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08/08/2004 |
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ACDSee 6.0 PowerPack Iain Laskey needs to get himself organised and thinks he’s found the right tool for the job
ACDSee has earned itself a formidable reputation over the years. From its humble beginnings as a tool for viewing thumbnails of images and creating slideshows, it has slowly gained more and more functionality. Now at version 6, it is one of the most feature rich products of its type. Here we look at the PowerPack version which bundles ACDSee with FotoCanvas and FotoSlate. ACDSee 6.0 ACDsee installed fine but was extremely slow and felt unstable with many long pauses and hangs. Downloading the update from the website transformed it into a snappy solid program though, after which we had no problems.
ACDSee lets you either view existing images or acquire new ones from a variety of sources including scanners, digital cameras and CDs. Each image is catalogued and you can add further details yourself to help with sorting and searching. For a new ACDSee user this can be a laborious process if you have a lot of images. Once you’re on top of things, adding new images is fairly swift. Given the importance of the image database, it’s good to see ACD Systems have added backup and restore options.
The images themselves can be tweaked in the usual ways with red-eye reduction, various filters and colour correction being just some of the tools available. We did feel the unsharp mask was rather strong in its default mode but it can be adjusted to produce a more realistic image. New in this version is a colour cast corrector which worked well although we did feel the equivalent in Adobe PhotoShop Elements was slightly better. On the plus side, the previews of the different tweaks are almost real-time making it easy to play around with the options available. The updated interface offers many new features to make adjusting and viewing somewhat easier. The new magnify view is particularly good. We did feel though that whilst flexible, the new interface could be confusing until you got used to it. An interesting new feature is the screen saver maker. This allows you to create a selection of images and then turn them in to a screen saver on your PC. A range of transitions provides some additional interest. You can also burn images to a CD or DVD or generate HTML pages giving you additional ways to share your images with friends and family.
FotoCanvas FotoCanvas is dedicated to photo editing and enhancing and has been designed to suit the novice user. That’s not to say it isn’t a powerful package though. To help beginners it has a range of wizards that walk you through many of the more common tasks. It’s a trivial task to load a photo and adjust it in seconds. A nice bonus is the ability to load and use PhotoShop plug-ins. This opens up a huge range of free and commercial 3rd party effects which dramatically increases the versatility of the program. FotoCanvas’s built in features aren’t too shabby though. Whilst other packages have a wider range of filters, the ones most people need are here and all very usable. New and useful are the dodge and burn tools for lightening and darkening selective areas of a photo to compensate for exposure problems. Productivity improvements mean batch updates can be performed and multiple images can be worked on via the thumbnail browser.
FotoSlate FotoSlate allows you to get creative and put your photos to good use. You can create calendars, CD and DVD inlays and covers, contact sheets, greetings cards and so on. The range is a little limited and the greetings cards section is pretty uninspired but we did think the calendars were quite attractive. FotoSlate lets you tweak the layouts which adds extra variation. As with other areas of this bundle, EXIF 2.2, ICM 2.0 and ICC Colour profiles are supported. As long as your camera/scanner also support these standards you’ll be able to achieve better colour fidelity when printing the images. For printing photos we found the Paper Saver wizard to be a neat solution. You can choose the images, specify the size you want each to be and the wizard will then re-arrange them on the paper to get the best fit and minimise the amount of expensive photo paper you use. Conclusion ACDSee 6.0 is fast and has a huge range of tools to play with. New users may feel initially intimidated by the package though as it has grown in to a behemoth compared to its lean and mean beginnings. However, perseverance pays off and it soon becomes apparent why so many people recommend this program. The PowerPack version adds useful tools making it a great all-in-one bundle for the amateur photographer. Of particular note across the range is the online help which is both exhaustive and well structured. If you already have a good photo editor then consider just ACDSee on its own. If you don’t then this bundle provides everything you’ll need for some time to come, especially given its ability to download new features from ACD Systems web site via the plug-ins option.
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