Software review: ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2021 is a speedy Lightroom alternative.Review acdsee pro 8 free
There was a problem loading comments right now. Without any warning words that I can find on the box this company limits home users with activation. I downloaded version 8 in October to finally get the IPTC format that is in other photo management software but not in what has been my favorite software up to now.
Now it is February There is still no update offered for version 8. It appears that the company is working on other new products. Perhaps that has taken priority over fixing the problems of early purchasers. Impatient to get on with making portable captions I got version 8 in a box. Still no update on the site but a stealth activation feature. For a family with several computers for historic and convenience reasons, but whose total hours of use is slight, this is bad.
It is also bad if your idea of how to remove a virus or worm is to save your data and roll in a system image from last month. Software that requires activation creates a phone hassle. I have uninstalled ACDSee 8, written it off as a waste of money, and have decided to see how much I can accomplish with Google's free Picasa software.
Google built it from the start with IPTC so the captions and searching are portable. If you are new to this photo management business then I recommend you start right out with another product like Picasa. I haven't used the comparable Adobe product but have friends who recommend it. If you are an old ACDSee user it was long ago shareware and want to upgrade, consider buying version 7. It is still available here and the updates available on the company site suggest the code should be stable.
I believe those are the "used" described as new but without UPC code ones on sale for less through Amazon as well. I see someone here says that the Adobe software is slow when you have lots of pictures. I have been working the last two days with Picasa and my 12 thousand photos. Picasa is different; you do things differently; and subfolder management does not seem to be as good.
I intend to add captions and do all I can with Picasa. This really illustrates the point made in "Half Great". I can only move to the best photo management software if the data about my pictures is in portable format. ACDSee 8 is a great file-level manager, and easily surpasses most, if not all, of its competitors at the file-level manipulation and organizational functions that are the basis for creating an efficiently structured and effectively manageable digital photograph library of thousands of photographs in size, and larger.
ACDSee 8 also sports a basic image editor, a slideshow and screensaver module, and a backup module. ACDsee is a great choice for those who need to manipulate a massive number of files regularly. However, ACDSee 8's cumbersome implementation of metadata management features -- the meat of a digital photograph manager -- makes the program difficult to recommend the program to mainstream users. What makes metadata support so important?
A photograph may be worth a thousand words, but not always. Without aid, the casual viewer may not understand or remember a picture's content or context. What is this a picture of? Who are these people? Why did I take this picture? They are:. Manage - Management mode consists of a library of images where you can index scores, categories, labels and more. This function is quite useful since with the correct settings, you will find the right shot out of thousands in a matter of seconds.
Photos - Photos mode is similar to Manage. View - In ACDSee, the View mode is a more detailed section where you may view images one by one along with the files of a larger size. This is a typical function for photo processing software, but it limits competition by using impressive buffering speed once again.
Develop - Here you may find the main tools for color correction of your shot: Exposure, Contrast, Saturation — along with vibrancy and clarity settings. In ACDSee Photo Studio Professional editing mode, you will find pixel-level tools such as picture retouching, watermarks and text overlay.
The mode contains a long list of tools at the bottom of the left panel. This mode presents a non-destructive image editing, but with impressive complexity.
The ACD See app uses a standard 3-panel workspace with image folders on the left, the preview screen and tools in the middle, and the features on the right panel. Besides, it supports touch gestures. It allows you to scale images in the folder. This mode greatly resembles Lightroom not only because of the toolset layout but also because of the ability to create and save presets. You can create presets for both separate tools and entire images.
Tune — Large number of sliders for adjusting white balance, shadows, lighting, skin tone, split tone, and more. Detail — This can be considered the main and only section for image retouching. Geometry — Lens Correction, Cropping, Perspective adjustments.
By combining a powerful digital asset manager, a RAW file converter that now handles Fuji X-trans images and a well-featured image editor with adjustment layers into one program, ACDSee Ultimate 9 is a serious contender in the field. With version 8 you get the powerful editing performance that Photoshop offers with the useful and interesting features that you would expect on Paint Shop Pro. Couple that with a very fast batch processing time of lossless images and you have a winning formula.
