CONS

• Cluttered, counterintuitive interface.
• Slow performance.
• No chromatic aberration correction.
• No face tagging.
• Weak social sharing.

Organizing

In Home view, at the bottom of the right-side photo preview window are options that let you star-rate, keyword-tag, and title your photo. After doing so, you can search based on that text in the center Home view panel. Photo Commander can identify a photo’s location from embedded GPS data, which most smartphones include in a photo’s metadata. But there’s no integrated map view. There’s no face-recognition or people-tagging option, either.

Adjusting Photos

The Quick Fix mode has buttons for many of the commonly needed corrections and effects. I always like to try a program’s automatic image correction first. Ashampoo Photo Commander Crack offers sub-options for just fixing color, contrast, skin, or noise. It didn’t help much on a shot with a shadowed subject and bright background. But for cityscapes it did a nice job. One snow scene yielded an overly contrasty result after auto-optimization in my testing, however.

Tapping the Contrast/Colors option shows side-by-side before-and-after views of your photo, with sliders for both color and exposure along the bottom. I really like the Gamma control, which lets you change exposure in a realistic way, because it bumps up brightness in a non-linear way (see this tutorial on Understanding Gamma). The half-sun button lets you set a white point with a cross-hairs cursor. The Effects dropdown shows thumbnails of your photo with Photoshop- (not Instagram-) style effects, such as blur, sharpen, and oil paint. There are some pleasing options in here, such as Radial Blur, Motion Blur, and six Vintage styles.

The program lets you alter a photo’s geometry, but there are no lens-profile-based correction for this. It corrects red pupils resulting from flash photography fairly well. And the clone-and-stamp tool removed blemishes as well as most photo software does now. There is, however, no chromatic aberration correction.

The program offers three levels of de-noising—fast, slow, and very slow. These last two really live up to their names, and the de-noising results are decent, but not quite on par with what you get from higher-end apps like DxO Optics Pro ($54.99 at Paint Shop Pro) and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. ($54.99 at Paint Shop Pro)

Special Effects and Drawing

Moving from photo-centric fixes and filter effects, the program also includes effects like tilt-shift and selective focus, and it lets you add text and object overlays. Text is well done, with a good choice of fonts, but you can’t tilt text. This and objects, which include shapes, clipart, and drawing, are layer effects, but the program hides the complexity of layer editing. This will be welcome to some, while others will want more control over layer editing, as you get in ACDSee Ultimate ($54.99 at Paint Shop Pro) . Ashampoo Photo Commander Crack does include the popular color-splash effect, where only one color is enabled in an otherwise black-and-white photo.

CreateIn the Create mode, you can produce video slideshows of selected photos, HTML albums, calendars, collages, panoramas, cards, contact sheets, and Photo Mixes. These last are overlays of photos that can take on an eerie, ghostlike effect. There are also tools for creating GIF animations and multipage PDFs. These are some nice output options that you won’t find in all photo software, and Ashampoo actually makes them easier than they are in Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Sharing and Output

Somewhat illogically, sharing functions are split between the Common and Organize modes. In the former you can print, export PDFs, and send shots to Facebook, Twitter, and Ashampoo Photo Commander Crack own Web host. In truth, when you share to one of the social networks, a link to Ashampoo-hosted images appears, rather than the photos being uploaded to the actual social network. I expect that most people would prefer a simple shared image. In Organize you get options for email, disc, and HTML albums. Batch editing and renaming, as well as JPEG optimization are offered in this mode, too.

Full Control Over Your Photos?

If you want to have some fun with your digital photos beyond what’s in the free Photos program that comes with Windows, Ashampoo is an option. It does offer a good number of editing tools, but it lacks the polished interface and many of the more advanced tools offered by Adobe products.

Photo Commander is intended as a lightweight Photoshop replacement, and it may well do everything you need in that program, including simple drawing and text overlays. But professionals will want the full-power Photoshop tools, and even competitors like Corel PaintShop Pro and ACDSee ultimate offer more compelling lightweight Photoshop replacements with better interfaces and tools like face tagging and lens-profile-based corrections.

Concsluion

Ashampoo Photo Commander 17.0.3 Crack offers lots of image editing tools and effects, but it’s much less polished than some of the competition and lacks some features we’ve come to expect.