Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Take your digital photos to the highest standard. ACDSee Pro 4 will help get you there fast, with all the tools you need for everything you shoot. Manage, view, process and publish your images in one full-featured application. You'll enjoy organized files, achieve stunning visual results, and free up more time to spend behind the camera."

I've been a huge fan of ACDSee for years - I've used every version of their product since the mid '90s - but I have to admit I'm not terribly enthused by this upgrade in their Pro line. The cost of the upgrade for owners of Pro 3 is high; $167.99 for the upgrade (compared to $99 for the Lightroom upgrade for example). When I look at the list of what's new, I don't see many things that make me say "Oh yeah, I've been waiting for that!". Pro 4 offers a better metadata panel, metadata presets, a location-based map view, improved raw rendering and vignette correction, chromatic aberration fixes...and that's about it. There's mention of an HDR feature on the product home page - and I don't think that's in Pro 3 - but the What's New page doesn't mention the HDR feature as being new...so who knows? Read more...

"While camera manufacturers keep competing for high ISO performance, DxO Labs now offers the image processing technologies which are critical to delivering top-notch image quality from such extreme ISO shots. In low-light conditions, photographers must choose between using low ISO and risking unnatural flash lighting or camera shake, or using high ISO settings with its typical image noise and loss of colors and details. But now, thanks to a new technological approach, DxO Optics Pro 6 sets a new bar for RAW conversion: photographers can push their cameras to the ISO limits and even beyond - as much as one to two stops above their usual ISO settings! - and still get great photos without any noticeable loss in image quality."

When I first started shooting raw a few years ago with my DSLR, I looked at a bunch of different raw processing software packages. With my experiments using Photoshop Elements and the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in, it quickly became obvious that processing images one by one, completely in isolation of each other, was a rather poor approach. I looked at several packages on the market, but spent the most time with Lightroom 1.0 and DxO Optics Pro 4.5. While there were several things I really liked about the DxO software, specifically the lens-based optics correction (I'm ticked Lightroom still lacks that) and the killer multi-threading, I found the user interface cumbersome to use. So have things gotten any better with version 5.0? I spent a few minutes looking at the press information, which is rife with competitive info, to find out. Read more...

"The wait is over! The all-new ProShow StylePack Volume 3 is here and is our most stylish and creative StylePack yet! Created for Producer users, this volume features a diverse collection of 25 high-impact, pre-designed Styles. Slide Styles instantly transform your slides into amazing effects and animations. With just a few clicks you can go from ordinary to extraordinary! Check out the new Styles below and see more online."

These impressive effects are strictly for the professional-grade ProShow Producer ($249 USD), but if you're a photographer making money creating slideshows for your clients, that's a small price to pay to have an impressive tool at your disposal. The fact that these stylepacks are only $19.95 is great - each one is packed with some great effects. I really liked the Chroma Wash and Oscillations effects from the first video - and Sum of the Parts is pretty slick as well! Tilt Matrix on the second video looks great as well.

I used ProShow Producer a couple of weeks ago on a quick project, and the end results were superb - though I'm still irked that I can't select all my images and apply the same slide style to each of them, all at once. Having to click on each image, click to apply the slide style, and then click OK on a dialogue box warning me that I'm changing the slide style is truly tedious when you have to do it 34 times in a row. Still, I've never seen a program so finely tuned for turning photos into video slide shows - it's a truly superb tool.