In Develop mode, a few controls do offer automatic modes. Still, there are more auto controls on offer in Edit mode, and some tools also have multiple versions offering different levels of complexity and, of course, varying levels of control as well. Adobe's images tend to look just a little more processed, with higher levels of sharpening by default and stronger tweaks to local contrast for a slightly punchier result.
Differences in sharpening aside, neither app shows any advantage in detail, however. Color is quite similar for the most part, although ACDSee tends to neutralize a golden hour glow more, whereas Lightroom tends to retain a bit more warmth. ACDSee's foliage tends to look a little more realistic, though, and it sometimes holds onto a bit more highlight detail by default. At higher ISO, there's a much greater difference between the two applications.
Adobe Lightroom performs quite a bit of color noise reduction by default, and also removes hot pixels. In the process, though, it sometimes bleaches the natural colors out of your creations. By comparison, ACDSee leaves the color noise very visible along with hot pixels, but it also holds onto what color your camera was able to discern far better than its Adobe rival. And of course, either application provides the tools with which to tame noise manually.
Unfortunately, while those in Lightroom can do a pretty decent job — certainly not in the same league as DxO's DeepPrime , but good enough — ACDSee's noise reduction algorithms are decidedly weak. There's not much that can be done with ACDSee's controls to improve the luminance noise, though.
I found the best results at around level 40 on the noise reduction slider. ACDSee's color noise reduction works reasonably well, although you have to nearly max out the slider to achieve what a light touch on Adobe's slider does.
Nor do the noise reduction presets in Develop mode or the noise tool in Edit mode perform any better, as they clearly rely on the same underlying algorithms. Unfortunately, if taming high ISO noise is a frequent concern for you, this alone is probably the biggest reason to give ACDSee a pass for the time being. As mentioned previously, performance has clearly been a primary goal for the team behind Photo Studio Ultimate I found myself immediately impressed by its performance and decided to really stress it to see how it held up under a difficult load.
It contains around 2. And as well as all the stills, there's also a small number of videos, which I also had it catalog. It took a day or so for Photo Studio Ultimate to finish the job of cataloging all the photos; once it was done adding them to its database and creating a whopping eight gigabytes of thumbnails, performance was excellent. I should note that this time doesn't include face recognition, something which would likely have added another several days or more.
The program still launches in around four or five seconds, and while it takes a rather sluggish 25 seconds to open Photos mode or seconds to first switch to the root folder of the photo library in Manage mode, that's the only time it feels slow. Once it's done, browsing is instant or very close to it. There's no delay at all as you browse from folder to folder and scroll through thumbnails in Manage mode.
Even in Photos mode, which presents every photo in the database as a single, scrollable list of thumbnails grouped by capture date, the thumbnails all appear within a second or less as you scroll through your library.
Searching for photos tagged by face recognition as containing a specific individual in that library took just 17 seconds to return almost results. And adjusting most sliders in develop mode delivered previews that were real-time or very close to it.
Note, though, that pixel peeping raws isn't possible with Photo Studio Ultimate at its default settings. To achieve its performance, it relies solely on the embedded previews of raw files, even when they're far too low-res for viewing. Enabling raw decoding in settings doesn't slow performance that much, and I think ACDSee should really ignore this setting and just always decode raws when viewing Final processing of a set of raw files from the megapixel Pentax K to full-resolution JPEGs at default settings took 12 minutes and 30 seconds, or about 1.
By way of comparison, Adobe Lightroom Classic with similar compression levels and default settings took 9 minutes, 30 seconds, or about 1.
ACDSee's face recognition algorithms can detect and identify faces not only when unobscured and looking towards the camera but also in profile view or when partially hidden behind another object.
Faces aren't detected when the photo is first imported into the database. Instead, the algorithms run when manually triggered or, by default, in the background when your computer is left idle in Manage mode. I found the feature to be a big time-saver, but some work is definitely still required to curate detected faces because the algorithms are quite prone to misidentification.
