Archive for the ‘ACDSee Products’ Category:
ACDSee tips
I posted few tips about using ACDSee..
- Getting 2 different menus when you right click.
- Expanding all your folders or categories quickly
- How to get your panes in ACDSee back to “normal” again quickly
- How to refresh your file list
- How to quickly view an image full screen.
Check it out here: Some tips you might not know when using ACDSee!
Subscribe to the comments for this postACDSee tip: Using Image Basket to gather up your photos
You will find an article about using the Image Basket in ACDSee 2009 over that ACDSee Blog here.
ACDSee has released ACDSee Pro 3
ACDSee released ACDSee Pro 3. This is their professional photo software organizer/editing images software. The cost of ACDSee Pro 3 is $169.99 but you have previous versions you can get a discount at 30% off.
Note: ACDSee has 2 major product lines – home & professional. The home versions are the ones used for digital scrapbooking organizing, ACDSee 9 (old), ACDSee 10(old), ACDSee 2009(most recent). The pro versions are ACDSee 2.0 & 2.5 (old) and this new release ACDSee Pro 3. If you are confused about which version is the best for you, here is their quiz.
Download your free 30 day trial of ACDSee Pro 3 now!
If you are person that takes a lot of photos and need to process RAW photos or like to tweak the lighting, color, etc of the images, then this product is for you. ACDSee Pro 3 competes against Adobe Lightroom. In ACDSee Pro 3 they introduced some new “modes.”
Manage Mode:
The Manage mode is the one where you your organizing, categorizing, and this is similar to ACDSee 2009 or ACDSee 2.5 and very little has changed here.
View Mode:
The view mode is to look at images larger. It basically is like Windows explore filmstrip version.
Process Mode:
The Process mode is where the majority of new additions were added. Think of the Process mode as the digital darkroom. In the Process mode there are 2 sub-modes, Develop & Edit. Develop is the non-destructive editing of the image. The Edit is the normal destructive editing. Whenever you Develop or Edit something, the originals are saved in a hidden folder so you can revert back to your original if you need. (And if you show hidden folders on your windows, you will see Developed & Originals folders if you have processed an image in that folder.) In the past, I typically took it upon myself to save the original and then do edits. With this tool, you can forget having to save the original and let the tool do it for you.
Process Develop mode (non-destructive editing) you have many different settings, here are the Tune, Detail & Geometry:
Process Edit mode (destructive editing) you have what appears to be some of the same as in Process and some additional editing tools.
So you have this Develop And Edit sub-modes in the Process mode and it seems just a little confusing. When this product was in Beta there was quite a discussion on this. So I wanted to clarify it but I think the best way is to quote a ACDSee’s developer from the beta forums:
Basically, you can think of bringing an image into develop mode as the same thing as bringing a roll of film into a photo lab. You bring your negatives into the shop and they develop them into a good looking image. Develop mode is our way of letting you control the way the lab tech develops your image. You walk out of the photo lab with the printed images (developed images), and you still have your negatives in your pocket so you can return to the lab to get them developed again using different settings if you want.
Now that you have your printed images you are free to do what you want with them. My analogy is going to break down a bit here, but let’s say you want to draw a moustache on someone’s face on your printed image. You get out your pen and draw on the image (this is like using edit mode). After drawing the moustache on the image you start thinking "I really wish this image was brighter, I’m going to go back to the photo lab to re-develop the image with some brighter settings". This is the point at which you are considering going from Edit to Develop mode. In reality, you can’t bring a printed picture with a moustache drawn on it back to the photo lab and ask them to brighten it. The only way you can re-develop the image is to bring in your negative and ask them to develop the image brighter this time. Obviously you are going to have to abandon the moustache you drew on the image and start from scratch.
Using the process tools you can tweak your images and even save some you didn’t think were all that good. This really helps if you aren’t the best photographer. Before & After I did some tweaking in Develop Mode.
Sharing photos:
In addition, they added a new tool to ftp your images to a site. So this may be beneficial for some digital scrapbookers. You can upload from ACDSee to the following sites: Smugmug, Flickr, Zenfolio and ACDSee’s new online album.
Organizing aspect:
And I have to finish this up with Organizing aspect of ACDSee Pro 3 because so many of us use ACDSee products primarily as their image organizer for digital scrapbooking. I know the question I will hear will be does ACDSee Pro 3 introduce any new features that will help us with organizing digital scrapbooking supplies. Unfortunately, ACDSee Pro 3 new features focused on image editing/processing of images. There was very little change in any organizing features. The minor changes are in the organize pane:
Category Icons are gone
They removed the icons for the categories in the Organize pane. This now requires me to read the categories and figure out what category I am in instead of glancing an icon. I miss the icons.
