ACDSee Pro 3 *Beta* available

**Marc Sabatella** · 05-27-2009, 02:40 PM

Disclaimer: As some of you know, I use have been using ACDSee Pro for my image cataloging and processing, and occasionally recommend that product here. I'm not affiliated with the company, although I am a moderator on their forum.

ACD has released a "beta" version of ACDSee Pro 3. It's a free download, but hopefully you understand what "beta" means: it's still under development, may not have all the kinks worked out yet, and the beta will expire when the final product is released, at which point you'd have to buy it to use it. The idea is to get people using it and giving feedback on it to make the final product as good as it can be.

With this release, ACDSee is moving toward something more Lightroom-like in overall look and feel, although it maintains one big advantage it has always had over LR: the fact that you don't need to explicitly "import" photos into its system in order to browse or work with them. But Pro 3 adds one very important LR feature that ACDSee had always lacked - it can now do all the same sort of "non-destructive" processing on JPEG files that it had previously offered only for RAW. And it adds several new tools to that non-destructive facility, including an "advanced color" tool that lets you control all sorts of attribute of color (not just simple WB and saturation sliders), plus some lens distortion / perspective correction tools, and an improved version of the already way-cool "light eq" facility that performed a sort of local contrast enhancement to increase the apparent dynamic range of a picture.

I think this release may of particular interest to fellow Pentax users, because it is the first version of ACDSee Pro that can browse PEF files by displaying the camera-embedded preview rather than generating its own preview on the fly. As a result, it's *MUCH* faster for browsing. Of course, if you do any processing on your RAW files, it will display your processed version instead of the embedded version.

There are of course other changes too, but overall, I think the most significant are the improved non-destructive editing capabilities (new tools & ability to process JPEG this way) and the fast preview of RAW files. I've actually been using it for a few week now (under non-disclosure until yesterday), and even though it is "beta", it's actually surprisingly robust.
Here's the link:

ACDSee Photo Software

**Marc Sabatella** · 05-27-2009, 02:42 PM

Oh, there is also a beta version of ACDSee for Mac, but it is apparently a much more limited product:

ACDSee Photo Software

shahnavaz · 05-27-2009, 02:59 PM

Thats a good news. I have been using Pro2 for a sometime now.

5teve · 05-28-2009, 06:21 AM

I'd be very interested in hearing opinions on how ACDSee compares to lightroom.

Im currently trialling lightroom, and find the workflow reasonable... but as i am a newbie at both DSLR and Raw processing im learning on the fly as fast as i can! i like the convenience that JPEG out of the camera gives, however i need to learn the processing techniques and to have in effect the digital negatives sitting there (im also a photo hoarder.. no matter how bad the shot i keep it)

i have 17000+ shots from my old P&S and have been very rigid in the folder structure used, and am keeping that with the K20 also, so i find lightroom a bit irritating with its auto stacking etc.. is this something ACDSee does also?

does ACDSee also support the likes of something similar to lightroom profiles (also discussed in this section) for a generic 1 click hit develop?

Thanks in advance

Steve

mike3legs · 05-28-2009, 06:26 AM

Marc,

I downloaded this earlier today being an ACDSee 2.5 user.

The single most frustrating thing I have found with 2.5 was it crashing whilst importing images. I know I am not alone in this.

How have you found this within 3 so far?

**Marc Sabatella** · 05-28-2009, 04:41 PM

So far (a couple of days of beta, a few weeks before that in a pre-beta "focus group") I have found Pro 3 more stable than Pro 2.5 - which is of course saying as much as 2.5 as it is about 3.0. So far, no hangs during import, but I've only tried import a few times - until recently, I was only using 3.0 on files previously imported with 2.5 (or even earlier).

As for comparisons to LR, I've only used the latter during a trial period a couple of years ago - not the current version. So while I'm somewhat familiar with its capabilities from that experience (and discussions here and on orher forums), I can't really give a details comparison. I can say that as of 3.0, it's very similar, with the most obvious difference being that ACDSee is happy to work with any file on your system whereas LR requires an explicit "import" into its library. So ACDSee is easier to test the waters with. I imagine once you've totally committed to a LR-based workflow, the import requirement would cease to seem a big deal - newly shot images would be imported when copying from the camera anyhow, and everything already on your computer would already be imported.

I'm sure there are significant differences, but without knowing more about what you do with LR and what features you especially like or what limitations especially frustrate you, it's hard to say what differences you'd notice. The basic model is simialr with both - see a bunch of thumbs, quickly browse them, rate them and add metdata if desired, use a non-destructive edit mode as desired that automatically remembers your settings and doesn't require you to convert RAW to JPEG if you don't feel like it, maybe do some batch operations like copying settings from one image to others, or taking a bunch of RAW files and generating JPEGs for all of them (for web display, perhaps) - that sort of thing.

Im currently trialling lightroom, and find the workflow reasonable... but as i am a newbie at both DSLR and Raw processing im learning on the fly as fast as i can! i like the convenience that JPEG out of the camera gives

I'd say the whole point of programs like both LR and ACDSee is that shooting JPEG provides no convenience advantage to speak of - you can work directly with your RAW files without the need to convert them to another format. Sure, you need to generate JPEG versions to share with others, but you seldom want full size versions for those cases, so even if you shoot JPEG, you'd probably be generating reduced size versions for emailing or web upload. Generating these from JPEG is no different than generating them from RAW.

So if you are seeing a significant difference in convenience between RAW and JPEG with LR, I'd say you probably using LR the way it was meant to be used.

i have 17000+ shots from my old P&S and have been very rigid in the folder structure used, and am keeping that with the K20 also, so i find lightroom a bit irritating with its auto stacking etc.. is this something ACDSee does also?