For example, at the default 'moderate' face detection settings, I manually trained the algorithms with pictures of myself, then browsed ACDSee's suggested names list to discover that it thought a cat, a Ferrari logo, my year old son and Formula One race driver Kimi Raikkonen were also me. And even changing the face detection algorithms to run at their conservative settings didn't solve this issue.
After completely clearing all recognition data and starting from scratch, subsequent suggestions still included many non-human and not even remotely face-like objects, including multiple wheel rims, random camera parts, a flower petal, a cupcake, a Korean seafood rice bowl and those ever-present Ferrari logos. While the algorithms correctly detected a large number of human faces and suggested the correct names for them at least most of the time, I really think ACDSee could use tightening up their suggestions further or offering an even more conservative recognition setting.
I also stumbled on several bugs during this review, although in fairness, a couple of these probably only came to light because of how hard I pushed the program while testing its impressive performance. When cataloging my roughly two-terabyte photo library, everything went fine for around the first 40, photos imported into ACDSee's database.
From that point on, I would get a crash and forced close of the app approximately once every 10, images.
Curiously, ACDSee also imported the final 40, images without a crash. I also discovered that after launching the program with my removable media disconnected, then closing, reconnecting the drive, and relaunching, ACDSee incorrectly flagged most of my photos as orphaned. Yet if I double-clicked on the thumbnail of a supposedly orphaned image, it would instantly open without issue, and then its thumbnail would update to show it as unorphaned once more. There was no rhyme or reason as to which images were incorrectly flagged, either.
Instead, the orphans were randomly scattered between those that still showed as accessible in the same folder. ACDSee's database optimization tool couldn't fix the issue, nor did re-running the Catalog tool, although it did throw up several 'save failed, can't output file' errors. But as I noted, these issues likely relate in part to the size of my photo library, and I didn't see similar behavior with smaller libraries or when using a non-removable drive.
That wasn't true of another face-detection bug I discovered, however. If you rotate an image that already has faces detected in it, the frames for any detected faces are then shown in the wrong area of the image. You can't change the frame positions or shape to fix this, as after switching away from the image and then returning, the frames revert to their previous, incorrect locations.
You can delete them, but if you then attempt to manually outline a face instead, the thumbnail shown for that face shows the wrong area of the original, unrotated image rather than the area of the rotated image that you'd selected. None of these issues are showstoppers, but together they do conspire to make ACDSee feel rather less polished than its Adobe rival.
There's a lot to like about ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate , but there are a couple of concerns that make it a bit harder to recommend. It has great support for a vast range of cameras with decent image quality, and while phones and drones aren't directly supported, their files can be accepted if converted to DNG-format first.
It offers image management features aplenty, and at the lower end of the ISO range, at least, decent image quality. And it does so while providing great performance overall, even with very large photo libraries. But we have concerns about its rather weak noise reduction capabilities, which we'd definitely like to see ACDSee address in a future release.
And we also found rather more bugs than we'd like to see, including one that could quite regularly cause a hard crash while cataloging images and videos. To be clear, we never lost any data.
All of our photos and ACDSee's database survived every crash perfectly intact, and the latter can easily be backed up and restored later if you have any concerns. But crashes still make us nervous, especially in software that has already been on the market for close to a year. If you can live without the more capable noise reduction of some of its rivals and take the time to learn its features, though, ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate has a huge amount to offer, and its interface is unusually swift and responsive.
Coupled with its affordable pricing and optional perpetual licensing, we can still recommend it as an all-in-one tool, albeit with some reservations. Amateur and enthusiast photographers who want an all-in-one tool for managing and editing their photos, and who don't often need sophisticated high ISO noise reduction. Before buying any software, try getting in touch with customer support. Tech support can be critical to software.
They had me reinstall 3 times. They have a 30 day money back guarantee with their software. How are you out that much money? I have never had any issues with its installation on my PC.
Just installed my subscription copy of ACDsee Ultimate , upgraded from version at no extra cost same setup with improvements. Very happy as the subscription is affordable and the upgrades are part of the standard pricing and yes the NR is definatly improved , win - win. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think they ever issued any patches or updates for the version. Buyer beware if you're thinking about getting Can you post a link to a news update on any news website that announced the release of a patch or update from the company?