ACDSee 2009:
ACDSee 3.0: 
Assigned Flags are gone as well as Multi-select boxes but you can assign a category by checking a box in Organize pane.
In previous versions there were little assigned category flags signaled that if an image or multiple images were selected which categories or you could tell which sub-categories were assigned. (See screenshot of ACDSee 2009 to see what I am trying to explain.) There also were little boxes that were multi-select boxes that allowed you check multiple boxes for searching on multiple things. Both the flags UPDATE: & multi-select boxes are gone in ACDSee 3.
ACDSee 2009: 
The new boxes in ACDSee 3 now allow you to assign or un-assign categories by checking a box in the Organize pane (previously checking a box could only be done in the Properties Pane.)
Instead of the multi-select boxes, to select multiple categories for a search in ACDSee 3, you need to select your first category, hold down the CTRL key and select the second or more categories. (Definitely not as intuitive as the multi-select box.) UPDATE (or use the blue & gray pointers on the left.)
There are also new blue & gray pointers on the left. Not sure if grey/blue pointers add much at all. I can already tell what is selected because the whole row is in blue. UPDATE. The pointer are multi-select boxes that disappeared from above. They are now arrows instead of boxes.
ACDsee 3.0 
But as with all of ACDSee products, the best way to figure out if the product is right for you is to TRY it out. All of ACDSee’s products have a free full working version for 30 days.
Download your free 30 day trial of ACDSee Pro 3 now!
Some of my tips from over at ACDSee Home Blog
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Save those pictures!! This is an article that is more general rather than ACDSee specific. It covers some basic suggestions on ways to backup your images.
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And some ACDSee related tips:
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Viewing & Working with PDF files with ACDSee
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Using Filter By in ACDSee Photo Manager
Want an ACDSee tip about using Go To File..
Visit ACDSee’s home blog to read about: Using Go to File in ACDSee Photo Manager
What is embedding in ACDSee 2009?
If you wondered what is embedding and why & how you should use it? Here’s an explanation that I wrote that was published on the ACDSee blog: Embedding Data with ACDSee 2009
What could digital scrapbookers do with embedding?
- Protect and safeguard their organizing.
- Share their organizing of photos with family & friends.
- Designers could published already organized digital kits.
Managing all those digital images – use a naming convention and ACDSee
With digital cameras, it is easy to take a lot of images. I find its really important to keep my images together centrally so I know where to find the images and they are easy to backup. The key to this is when you bring the images from your digital camera into your computer, set up a system so that it is done for you. Here is some tips that I wrote for doing just that:
Organization Challenge Week Six
Table of contents for Organization Challenge 2009
How has everyone been doing? Plugging along, slowly and steadily? I hope so. Just like real life messes our digital messes sometimes take a long time to create and will take a long time to clean.
I think that we have one more task that we should work on before we finish this series for now.
This is one that I started last year for the Organization Challenge, but I know that over the course of the year, I have slacked off, and did not keep up with this one as well as I should have.
When I first started tagging elements, I tagged every last one of them. If I had a ribbon pack with the same basic ribbon in 10 colors, I tagged each one as “ribbon” and by its color. In doing a category search of ribbons, all varieties of them appear. This wasn’t a big deal two years ago when I first starting using Photo Manager. I had a whole lot less stash for the program to search. But now if I did a search for “Ribbons” I have more ribbons returned that I really need to scroll through.
What I had decided to do is go back and control this excess tagging. I had worked through my categories to un-tag the individual elements and make sure that only the preview is tagged. This is similar to what we did with the tagging of alphas. This works best with “Element Kits” rather than a full kit with papers and elements. However, you can work with this however you find it to be best for you. This reduces the wait time when I search a category with a large number of items.
Go through each set of elements that have multiples colors of the same item. This folder has every belt tagged as “Ribbon.”
I don’t think I need to have each one of these come up in a search. The kit has a great preview and that is really the only item that I feel need to be tagged. To easily do this, Select all images. Ctrl-Click the preview to deselect it, then uncheck the rest of the elements. When I do a search and I want to use an element in that preview, all you need to do is right-click and go to File, and you will be brought to the folder that has these gorgeous belts in every color!
TIP: If the folder has a few different styles of the same thing I will tag one of each variety. This way, I will have 4 different label styles appear in a search, and all of the color variations can be found using Go To Folder.
You can find these elements by pulling up tagged categories through searching in the Organize Pane. When you find several items that are identical aside from color, click on one, right click, then Go To File. Or you can go through your Folder Tree on the left side of your screen, and browse through and see what needs to be taken care of.
