ACDSee Pro 4 review

1 / 3

Digital SLR cameras’ raw modes unlock an extra level of photographic creativity, but the raw-processing software that comes with these cameras is often fairly uninviting. Perhaps that’s why many people stick to shooting JPEGs and managing them in the excellent – and free – Google Picasa.

ACDSee Pro is similar to Picasa, handling various tasks including tagging, sorting, searching, optimising, printing and sharing photos online. However, at each stage it offers functions that let prolific, creative photographers achieve more than Picasa allows.

ACDSee Pro took just a second or two to search through thousands of photos to reveal all the wide-angle shots taken with a particular camera

Its Manage tab is a case in point. A Calendar panel sorts photos by capture date, and with our library of 37,000 photos it took less than a second to reveal the ones taken on a particular year, month, day or hour. The Organize panel filters by a vast range of other criteria including camera model, focal length and aperture. Most of this data is embedded into files as they’re taken, while other details – Creator, Job Title, Web URL and so on – can be applied in batches using custom metadata presets, a new feature in version 4.

Filtering by multiple criteria simply involves holding down Ctrl and selecting the ones you want from the list. However, it’s not so easy to filter by both date and another criterion, as selections in the Calendar and Organise panels on each side of the screen cancel each other out. A third sub-panel, Group By, provides a workaround but it’s clumsy.

ACDSee Pro 4 takes a cue straight from Picasa with its newfound ability to plot photos on a map. Photos from GPS-enabled cameras are plotted automatically, and it’s easy to drop other photos onto the map manually. The maps come courtesy of Google, but the panel doesn’t fit neatly into the interface’s default layout. There’s ample scope to rearrange the layout of all the panels, and to save and recall layouts, but it shouldn’t be obligatory to have to resort to this sort of customisation.

Displaying photos’ locations on a map is a fun way to browse collections, particularly if your GPS-enabled camera has done the coordinate plotting for you

A key task for photo-management software is picking the best shots from a large set. ACDSee Pro uses a five star rating system, which is much more useful than Picasa’s single star. However, applying ratings involves grappling with the right-click menu when it deserves prominently-placed buttons. There are keyboard shortcuts to apply ratings more quickly but they don’t work in the Compare Images viewing mode. Another snag is that, while it’s possible to show only the photos with a particular rating, it can’t show all those rated two stars or above, for example.

Raw image processing is the most compelling reason to upgrade from Picasa, which supports raw formats but can’t do an awful lot with them. ACDSee Pro is quite the opposite, with some extremely sophisticated tools for optimising colours and correcting for lens defects such as distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration. The raw processing engine sees significant changes in this release, and although we weren’t able to make direct comparisons with version 3, we’re inclined to believe claims that it’s both better quality and faster – it certainly impressed us in both respects.

However, it can’t quite compete with the raw-processing tools in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. Its colour optimisation is just as powerful but the sharpening and noise reduction functions aren’t as comprehensive. Meanwhile, ACDSee’s lens correction is a manual process whereas Lightroom’s is mostly automatic, based either on its database of lenses or the metadata embedded in some cameras’ raw files.

ACDSee Pro’s raw-processing tools are generally excellent but it can struggle with noisy high-ISO images

We were impressed with ACDSee’s printing and slideshow-creation options, as well as its online backup and sharing at ACDSeeOnline.com. This website is a good match for Picasa Web Albums, and having direct folder-level access from within the software makes transfers delightfully easy. 2GB online storage is included, with 25GB priced at £15.65 a year.

There’s no question that ACDSee Pro is far more powerful than Picasa. While various niggles mean it’s not quite up to the standards of Lightroom, it is around £50 cheaper. If you’re contemplating shooting in raw mode or are struggling to keep on top of a massive photo library, but can’t stretch to the cost of Lightroom, it’s an excellent choice.