I don't think I am wrong. There are always raw support updates to capture new cameras released during the December holiday season. It often also corrects any errors and omissions. Don't forget, this small development staff was also busy preparing the Gemstone Beta AND the release at the same time. IIRC, there was no late summer update, which is almost always a camera support release. You are correct! While they might add support for new cameras Sony RAW never fully worked with it, though!
The "Check For Updates" button under Help is purely cosmetic. You said I was wrong and I was not. Please read my post again and kindly point to a patch or update they released for the version other than updated camera support. Ble59 - you did not qualify your original claim as to the type of update provided. You WERE wrong.
You implied that the software was never updated, and appeared to try and insert FUD into the dialog. I am not going to drag this out any longer. I believe I have documented the spurious claim that this software is not updated. The updates provided over the years vary in number, I assume, the actual number depends on the ACDSee product manager's determination of need.
I'm out on this subject. I switched over from Adobe when they moved to a monthly fee. It was a good move, the YouTube coaching is very good, the controls are intuitive for me, the results have been as good or better than Photoshop.
DeHaze and light equalizing are both big in my workflow. Presets can be saved. I love it and use it way more than LightRoom and Photoshop for that matter, although Photoshop has features that ACDSee does not have and that are more intuitive and efficient. The only thing I don't like about this software package, is that it does not Save and Replace an image.
You have to keep renaming the image every time you make changes to it. I'm guessing that's a "Nanny" way of keeping you from inadvertently deleting one of your prize images,but it sure is inconvenient! When saving, there are both "save" and "save as" options.
The "save" option opens a conformation box, but it can be switched off by the usual "don't show again" check box. This is particularly visible on photos I took of fireworks; what should have been clear white streaks of fireworks showed enormous amounts of purple fringing. I also didn't like the rather long delay switching to the RAW editor from the regular photo browser.
You obviously have more experience with ACDSee. Tim ACDSee allows you to save any default values you like to those sliders in develop mode, so your own set of personal defaults would be applied when you open a new RAW image in develop mode.
The sub-headline that names the price makes this seem like expensive software, but it doesn't have to be. I received, and accepted, an offer to purchase Photo Studio Ultimate for fifty bucks, one-third the price you list. And the photo software came bundled with the Luxea video editor. Our editorial policy is to publish list prices for products.
Discounts can appear and disappear or change over time, and many products will have special promotions at some point. I understand regarding your price listing policy. I just didn't want the listed price to discourage anyone from at least trying ACDSee. It's nice to have companies like ACDSee, Affinity, and others who make their products affordable to us non-professionals and modest-budget enthusiasts.
I hope the Ultimate will My guess is it's perceived as a new camera body even though the A7RM3 has been out a while. There must be more to it than that, it's been out quite a while. If it's not a technical issue, then maybe a marketing issue of some sort? Thanks for covering the upcoming release with pertinent and timely I'm working with ACDSee now since over 20years it always has been a little buggy but this improved vastly with the last versions.
It's my number one tool and I do make my living from my photography. Number one reason I use it that it saved me so much of my precious time compared to any other photo browser or editing program! It depends on the length of the relationship. One year qualifies for "ex" status, does one night? The color noise slider usually has to be put all the way to the right and the luminance slider work in a very narrow interval Below that, not much happens and above that details smear out.
But knowing that, satisfactory results can be achieved. The sharpening tool is fine and has an edge mask slider which is useful for avoiding sharpening uniform areas like the sky. I use a two pass sharpening workflow with preset sharpening at import and a second output sharpening when everything including resizing etc. With the combination of the built in NR and my sharpening procedure, I get better results than with say DXO Pure Raw which indeed removes noise but also blurs details more than I like and sometimes adds halos.
I've used Acdsee since actually upgrading for new features regularly. I haven't yet been able to bring myself to cancel Adobe. I did a few years back and signed up again. Acdsee has some great features, it's in my opinion a far better program for viewing and finding photos. It's noise reduction is poor as said. It's light eq is good but you need to be very gentle with the sliders, same with the highlights sliders, which can cause a red hue if pushed.
