest catalog version.
You can also use ACDSee as a Photoshop plug-in, convert Lightroom catalogs for it, and integrate with OneDrive for cloud storage. Once you finish the installation, ACDSee jumps you to its web video course for beginners hosted by the company's director of photography (and noted commercial photographer), Alec Watson.
Other Improvements. Other Improvements. New develop presets, more lens correction profiles, improved OneDrive support, WEBP support, Media Mode UI improvements, raw file support for more cameras, and SendPix integration for photo sharing.
ACDSee has a good many buttons, menus, modes, panels, and toolbars, all of which can be overwhelming. It uses the pleasing black (or very dark gray) background popular among pro photo and video applications. There's no accommodation for 4K and other high-DPI displays like my BenQ QHD monitor, so menus are tiny on these screens. At least the mode buttons at the top right are big enough to be easily visible and clickable.
Like many photo programs, the left sidebar offers image sources, including hard drives, and ACDSee Mobile Sync, which sucks up photos and videos from your smartphone via the ACDSee Mobile Sync app. The company also offers a full mobile photo editing app for $6.99.
An Import button atop the Manage mode lets you bring pictures in from devices, disks, scanners, or CD/DVD. On import, you can choose the disk folder destination and naming convention, but you can't apply adjustment presets, as you can in CyberLink PhotoDirector and Phase One Capture One Pro. If you just want to add photos on your hard drive to ACDSee's catalog, you can't do so in the import dialog; rather, you right-click the folder in Folders view and then choose Catalog files. Lightroom Classic lets you add photos from the same Import dialog. During import, you can see thumbnails of current files and a countdown of the number of files processed and left. Import with ACDSee Photo Studio was significantly slower than for other tested programs; see the Performance section below.
Applying keywords to your photos for organization has improved. You can now create hierarchical keyword groups or choose from a selection of topics, such as Landscape, Wedding, and Portrait, but it's not as big a selection as some competitors offer, and there's no AI object identification like that in Adobe Photoshop Elements' Organizer.
You can also group photos into Collections and Smart Collections. To create a new collection, you right-click on the blank area in the left folder panel. It works, but it's not very intuitive. The Collection pane wasn't even enabled after installation; I had to turn it on from the Panes menu. Image baskets let you hold photos you want to work with in a temporary tray below the main display area. You can now create five image baskets, which appear as separate tabs.
One fun organization feature is maps. ACDSee Photo Studio Professional can use GPS encoding in files that have it to show the images on a map. You can also drag photo thumbnails onto the map to create pins for their locations. There's no mode button for this as there is for People, and it's not even enabled by default. You have to go into the Panes menu and check its check box. The program highlights thumbnails shot in the location you select a pin on the map; I'd prefer it. Lightroom does a better job with maps, though, with thumbnail slideshows right on the map showing photos shot at the location.
ACDSee handles cropping fairly well and is now available in Develop mode. It defaults to an unconstrained aspect ratio, which I prefer. I also like how you can hide the area outside the crop, and how spinning the mouse wheel changes the photo's angle. You can also straighten a photo with a guideline, but there's no tool for auto-straightening based on the horizon like Lightroom's. Note that the straightening tool is found in Develop mode's Geometry section.
The Smart Erase tool (only in Edit mode) is equivalent to Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill tool and does a decent job of automatically removing unwanted objects from a photo. Note the removed gray tape on the right side of the floor in the nearby image. Lest you think that this kind of tool is gimmicky or just for hobbyists, you should know that Rhein II, the most expensive photo sold ($4.3 million) up till 2014, used digital manipulation to remove people and objects.
The Dehaze tool worked well enough on my test winter landscape shot, but it tends to jack up the color saturation more than I'd like. I do like that it offers a brush for applying dehaze just to selected areas of the photo. Adobe's similar tool also lets you add realistic haze; ACDSee's slider can only remove haze. DxO PhotoLab does the best job at haze removal out of the box with its automatic corrections, and it doesn't introduce a color cast, as Adobe and ACDSee do.
You can also target color ranges for selection. Using Noise Reduction illustrates how it works. In the photo below, I want to keep more detail on the barn swallow and smooth away the noise on the out-of-focus green background. Targeting the green pixel range in the color wheel enables me to do it. The same method of selection can be used for other types of edits simply by tapping the Pixel Targeting button. 2ff7e9595c
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