• Pros Full set of image editing tools. Lens-profile-based geometry correction. Haze removal. Good skin-improvement tools. Responsive performance. OneDrive integration.
ACDSee Pro for iOS. ACDSee Camera Pro for iOS. Light EQ™ for Android. Canvas Products. Sign up to create an acdID account where you can activate, download.
• Cons Interface not as intuitive as others. Lens-profile-based image correction tools less effective than the competition's.
Weak geometry and chromatic aberration tools. • Bottom Line ACDSee Pro 9 offers the full range of powerful photo organizing and editing tools, but it still falls short of competitors like Lightroom in raw camera file conversion, effectiveness of some corrections, and interface usability.
Like Adobe, ACDSee (the photo software, not the aging rock band) has been around since the early days of digital photography. And ACDSee Pro, the professional package, has long had its partisans who prefer it to Lightroom and the rest of the competition. Since my last review, ACDSee has added many welcome features, and some of its tools, such as its Light EQ adjusters, are particularly good.
It's also one of the faster photo workflow apps, but it still falls short of competitors like Editors' Choice in raw camera file conversion, effectiveness of corrections, and interface usability. Pricing and Starting Up ACDSee now emulates Adobe in offering its software through a subscription model, but you can also buy a simple one-time download, for $99. Subscriptions start at $79 per year, which gets you two installations of either the ACDSee Pro 9 for Windows or Mac ACDSee Pro 3 for Mac, plus ACDSee Web galleries for showcasing your work and 2GB of SeeDrive Cloud Storage. That's not much storage for pro photography, but you can buy 20GB for $20 per year 40GB for $30, or 100GB for $60. The software runs on Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, and Mac OS X 10.7 and later, and it runs as 64-bit code on both. I installed the application on a 4K-monitor-toting, where it occupied 290MB of disk space. That's tiny compared with Lightroom's 1.4GB.
No matter how you obtain the software, you need to sign up for an ACD account and respond to an email verification. The program then restarts, has you choose a default photo folder, and you're ready to edit photos. The next step is going through an introductory wizard with a quick-start guide. This steps you through the program, and is very thorough and helpful. After choosing your photo folder, you get the option of building a catalog.
This is a database that enables non-destructive editing, because it saves your edits separately from the original photo flies; after editing you simply export a version of the edited image. Lightroom uses a catalog in exactly the same way, and 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 you do with a photo, such as keyword tags, ratings, notes, and more. As with most such software, ACDSee Pro prompts you to create a backup of the catalog file each month. What's New in ACDSee Pro The latest version of ACDSee Pro adds quite a few new tools and capabilities.
Like Lightroom, it can now make corrections to geometric distortion and chromatic aberration based on the known properties of the particular lens you use. The program also now supports 4K and Retina displays.
It offers Actions, or automated routines that you create for regular use on photos or even groups of photos. Snapshots, which let you make copies in mid-edit, are offered in several other workflow programs, and now they come to ACDSee.
Among new editing tools are Dehaze, Skin Tune, and new filters. Rounding out what's new are Photoshop plugin operation, Lightroom catalog conversion, and integration with for cloud storage. Interface The application uses the standard three-panel view, with image-source folders on the left, viewing area in the large middle section, and tools and properties on a right-side panel. You can choose from three interface colors: light, silver, and charcoal. Like Lightroom, but unlike and, ACDSee Pro uses a modal interface. These are basically tabs across the top of the application window that change the interface based on what you're doing in the app—organizing, editing, exporting, and so on. In ACDSee Pro, your mode choices are Manage, Photos, View, Develop, Edit, and 365.
Most of these are self-explanatory, except for the 365 mode, which lets you upload photos to ACDSee's cloud storage. Photos and View only differ in the number of images you see on the screen (lots for the former, one for the latter). Unlike Lightroom, ACDSee Pro doesn't let you customize which modes appear in the interface. Taking a page out of mobile apps like the iPhone's Photos app, ACDSee Pro's Photos mode shows you every single photo in its database, grouped by date. The interface is flexible, letting you undock and auto-hide panels if you like.
The program supports touch gestures, which I tested on my touch-screen PC, pinch-zooming and swiping through photos in a folder. I found, however, that these interactions weren't very responsive or reliable. Lightroom's touch support is way ahead of ACDSee's in this regard. Also, buttons and menu choices are too small for the occasional screen tap.
The app displayed just fine on a 4K-resolution screen in my testing, however. Organizing and Importing Photos As you might expect, importing and organizing happens in the Manage mode. You can choose to rename files on import and to enter metadata such as keywords, but you can't apply adjustment presets, and in general the import is less robust than what Lightroom offers. But unlike Lightroom, ACDSee Pro doesn't require you to import: as with DxO Optics Pro, you can simply open a photo file wherever it sits. ACDSee imports not only photos, but also video and music, and I wish it were easier to tell it only to import photos. The same hold for just viewing by media type after import, and for seeing your last import—all things that Lightroom makes easier.
ACDSee supports most popular professional and prosumer raw camera formats; the Canon T6s is supported, but not the Pentax K-3 II. I imported from the (the world's smallest full-frame DSLR), and ACDSee couldn't display the raw files, while Capture One and Lightroom could. Import quality, or raw file conversion, is another issue: In several image tests, ACDSee did an acceptable job of converting raw camera files, but it was bested by both Lightroom and Capture One, with the latter revealing the most detail and the former more natural color and lighting with well-exposed images. Organizing options include ratings, color-coding, captions, and categories (such as People, Places, and Various). You don't get nearly as much help in entering keywords as you do with Lightroom; you're on your own for creating presets of 9 keywords.
