ACDSee Ultimate 9 Review

Develop allows you to make global changes to the picture you've selected, such as exposure, contrast, saturation, that kind of thing. Should you require something a little more specific, then you should go to the Edit screen. One of the new features of Ultimate 9 is the non-destructive properties of the Adjustment Layers. It's interesting that ACDSee are only just adding this type of feature now as it's been available on Photoshop since CS4. In fact, that's not the only thing that ACDSee have seemingly taken from Adobe. There's also now an Action option to record your most used steps and get the program to do them for you so you can sit back and enjoy a view. There are plenty of lens correction functions on other programs but ACDSee have taken it one step further. Ultimate 9 will use your camera's metadata to establish the lens used and make corrections according to that information.
Layered Editor
One of the more interesting new features is an option to take snapshots of your work. The idea being to decrease the chance of you losing work and making it even more non-destructive. The process is simple and involves opening the board at the top left of the Develop module by clicking the aperture icon, then clicking the plus symbol when you'd like to create a new snapshot.
Snapshot
Another very interesting feature that's new to ACDSee is the Dehaze feature that can be found ion the Adjustment layers in the Edit module. It works very much like a polariser in that it removes mist, smoke, fog and other things that may cloud your pictures. It has to be noted that it doesn't do other things that actually using a polarising filter can do, such as cut through reflections on glass. If that's on the photo then it can't be gotten rid of. After all, the program doesn't know what's behind that reflection.
Dehaze
For all the portrait photographers out there, ACDSee have introduced the Skin Tune feature to Ultimate 9. Plenty of you will be familiar with the glamour effect of smoothing skin out so much that it looks like it's not real and that's effectively what this does. There are three sliders to make your adjustments and it's entirely possible that you can keep it looking realistic while smoothing out blotchiness. We found a little cloning was still necessary to maintain a life like image. We are impressed with how intelligent the system is, though. It completely stays away from the eyes. We expected to see the retinal veins disappear but they don't.
Skin Tune
Other new features include Collections for increased speed in finding images for actions such as batch processing or printing. You can now import and utilise Photoshop plug-ins to the Edit section of the program and 4K monitors are now supported. There's a number of new filters to choose from and there's linear and radial gradients to add various effects and colours to your images. If you decide to switch from Lightroom to ACDSee, they've included a system that ensures compatibility between the work you did with Adobe and transitioning it over to Ultimate 9. There's a new colour matching system which will use any colour inside or even outside the app. Last, but not least, is the raw update. Ultimate 9 is now compatible with an additional 33 cameras including 12 Fuji X-Tran models. ACDSee will automatically show all raw images as a thumbnail as long as the raw file has one in it. If the thumbnail is too small to be viewed properly Ultimate 9 will create a better one for the Manage section. However this can take time and if that's a commodity to you then you can turn the feature off.
Performance
We processed 10Gb of images from TIFF to JPEG using a computer with an AMD64 Quad Core 3.7GHZ processor and 8Gb RAM. The whole conversion took 9 minutes and 45 seconds. That's roughly middle of the road when compared to other editing systems that offer similar features. For example Corel Paintshop Pro X8 takes around 7 minutes 30 seconds, while OnOne Perfect Photo Suite 9 takes over 15 minutes and After Shot Pro 2 takes just under 9 minutes.
ACDSee say that they've improved the speed of processing in Ultimate 9 with a more agile Move tool and improved layering. Processing some features can take a while, such as when we played around with the tilt/shift filter. It took around a minute to process our changes which is a long time when you're sat watching a green bar progress along the screen.
Conclusion
In our review of the previous version – ACDSee Ultimate 9 Review – we noticed that the program was more invasive. It took over as the primary image viewer and inserted a thumbnail of images into the window that pops up when you right click on an image. The only way we could find to completely disable this was by completely uninstalling the program. While this still occurs in Ultimate 9, it doesn't actually do any harm. If anything it helps because it also provides some basic EXIF data. Taking over the opening of images doesn't happen, though.
We like a lot of the features on Ultimate 9 but there are a few that still need some work. For example, the Skin Tune feature is extremely handy but is a little too imprecise for our tastes. It can still be easy these days to overcook images with heavy processing so it would have been handy to have adjustments made in finer increments.
Despite the increased speed of the program, we still found areas that were slower than we'd like to see on the flagship product. We do like the integrated functionality of the Lightroom plug-ins for anyone thinking of coming over to ACDSee and we also like the increased amount of raw files that are accepted.
Using this as a stand alone editing suite, it's more than capable of doing everything you need it to. Maybe even more in some cases. The layout is similar to Adobe and Corel so you won't have much trouble adapting to the UI although there are some differences. If you've been involved with one of the main players and you're looking to move or if you're new to the photographic editing business, then take a look at ACDSee Ultimate 9. The plan works out less expensive than Photoshop CC but to buy the program is more expensive than Corel PaintShop Pro.
Ratings (out of 5) | |
---|---|
Features | 4 |
Ease-of-use | 3.5 |
Value for money | 4.5 |
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