Some types of categories you may with to look though may include “Frames,” “Ribbons,” “Brads,” and so on.
To recap:
Browse through your folders.
Tag preview only.
Use Go to File to find additional items.
Our Homework:
1. Back up and Optimize.
2. Go through your folders and remove “repetitive” tags.
3. 15 minutes a day to work on that stash!
All in all, I think that it is time to wrap this series up. However, while the series might be finishes, that does not mean our time organizing is done. Just like laundry, tagging is never completely over. Keep up your “maintenance” plan, with 15 minutes a day of tagging, weekly back up and optimizing, and go through some of the other challenges as you need them. I hope that all of you were able to get some help moving in the right direction from these challenges.
Have fun and happy tagging!
Organization Challenge: Week Five
Table of contents for Organization Challenge 2009
How are your digi-files coming along? I hope that you are finding these suggestions and steps to become better organized helpful. I know that since I did this last year, my files have become messier- with some shoved into folders where they didn’t belong. So even though I did all of this last year, I think my hard drive deserved a good clean-out again.
- 1. Did you Back up and Optimize? With all of the time and effort you are putting into this, you don’t want to lost any tagging so backing up and optimizing is very important. And I know I really see a difference after I optimize my database in how smoothly the program runs.
2. Work on those fonts, I am getting there. I found fonts stored in four, yes *four* different folders, so it is going to take a while. But I found a huge amount of duplicate files. Now that they are deleted off my computer, it is saving me a lot of room! I am also purging fonts I don’t like and know I will never use.
This week we are going on to another potentially difficult and messy category: Organizing your brushes. Abr brush files can only be seen in Photo Manager 10, 2009 and Pro Versions 2 and 2.5, so if you are using an older version of Photo Manager,you won’t be able to do this challenge. Or, you can download a free 30 day trial for Photo Manager here
You’ll be totally hooked, so be warned. 
This will be similar to how we organized out Fonts. However, I don’t tag my fonts, but for some reason I do tag brushes. I am not really sure why I do that. It could be that fonts can usually be put into one folder or category, but brushes, because of the way that there are usually several brushes in one file, fit into several categories. Looking more closely at what I do, I put the brush into broad folders: Collections by Designer, type of Brush (e.g. Stitches, Doodles).
From there, I will look at the brush files. To see all of the brushes in one files, double click the files, and it will open up into the Browse window. All of the individual brushes will show up on the left side. In looking at the files, I can tag the brush with multiple categories.
Tasks for this week’s challenge:
Steps:
- Create a main folder for your brushes. I keep the default Photoshop brushes in the Adobe presets folder. All of my other brushes, I keep in my scrapbooking folder, just as I would keep my elements and papers.
- Create Sub-Folders based on the system you want to use. You can either use Move To Folder (Alt M) or drag your brushes from the first folder to the new brushes folder.
- Create categories and sub-categories in the Properties pane.
TIP: To do this, you Right Click on Categories, type Brushes, click enter. To create sub-categories, right click on Brushes, and type in your sub-category names.
- Working through your files, tag the brushes with the sub-categories.
TIP:Â As you go through tagging your brushes, add in a designer name or credits if you have them.
- If you want to make a contact sheet to see all of the individual brushes, select the files. Go to Print|Contact sheet. Adjust the thumbnail settings to fit as many thumbnails as you wish on one page.
To use brushes in Photoshop, drag the abr file onto your Photoshop workspace. Select the Brush tool, and they will load into the Brush Tool Box.
To use brushes in Photo Editor, Kristi put together an excellent series on the DigiScrapInfo Blog http://digiscrapinfo.com/wordpress/2008/02/02/define-a-brush-in-photo-editor/
For a great video tutorial on using brushes:
http://www.digiscrapinfo.com/joomla/acdsee-photo-manager/115-acdsee-10-new-features
Have fun!
Organization Challenge Week Four
Table of contents for Organization Challenge 2009
2/9/2009
How did everyone do with cleaning up all of those Duplicate Authors? I found quite a few that needed some work on them. One thing I would like to see in a future version of Photo Manager would be a Auto-Fill In for the Author, like they do for keywords. But for now, a little pruning here and there doesn’t hurt too much.
Did all of you remember to Back up and Optimize? I did both. In fact, I think I backed up about three times. I have been doing a lot of work on creating and updating Photo Disks and I don’t want to lose any of that hard work. And keep reading every week, because soon I am going to have a Challenge on clearing up hard drive space by making Photo Disks.
