ACDSee Photo Studio Home Free Download v27.0.2.2553

CONS

• A lot of tools buried in menus
• Lens-profile-based image correction tools less effective than the competition
• Weak noise and chromatic aberration tools
• Taxing on our PC in testing

The new People mode button (it looks like two heads) at top right makes working with face recognition easier. The program automatically processes all imported images with face detection (you can turn this behavior off in Settings if you prefer). Two tabs let you switch between Named and Unnamed faces. To get started, switch to Unnamed faces. After you’ve identified a few faces, name suggestion works with detected faces. Keep in mind that the technology finds art with faces and any random face in the background. It does a decent job of identifying those you name, though.

One fun organization feature is maps. ACDSee Photo Studio Home v27.0.2.2553  Professional can use GPS encoding in files that have it to show the images on a map. You can also drag photo thumbnails onto the map to create pins for their locations. There’s no mode button for this as there is for People, and it’s not even enabled by default. You have to go into the Panes menu and check its check box. The program highlights thumbnails shot in the location you select a pin on the map; I’d prefer it. Lightroom does a better job with maps, though, with thumbnail slideshows right on the map showing photos shot at the location.

Adjusting Photos

In Develop mode, you get all the standard light and color correction tools—Exposure, Contrast, Saturation—along with things like Vibrance and Clarity, which have become standards for prosumer software. The interface for adjusting this works well, with large bar sliders. Reset buttons helpfully appear for each section in which you make an adjustment, and B&W tools are just a click away. The program offers abundant batch tools, too, for most kinds of editing and organizing. Actions include Instagram-like filters as well as many other editing and workflow options.

Switching to Standard mode for the Light EQ tools presents detailed sliders that let you adjust more-specific levels, another good tool I haven’t seen in other software. The Auto button only appears under the Light EQ controls when you open them, and you can click it to get the program’s best-guess settings. Even cooler, you can adjust with a wand tool over the image that adjusts brightness based on the area under the cursor. It’s sort of like the iPhone’s “tap on the screen to set exposure and focus” feature, minus focus.

Correction Tools

ACDSee Photo Studio Home v27.0.2.2553 includes tools to correct pincushion and barrel distortion based on known characteristics of the equipment used. The program correctly identified my camera model, and applied the auto-fix, making a subtle improvement to a wide-angle shot, but there were still skewed objects at the image’s edges. You can increase the effect, but I missed Lightroom’s Upright option, which completely aligns with vertical lines. ACDSee fares even worse when it comes to chromatic aberration correction. You have to try to move sliders just so as to correct it, but the defringe tool worked more automatically and effectively.

ACDSee Photo Studio Home v27.0.2.2553 handles cropping fairly well and is now available in Develop mode. It defaults to an unconstrained aspect ratio, which I prefer. I also like how you can hide the area outside the crop, and how spinning the mouse wheel changes the photo’s angle. You can also straighten a photo with a guideline, but there’s no tool for auto-straightening based on the horizon like Lightrooms. Note that the straightening tool is found in Develop mode’s Geometry section.

Different Brushes

You can use brushes (up to eight of them) with feathering and tolerance settings for most Develop adjustments, but there’s no subtract brush, only a Clear All Brushstrokes button. The Magic option does a nice job finding edges, even in complex areas like palm leaves. As mentioned, brush capabilities include vibrance, white balance, colour overlay, colour EQ (saturation, brightness, hue, and contrast), and tone curves.

The last is a cool capability that I haven’t seen elsewhere. You can’t, however, use brushes with the Effects in Edit mode or with Skin smoothing. The Repair tool also disappointed me in that it didn’t let me see the source area; even after I’d chosen a source, my result had unwanted textures applied. The Blended Clone option is better but still gave me the same problem, though to a lesser degree. The Repair tool in Edit mode was more successful, and in that mode (see next section) you can use a brush with Skin Smoothing.

Editing With Layers

ACDSee Photo Studio Home v27.0.2.2553 Photo Studio Professional’s Edit mode is where you find pixel-level functions such as watermarking, and text overlay. The mode sports a long list of tools down the left panel. There you find watermark, tilt-shift, grain, and Special Effects, which opens another selection of nine filter types, including artistic, distorted, painting, and retro. Some Develop tools are also found in Edit, but I’d prefer a design that keeps tools in their place, giving the Edit mode a friendlier look. Note, too, that you can go back to Develop mode after doing layer edits. Photoshop lets you use Adobe Camera Raw as a filter for this.

Smart Erase tool

The Smart Erase tool (only in Edit mode) is equivalent to Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill tool and does a decent job of automatically removing unwanted objects from a photo. Note the removed gray tape on the right side of the floor in the nearby image. Lest you think that this kind of tool is gimmicky or just for hobbyists, you should know that Rhein II, the most expensive photo sold ($4.3 million) up till 2014, used digital manipulation to remove people and objects.

Dehaze tool

The Dehaze tool worked well enough on my test winter landscape shot, but it tends to jack up the colour saturation more than I’d like. I do like that it offers a brush for applying dehaze just to selected areas of the photo. Adobe’s similar tool also lets you add realistic haze; ACDSee’s slider can only remove haze. DxO PhotoLab does the best job at haze removal out of the box with its automatic corrections, and it doesn’t introduce a colour cast, as Adobe and ACDSee do.

Skin Tune

Skin Tune is a tool for portrait photographers. The three tools in this set—Smoothing, Glow, and Radius—make easy work of making people’s mugs look dreamier. One thing I’d wish for in this tool, however, is a Before-and-After view. It’s a far cry from the advanced AI-powered facial editing tools you find in Photoshop and PhotoDirector, however

Noise Removal offers three options: Camera, Median, and Despeckle. By default, the first option is too aggressive for my taste, smoothing out the image excessively. Median leaves the sharpest but noisiest result, while Despeckle is something of a compromise. I’m happy to see that ACDSee Photo Studio Home v27.0.2.2553 now offers those last two modes that don’t require trial-and-error moving of sliders back and forth, the way some apps do. You can also now brush on noise reduction to selected areas of a shot. That said, the results aren’t on par with DxO’s incredible DeepPrime noise removal, which preserves detail while removing noise.

New for the 2022 version is the ability to target colour ranges for selection. Using Noise Reduction illustrates how it works. In the photo below, I want to keep more detail on the barn swallow and smooth away the noise on the out-of-focus green background. Targeting the green pixel range in the colour wheel enables me to do it. The same method of selection can be used for other types of edits simply by tapping the Pixel Targeting button.

Conclusion

ACDSee Photo Studio Home v27.0.2.2553 -level software offers many powerful photo organizing and editing tools, combining functions of both Lightroom and Photoshop, but its interface can get overwhelming.