However, ACDSee sneakily installs a number of background applications and causes many to launch at startup, permanently consuming resources even before Photo Studio itself is launched! On the surface, allowing users to choose installation components, particularly resource-heavy ones like Windows Explorer integration, is a good thing. Selecting the root of the tree allows setting the installation path for everything. Installation & SetupĮven though it only takes one minute, installing ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2021 is a scary experience! The installer opens with a tree of options that can be toggled in groups or by individual components. More on the topic further down this review. Testing was performed on ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2021 yet observations apply to the Home edition as well, particularly since non-destructive image processing and editing did not work in the trial. Layer support allows Photo Studio Ultimate to perform HDR blending and Focus Stacking in addition to applying layers of image processing.Ĭollectively referred as Photo Studio, everything in this review applies equally to the Ultimate and Professional editions. This is of great benefit to beginners who can easily experiment with minimal risk.Īs software primarily for photo editing, Photo Studio provides minimal DAM features but its image processing functions cover color-correction, retouching, image repair, lighting equalization, RAW editing, Facial-Recognition and much more. While not an absolute necessity, it is highly recommended to work non-destructively. This type of editing avoid potential data loss and an expansion of storage as variants of an image get created for various media. Each application offers an extensive feature set but non-destructive editing, which ACDSee calls Parametric Editing is only available in the Ultimate and Professional editions.

There is a detailed comparison of editions directly on the ACDSee website. Once imported into a catalog, ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2021 and its sibling editions can keyword, search and filter images. Digital Asset Management features were added late in their evolution and so all these software support manipulating images without importing them first.

The Home edition does not have any development features.Īll Photo Studio editions are available exclusively for Windows 64-bits. The most notable difference is the availability of layer editing in Ultimate which is not supported in Professional. All three support exactly the same asset management capabilities but differ in image processing features. This imaging software company offers a number of applications with three offering DAM features: Photo Studio Ultimate, Photo Studio Professional and Photo Studio Home.

Photo Studio Ultimate 2021 is the flagship digital photography workflow software from ACDSee.

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