If you and your database are ready go, let’s move on to this week!
Today, we will be working on a task that I did last year, but am dreading at having to do it again. Organizing Fonts. I am a self-admitted Font-a-holic. I collect fonts like some people collect…. shoes. 
And they can make a mess of your computer- both in how it runs and on your organization if you don’t have a good system to work with.
I want to remind everyone of my disclaimer that I stated the first week of this challenge. This is only my way of doing things. It works for me; however, it might not work for you . And that is 100% OK. If you have a different way to do any of, and would like to share, you can post in the DigiScrapInfo Forum.
I do not keep many of my fonts installed on my computer. I really like to collect fonts and I have a lot- at least a few thousands. Keeping them all installed makes my computer extremely angry with me. The system I have devised is to keep most of my fun fonts onto my second hard drive. You may choose to do this in a separate folder, on an external hard drive or on a different drive. All of my scrapping supplies are on my second hard drive so that is where I keep my fonts.
So first, what I did is figure out which fonts had to stay installed.
TIP: For a list of Windows Fonts that should not be uninstalled, read this post .
Second, I needed to choose a few fonts that I use all of the time, is several different programs to keep installed. These are the ones that would be more inconvenient to had uninstalled than installed. I chose a couple of script, and a couple of handwriting style fonts that I really consider as my favorites. Now that I am looking back since last year, I know I want to change mine a bit. As all Font-a-holics know, your favorite fonts can change rapidly. Today I am going to go back through my list of “non-essential fonts” and choose the ones I want to keep, and uninstall the ones I don’t want at the moment. What is nice about this method, is that if I want that font, I can use Photo Manager to temporarily load certain fonts just for when I need them.
The rest of the fonts are then uninstalled. Some people use The Font Thing (TFT), which is what I had used for my font browsing before Photo Manager. Once I was done with TFT, I uninstalled it as there was no need for it any more. But if you have it, or need to use it, you can download and uninstall it when you are done.
TIP: You can find The Font Thing here.
I have found that I like to keep my Fonts in Sub-Folders in different Categories rather than having them in one folder and being tagged. Feel free to try it this way or by tagging and see which one makes more sense to you.
What I did next was create a folder tree in Photo Manager for my fonts. On my second hard drive, where I have all of my scrap supplies, I created a folder called Ta-da! …. Fonts.
Under that, I made new folders for the different style fonts I use. Here you can see how my folders are set up in Photo Manager.
You can make as few or as many folder as you wish. It all depends on how many and what style fonts you have.
TIP: If you need ideas for font styles dafont.com has a very good list of font styles.
From there, I dragged all of my uninstalled fonts from where they originally were located, right on into the new Fonts folder. From there, I just scrolled on down, Ctrl-Clicked similar fonts and then dragged them into the appropriate folder.
To use these fonts when scrapping is really easy, even though they are not installed. Before you open your editing program, open Photo Manager, select the fonts you wish to use, then go to Database | Rebuild Thumbnails and Metadata.
Open your editing program. When you are ready to work with the fonts, simply drag them from Photo Manager into the program. The fonts will be loaded onto your computer only while your editing program is open. When you close it, the fonts automatically unload.
For more details you can read here:
Change the Sample Text of Fonts
The other thing we are going to work on this week is to remove extra back ups that are stored on your hard drive. ACDSee does not overwrite the back up data, it makes a new folder each time you back up. So if you back up a lot,. which is a very good idea, you may have a lot of back-ups on your hard drive that are taking up precious storage space.
To do this in Version 9, the default location is:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local settings\Application Data\ACD Systems\Catalogs\90\ACDSeeBK
For Version 10, the default location is:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local settings\Application Data\ACD Systems\Catalogs\100\ACDSeeBK
To do this in Version 2009 (11), the default location is:
C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local Settings\Application Data\ACD Systems\Catalogs\110\ACDSeeBK
My Database is located on my EHD that floats between my laptop and my desktop. I wanted the Database to be accessible for both systems, so it is I:ACDSeeDatabase\ACDSeeBK
For a full explanation on how to see how many back ups you have, click here http://digiscrapinfo.com/wordpress/2007/11/16/you-can-learn-from-my-mistake/
Tasks for Week 4:
1. Back up and Optimize
2. If you use Photo Manager to view fonts, set up a system to keep you better organized.
3. If you find fonts that you know you will never use, have duplicate fonts or corrupted fonts, delete them and don’t look back!
4. If you have any credit information on these fonts, go ahead and put that information in the Caption or Notes section.
5. Check to see how many back- up files you have and delete as many as you feel comfortable.