ACDSee Pro 5 does the job
posted Monday, August 27, 2012 at 10:54 PM EDT
When we last took a look at ACDSee Pro in 2007 we lauded its affordability and capabilities but complained that it had remained a bitmap editor in an age of non-destructive editing. That isn't an issue any more. And the good news doesn't stop there.
We cover the latest advances and report the modest system requirements, as always. But in this review we go beyond the basics to actually work on a couple of images. One we handled with a single click and the other took an afternoon of fiddling.
Our single click JPEG image shows the difference between Auto Levels in ACDSee Pro and Photoshop CS6. We had a night shot of the crowd at the ballpark (which meant we were shooting into the lights) that was really washed out. The perfect test.
Our afternoon project was a Raw file with a monochrome preview. We take it through ACDSee Pro's Develop and Edit modes to massage the tones, do a little split toning and finally some selective color, making three different images from the one file.
We have our quibbles, of course, but it's remarkable what ACDSee packs into Pro at such an affordable price. Read our review for the whole story.