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!