Thursday, January 6, 2011

ACDSee Photo Management Software

You are welcome to read this article but have in mind that ACDSee Pro 5 and ACDSee Photo Manager 14 have been released as of October, 2011. You can find information about the new versions here.

It was more than 10 years ago, when I first used ASDsee software. I still have some good memories of the pleasant experience I've had with it so when I recently saw an advert of ACDSee Pro 3 product, I decided to write a few words about this digital photo management software product and its little brother ACDSee Photo Manager 12.

As "Pro" in its name suggests, ACDSee Pro 3 (ACDSee Pro 4 is available as of April, 2011) is more advanced product compared to ACDSee 12 photo management software and the first offers more features orientated towards professional photographers or photo enthusiasts with more needs. Both products are compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and both have many characteristics in common. Some of them concerning viewing capabilities include: supporting of over 100 image, video and audio formats; browsing photos at lightning fast speed; full screen viewing; comparison of several images at once; tagging photos for further processing.

In regard to organizing capabilities, there are again some shared features between ACDSee Pro3 and ACDSee 12. You may automatically import, categorize and rename digital photos whenever a storage device or a camera is connected to your PC. You may organize photos using combination of keywords, metadata, file folders, ratings and custom categories. You may create and save various detailed searches by keywords, file names, captions, etc.

Of course, everyone wants to tweak a picture now and then. So, both photo management software products offer again some common basic features in photo editing field. You may easily adjust exposure, edit selected area's saturation and color, apply simple effects like blur or choose among 20 filters to use. You may easily fix flaws as red-eye, unwanted objects or blemishes, reduce noise or convert photos to black and white. At the end you may add a custom border, edge effect or drop shadow.

Apart from the aforementioned, both ACDSee Photo Manager 12 and ACDSee Pro 3 offer some publishing and archiving capabilities like creating screen savers or slide shows of pictures; uploading to FTP managed spaces; various e-mailing and printing features; uploading photos to Facebook, flickr, etc. as well as storing images on ACDSee online website where you may create private and public albums. You may also burn your digital photos to DVD/CD and automatically synchronize your drives with either of these photo management software products.

In addition to all those capabilities, ACDSee Pro 3 has some more to offer (in order to justify its Pro name and higher price). Here is what one gets additionally with it. You may perform high-quality decoding of RAW format images. You may customize and save file sort orders and workspace layouts. You may create your Properties pane to display file information conveniently or edit IPTC info of group of photos. The next are some more substantial features also missing in ACDSee 12 photo management software: processing of RAW pictures with full precision and control; fixing pincushion, barrel, fish-eye lens and perspective distortions; processing images to improve color, exposure, geometry and clarity; real-time preview of made adjustments; adjusting the contrast and brightness of different tone bands; boosting saturation without skin tone affecting; simulating HDR results with a single exposure; adjusting brightness, saturation and hue on a color by color basis; performing up to 13 various edits like rotate, resize, convert file type, etc. on multiple photos simultaneously; using ICC profiles to improve color matching among devices; watermarking photos to protect your intellectual property before sharing them; uploading images to Zenfolio.

So, both ACDSee 12 and ACDSee Pro3 are good digital photo management software products and each of them could be helpful in your photography related work. If you want to buy one of them you may visit their corresponding pages on ACDSee's website: ACDSee Photo Manager 12 / ACDSee Pro 3. There is also over 40% discount of ACDSee Pro 3 price valid through February 18, 2011. And if you are a Mac user, there is an ACDSee Pro for Mac version.

Look for other software reviews in our Review Maze.

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