ACDSee 8 Photo Manager Review
Overwhelming Photography
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
As a media browser ACDSee is very, very fast. Forget about using Windows OS image browsing options. After you start using ACDSee, you won't need deal with the sluggishness of other solutions.
Designers and advanced PC users will appreciate rich and sophisticated image management features ACDSee offers, but people new to digital photography might feel overwhelmed or even lost.
ACDSee 8 is essentially an image-management program, so it needs to be viewed as such. In addition to that, image-editing features ACDSee 8comes with are simply outstanding. Unlike previous versions, now there are plenty of professional tools for enhancing photos. What’s left from version 7.0 are histogram-based Levels and Curves commands, color-cast controls, red-eye removal tools, an Unsharp Mask command, image resizing, and lossless JPEG rotation.
The new interface for ACDSee 8 got a major facelift and now comes with some handy options that include 21 additional image effects and a text tool with drop-shadow and bevel options. There are even face correction tools for professional photographers.
ACDSee 8 also has adequate photo sharing option (nothing to rave about, though). It’s called SendPix and it lets you create photo album that can be shared or place on a website where it can stay for 30 days free of charge. My hunch is that it’s just another gimmick to get more money out of people, since free services like Flickr are available. ACDSee 8 also easily integrates with a lot of popular photo software. Case in point is seamless integration with Snapfish.
ACDSee 8 also supports metadata, which means you can annotate or make keywords to help you find an image you're looking for via their database support for your images. (I really liked this feature.) I had ACDSee read all of my CD's, catalogue them, and save the thumbnails to a data base. Now, when I'm looking for a particular image, I can do a search by keywords or simply browse the CD's. This database can also be exported and backed up, capabilities that are very important.
Basically, you have two choices nowadays - Photoshop Elements and ACDSee. If you are shooting to be a pro or semi-pro, you’ll want to stick to ACDSee. It’s cheaper than Photoshop Elements 4.0 anyway.