You can also group photos into Collections and Smart Collections. I had to read the help to figure out that. In order 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. One fun organization feature is maps. ACDSee Pro 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. Lightroom does a better job with maps, though, with thumbnail slideshows right on the map showing photos shot at the location.
Adjusting Photos In Develop mode, you get all the standard light and color correction tools—Exposure, Contrast, Saturation—along with things like vibrance and clarity, which have become standards for prosumer software. The interface for adjusting this works well, with large bar sliders. Reset buttons helpfully appear for each section you make an adjustment in, and B&W tools are just a click away. Switching to standard mode for the Light EQ tools presents detailed sliders that let you adjust more particular levels, another good tool I haven't seen in other software. Even cooler, you can adjust with a tool on top of the image that affects the area under the cursor. One missing item was auto-correct for the basic lighting and color sliders. Even though pros like to claim they don't use these, they can be a useful starting point to image correction.
The program does offer auto-levels, however. New for ACDSee is lens geometry correction.
I'm somewhat dubious about this kind of tool, however, which attempts to correct pincushion and barrel distortion based on known characteristics of the equipment used. Nevertheless, the program correctly identified my camera model, and applying the autofix made a subtle improvement to a wide-angle shot, though there were still skewed objects at the image's edges. You can increase the effect, but I missed Lightroom's Upright option, which completely aligns vertical lines. ACDSee's fares worse when it came correction. In my tests, it barely affected green and purple fringing that Lightroom and DxO Optics Pro were able to completely eradicate. Edit Mode ACDSee Pro's Edit mode is where you find pixel-level tools such as retouching, watermarking, and text overlay. The mode sports a long list of tools down the left panel, which actually includes the Develop tools, too. I'd prefer a design that keeps tools in their place, which would also enable a friendlier look to the Edit mode.
New for the mode is the Dehaze tool. This worked pretty well on a test winter landscape image, but it tends to jack up the contrast more than I'd like. I do like that it offers a brush for applying dehaze just to selected areas of the photo. In fact, Lighroom's Dehaze tool only works as a brush adjustment. Another difference is that with Adobe's tool, you can add very realistic haze; ACDSee's slider can only remove haze. Capture One doesn't include a haze-specific tool, but DxO Optics Pro does a great job at haze removal out of the box, with its automatic corrections.
The screenshot below shows incomplete de-hazing on the left using the brush. Performance Importing 52 6MB raw files from a Pentax K30 took 37 seconds in ACDSee Pro, compared with 32 seconds for Lightroom and 42 seconds for Capture One. As with Lightroom, ACDSee lets you start working on photos before the import is complete. In general program use—opening and editing photos—the program feels snappier than most of the competition, though my sixth-generation Core i7 CPU is no slouch. Sharing and Output ACDSee Pro's 365 mode is the starting point for sharing. In fact, the mode embeds a Web browser into the application, where you sign into a cloud account.
Once you log in, you can upload photos via the Transfer sub-mode, including by drag-and-drop. As in Lightroom's Publish Services view, you see online photos on the top of a split gallery thumbnail view and local ones in the bottom. You can drag-and-drop images to the ACDSee's online storage, called the SeeDrive. By default, you upload JPGs to 365, but you can choose raw files with associated data.
You can designate local folders to sync with the online storage, but syncing only happens when you click the Sync to Web button. There's no link to your online gallery from the application, and I had to enter an unlock code to access it; I wasn't sure where that was, but happily it turned out to be the same as the serial number. At, you can see all your synced photos, and the public can see them too, if you allow it. The attractive, dark image pages show tags and allow comments and downloading. There are some appealing photos on the Popular page, but if you're looking for a social photography experience, it's hard to beat. (Instagram, though very popular, is a different beast, as much about social networking as photography, and doesn't offer things like EXIF or even full-size viewing.) In any case, I'd rather see ACDSee put its effort into better tools for directly sending images to Flickr, Facebook, and SmugMug, rather than into creating its own Web galleries. When it comes to that old-school output option, printing, ACDSee Pro offers a full set of tools, with a good choice of layouts including custom layouts.
It can also show soft proofing with gamut warnings. It even supports the EXIF 2.2 printing standard, and lets you choose between having the program or the printer handle color management. Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine?s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine?s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine?s Solutions section, which covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software.
Most recently he covered services and software for ExtremeTech.com.
7 ACDSee Free is a lightweight for Windows. If you think that the stock Windows Photo Viewer is too slow, then you may want to give ACDSee Free a try.
ACDSee Free is a simple photo viewer that doesn't feature a bunch of bells and whistles that slow it down. Apps like are great for managing and touching up huge image libraries but they are often slow and resource heavy.
ACDSee Free gives you a great image viewer that responds quickly. Zoom in and out of photos with the '+' and '-' keys or quickly set it as your desktop background from the 'Tools' menu. Another cool feature of ACDSee Free is its print controls. Once you're done viewing your photographs, you can quickly access print settings to make sure it fits on the specific type of paper you're using. There are tons of print options for users to tinker with to get the best possible results. ACDSee Free's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Yes, ACDSee Free is lightweight and quick but Windows Photo Viewer isn't a slouch either.
Since Windows Photo View is included with Windows, there really isn't a good reason to seek out an alternative photo viewer. Overall, ACDSee Free is a good, speedy photo viewer but it could have included a few more features to differentiate itself from the stock Windows Photo Viewer. ACDSee Free supports the following formats BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TGA, TIFF, WBMP, PCX, PIC, WMF, EMF.