CyberLink PhotoDirector 2011 review

Anyone familiar with Adobe Lightroom 3 will do a double-take when they see PhotoDirector 2011. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we can see why CyberLink would want a slice of the Lightroom action. We’ve long been fans of the Adobe’s photo editing tool and in our review of the latest version, back in June 2010, we were impressed with the addition of lens profile correction.

PhotoDirector 2011 may lack this feature, but it has just about everything else. Even those who haven’t used Lightroom will quickly get used to the workflow of PhotoDirector: import, tag, edit and export. Efficiency is one of the main attractions of Lightroom, and it’s no different here.

The application is divided into three main components: Library, Adjustment and Slideshow. Library takes care of the organisational side of things and allows you to import and tag your entire photo collection, or just particular folders. You can search for images based on a range of information from keywords and whether the photo has been edited yet to any EXIF data such as shutter speed and aperture. You can’t, however, find photos taken with a specific lens. As with Lightroom, you can flag, reject and rate images. As long as you spend some time doing this for all your imported photos, you can quickly track down the best photos from each event later on.

The Adjustment section, naturally, is where you’ll spend most of your time in PhotoDirector. There’s plenty of scope for viewing images and adjustments, including the useful option to use a second monitor for a full-screen preview of the adjusted shot. If you don’t have this luxury, you can opt for a split-screen view with the original on the left or top, and the effect of the adjustments shown on the right or bottom. It’s easy to flip between full-screen and editing views but, unlike Lightroom’s layout with toolbars on the left and right of the image, PhotoDirector has controls on the left only.

You have the choice of manual editing or choosing from a list of presets. The order of tools is identical to Lightroom, but they cover just about everything you need. It’s simple to correct white balance errors, even with JPEGs, but RAW files from all the popular cameras are also supported. Other tools include tone, levels, colours, sharpening, noise reduction and vignette correction.