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ACDSee Ultimate 9 review - Acdsee ultimate 9 vs lightroom free
Migrate from Photoshop™ & Lightroom™ | ACDSee
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. The importing felt the same sort of speed as Lightroom, perhaps marginally quicker, but I think that's gated by a number of factors outside of software like card reader, card, USB, and so on. This is arguably the most fundamental and important difference between Lightroom and ACDSee Ultimate : you don't have to import files. That is, ACDSee accesses your drives directly and bypasses importing the files into a catalog.
ACDSee still has an import function, but that is merely copying your files from your card reader over to your local hard drive, and not storing duplicates of the files in its own database. This is such a tiny feature, but its quality-of-life impact has been sizable for me. It's not technically in the ACDSee client but an added functionality outside of it. All it does is add an extra section to the dropdown menu of your operating system's right click, which shows a small but high-quality preview of the file and the EXIF data.
The EXIF data is always useful, but you could argue the preview is superfluous unless you have your files listed in folders without preview icons generated. This technology is becoming more and more prominent in not only software but cameras too. It has a wealth of applications and can drastically smooth and speed up your workflow.
It can be used for weddings to ensure you categorize and track images of guests or the couple themselves or even make images of a model you've used more than once searchable by name. It's a very powerful way of indexing images.
This is an important topic with most artists not having huge disposable budgets to dish out for software. Pricing is also an area to discuss that's becoming more and more frustrating, particularly with Adobe.
I pay for an Adobe CC subscription, which covers lots of software. Some people prefer to buy the software outright, which isn't an option for Lightroom CC, and so like many others, I was forced to pay monthly. It's thoroughly infuriating. Fortunately, with all of ACDSee's products, the pricing is easier, and cheaper.
It's not a few filters a presets, it's four other pieces of software and cloud storage. Also, their business plans don't go up in price tenfold like their competitors, but only a couple of dollars per month, per user.
The file management and presentation of those files, coupled with the impressive speed at which the software works are a huge draw to it. This can be an important difference when you're working with large batches of images or many batch of images. If the price of the software was around the same as Lightroom CC, I'd focus on this as almost its USP over the all-in-one image processing, but it's great value means it has appeal to a wide range of photographers.
Change is uncomfortable, particularly when you're so used to a certain way of doing things, but time saved is money saved, and money saved is Go to Top. Sports extensive digital asset management tools for optimal organization and efficiency. Developed for professional and advanced amateur photographers who need total control of their workflows.
New AI-driven People Mode for quick and easy identification of named and unnamed people in your photos. Offers batch file processing, including renaming and resizing multiple files, using Presets. Organize files using a combination of folders, keywords, ratings, color labels, metadata, and categories.
Photo Studio Ultimate is a comprehensive digital darkroom tool. In the interest of readability, I'm not going to try to cover every feature of Photo Studio Ultimate in this review. Instead, I'll hit the highlights for those of you who're new to ACDSee while summarizing the improvements perpetually licensed users of the previous release can enjoy with an upgrade.
Let's roll up our sleeves and get right down to it! According to ACDSee, the updated version includes a new Media mode for efficiently viewing and managing folders and media, a new People mode that uses an improved AI engine to recognize faces, and some new selection tools.
Users who purchase the edition will be eligible for a free upgrade. These differ only in their limits on cloud storage and the number of concurrent installs allowed.
Let's review what's new for those already familiar with ACDSee. Probably the most noticeable difference — and the biggest reason to upgrade if you're using an older, perpetually licensed version of ACDSee — will be the performance gains.
There are also some notable tweaks to the user interface and tools on offer. A new refine selection tool helps you outline subjects for editing more accurately, while new text-in-frame and text-on-path tools let you define areas for text overlays and have text follow a curve or shape. And you can now create presets for batch resizing and renaming, and assign these to keyboard shortcuts. Meanwhile, the quick search tool has gained a new button to search only within the previous search results rather than the entire database.
This makes it easier to quickly winnow out unwanted results based on subject matter to find the images you're after.
And smaller improvements abound, such as support for GoPro raw files and import of face recognition data from Lightroom and Picasa, easier pairing with ACDSee's Mobile Sync app via QR code, and comprehensive, context-sensitive online help. Further right, you'll find several icons through which you can sign up for an optional ACDSee subscription, including cloud storage and access to several other apps, view statistics about your photos and the overall database, and view any messages from ACDSee.
Manage mode allows you to browse folders and view their contents on local and network drives without first importing them into the database.
There's a choice of several view types, including thumbnails or a film strip beneath a larger preview. You can also view or edit metadata, add tags, ratings or labels, and images or videos can be categorized or added to collections. Additionally, you can view geotagged images on a map or add locations to those that aren't geotagged. ACDSee Actions — essentially short scripts combining multiple processing steps into a single click -—can be applied, or multiple images loaded into stacks or processed to create an HDR or focus-stacked image.
You can also select images to open in Develop or Edit modes or to be handed off to an external application. Rather than giving you access to everything on your drives, Photos mode gives you access by date only to the images and videos you've imported into ACDSee's database, which are shown only as thumbnails.
You have a choice of daily, monthly, or yearly views and can also select folders you'd like to scan for content. There's not much you can do in this mode other than rotating images or selecting an individual image to open in one of the other modes.
You can only access relatively small thumbnail views of your content. This mode is similar to the filmstrip view in Manage mode, except most visual clutter is removed or disabled.
It's also the only mode to allow you to actually play videos, rather than seeing them as static thumbnails. To differentiate videos from stills, the other modes show them as groups of four smaller thumbnails taken from various points in the video clip. There's also an Actions Browser pane for still images that allows you to visually preview the expected results of each action on your selected image before you apply it.
Develop mode is where you'll be doing the bulk of your editing. By default — the interface being very customizable — the sliders with which you'll make your adjustments are grouped in a pane at the left of the screen.
Depending upon the size of each panel within the pane, you can mostly have only two open at once, although for a couple of bigger or smaller panes, that number increases or decreases. If you open too many, another panel will simultaneously close to make room for it, preventing you from having to scroll up and down the pane.
Most of the basic options are similar to those you'd find in Lightroom, although there are some differences in how they're named or located. The most notable omissions are equivalents to Lightroom's Whites and Blacks sliders.
You'll find a history panel and a categorized selection of developing presets at screen right, but there's no way to preview their results before application. Nor can you access the View mode's Actions Browser in this mode, and if you apply an action before switching to Develop mode, its component steps aren't shown in the history panel.
Finally, we come to Edit mode, which differs from Develop mode in two key ways. Multiple edits can be made to a single image, but if you want to switch to a different image or program mode, you have to render your results at that point. The other key difference is that there's much more hand-holding in this mode, which will help less experienced photographers get the results they're after. 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. Used it till version. Kinda all right software, but then I had to switch to Adobe stuff and now I'm on their hook ;. By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
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