ACDSee doesn't have stacking, period - that's probably one of the major limitations it has relative to LR. But on the flip side, it is totally "transparent" in terms of its view of the filesystem - basically any file organization system that works for you can be implemented within ACDSee just as easily 9far more easily, actually) as with Windows Explorer. ACDsee doesn't try to hide the filesystem from you or force you into one way of organizing things. It does have its quirks that reward you for organizing things in certain ways more than others. But it's also a very powerful file management tool, so if you do decide you want to make some changes to your organization scheme that involves moving files and folders around, it's a great tool for that purpose.

does ACDSee also support the likes of something similar to lightroom profiles (also discussed in this section) for a generic 1 click hit develop?

ACDSee has its own camera profiles, optimized to produce the results they think "best" by default - they make no special attempt to exactly mimic whatever the camera's own JPEG engine might have happened to have produced. So if you standard for for excellende is what the camera would have done, absolutely no room for the possibility that someone else might have a better idea, or that you yourself might want to override the defaults as often as not, ACDSee is not the best tool. It produces great results using its defaults, but they aren't necessarily exactly what the camera would have done, nor are they necessarily exactly what I'd want if I were to custom process the image.

*AndyB* · 05-29-2009, 09:36 AM

Hi Marc, thanks for the update on ACDsee Pro. I have a question that maybe you can help me on. I've looked over the forums but I can't find the answer anywhere. I use Google Picasa 3 mainly to just view and locate the images on my drive. I like the ability to view everything on my drive without having to go and select a particular folder to see what's in it and Picasa excels at that. That's about the only thing I like it for though. I've installed the beta version of ACDsee 3 but I can't seem to figure out how to do this. I really don't want to have to go and individually select each folder to see what's in it. And the only thing I could find which is kind of clunky to me is to go to the folder panel and expand the subfolders there. I just want to be able to see the files in the folders within folders within folders. Hopefully that makes sense. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

**Marc Sabatella** · 05-29-2009, 10:32 AM

Originally Posted by AndyB

I use Google Picasa 3 mainly to just view and locate the images on my drive. I like the ability to view everything on my drive without having to go and select a particular folder to see what's in it and Picasa excels at that. That's about the only thing I like it for though.

I'm with you there. Picasa does this one thing well, but I really disliked using it for anything else. ACDSee doesn't really have anything *quite* like the initial Picasa scan (but see below). If you've got a bunch of images scattered all over the place and you need help finding them, I'd suggest using Picasa for that if necessary, get them organized into a logical structure so you don't *need* Picasa to find your lost images for you, then switch to using ACDSee from then on.

Actually, once I got things organized, it pretty much ceased to matter *where* things are - I search for images using keywords, categories, ratings, EXIF data, the date shot, etc - but almost never file location. That's become about as irrelevant as having to know what sector and track number of the physical disk the file is stored in.

However, there *are* ways to use ACDSee to help you find your find you images in the first place, sort of like Picasa's initial scan. Run "Catalog Images" on the top level folder containing your images, and ACDSee will generate thumbs and read in EXIF and IPTC info from your existing files. Then you use the Calendar view to find your files regardless of where they live. That's actually what I did. I clicked on a month in the calendar to find images shot that month, weeded out duplicates or images that just didn't belong, added keywords and ratings as appropriate, then moved them all to folders organized by date. I started with my earliest images and worked my way to the present. Once done I had an extraordinarily well-organized collection, and the idea of needing Picasa to help me find images now seems as strange a concept as needing to read the instruction manual on how to turn the steering wheel of my car.

the only thing I could find which is kind of clunky to me is to go to the folder panel and expand the subfolders there. I just want to be able to see the files in the folders within folders within folders.

In the early stages of organization, that can indeed be a common operation. Once a collection is well-organized, using the Folder panel becomes an increasingly rare thing to want to do. But there are a couple of shortcuts that can help while still in those early stages. Hitting the "*" on the numeric keypad (has to be the numeric keypad - might require a "helper" key on a laptop that lacks a dedicated numeric keypad) will expand the selected folder one level. Hitting it again expands *all* of its subfolders one level. Hitting it again expands *all* of those 'grandchildren. So usually just a few presses of "*" will completely expand any tree. Then you can shift-click the last elements to select everything in the tree.

Again, once things are cataloged and organized, one virtually *never* should need to do this - whatever those images have in common can be accessed more directly using the calendar, categories, keywords, ratings, etc.

*AndyB* · 05-29-2009, 12:55 PM

Thanks for the information Marc! I very much appreciate it.

I guess that's the kick in the pants I need to organize my photos better. I was hoping I could use ACDsee for my onestop "almost do it all" program and I guess I can. One thing that really sells me on ACDsee is the fact that I can use ACDsee to start up Photoshop or any other photo editing app if I really need to tweak a photo.

Thanks again!

*nulla* · 05-29-2009, 08:48 PM

Originally Posted by AndyB

Thanks for the information Marc! I very much appreciate it.

I guess that's the kick in the pants I need to organize my photos better. I was hoping I could use ACDsee for my onestop "almost do it all" program and I guess I can. One thing that really sells me on ACDsee is the fact that I can use ACDsee to start up Photoshop or any other photo editing app if I really need to tweak a photo.

Thanks again!

Andy... Picaso also taught me the same, though I dont use it any longer. I had since got an external hardrive where I store all my photos in folders.

I use LR, but am impressed with ACDC as it has some great functions.

I will keep using the pro beta alongside lightroom until I make a decision to purchase or not.. it is now my default image viewer

Thanks Marc for your wonderful input as usual

Neil