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...

Back in 2009, I reviewed Lightroom 2 - and gave it a fairly glowing review. I spent a fair bit of time evaluating different raw process solutions back then, and Lightroom 2 was the best one out there. A year and a bit later, Adobe has released version 3 of this software tool and it's only gotten better. All of the basics are still the same, so rather than repeating what I've already covered in my review of v2, I thought I'd cover off some of the things that I like the most about Lightroom 3 ($285.99 USD full version, affiliate). Here they are. Read more...

Product Category: Photo editing software

Manufacturer: Adobe

Where to Buy: Amazon.com [Affiliate]

Price: $265.99 USD ($99 upgrade from Lightroom 1.0 direct from Adobe)

System Requirements: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista (32-bit or 64-bit) or OS X 10.4/10.5. 1 GB RAM, 1 GB hard drive space...but if you have a computer with those specs, you probably shouldn't be shooting in raw. Figure on 2+ GB of RAM and a 2+ Ghz dual-core CPU for decent performance.

Pros:

• Great quality raw photo conversions using Adobe Camera Raw;
• Fast software that scales to multi-core systems beautifully;
• Clearly designed for photography professionals in a hurry;
• Impressive depth of tools for correction, adjusting, printing, and sharing online.

Cons:

• Lack of HDR functionality; no duplicate filtering
• Needs a fast CPU and plenty of RAM to really sing;
• No automatic lens barrel distortion correction like DxO Optics Pro offers.

Summary: Lightroom is a photo processing software package aimed at professional and prosumer users. More specifically, it's raw photo processing software. If you don't have a camera that can shoot in raw format, or you're only shooting in JPEG, this isn't the software for you. If you're a photographer who shoots in raw format and are looking for software that will help you develop, edit, process, sort, rank, and export your images, this is among the best software on the market for those tasks and well-worth the asking price. Read more...