ACDSee Pro 7 review

CREATIVE EFFECTS
We’ve complained about the Edit tab, but it does have its uses, and ACDSee Pro 7 has functions that are unavailable in Lightroom. There’s no layer-based editing, though, so it can’t combine multiple images.

Some of these effects are pretty crude, but the ability to limit them to specific areas with the brush, linear gradient and radial gradient tools adds flexibility. There are a few effects that stand out from the rest. Lomo and Orton emulate two film-era effects to give photos an atmospheric vintage appearance. The new Tilt-Shift effect blurs around a band or ellipse of sharp focus and includes some sophisticated options for creating realistic bokeh effects, which are those round splodges that appear from light sources in an out-of-focus lens.

The new Tilt-Shift effect is one of many processes that push photos in more creative directions

Ultimately, it’s the smaller details that distinguish ACDSee Pro from Lightroom 5. In most cases, Lightroom comes out on top because its noise reduction for RAW files produces better results and is quicker to preview. Lightroom includes a database of lens profiles for automatic correction of lens distortions and vignetting, and its chromatic aberration removal is automatic. These must be applied manually in ACDSee Pro 7, and doing so is painstaking work.

Then there are the on-going frustrations with library management, whereby metadata filters are presented as fixed values such as 1/125s and 1/250s shutter speeds, with no way to filter by values that fall in between. It’s possible to filter by date, folder location or metadata, but these three panels can’t be used to filter in conjunction with each other.

While there’s no shortage of commendable features, Adobe Lightroom 5 is a more elegant and rewarding application.