ACDSee Pro 6

ACD Systems' venerable pro photo-workflow app has come in from ever more serious competition from the big guns Adobe and Apple, with extensive improvements in Lightroom 4 and Apple Aperture 3.3. But the latest ACDSee Pro 6 offers a lot for pro and serious amateur digital photographers, including integrated maps that work with geo-tagging, local adjustment brushes, and support for 64-bit CPUs for faster performance. And it is a responsive, enjoyable, and powerful pro photo tool that's less expensive than its nearest competitor, Lightroom. Despite all this, ACDSee Pro simply can't keep up with advanced features that media software giant Adobe includes in its digital photo workflow application.

Getting Started
You can download a free, fully functional 30-day trial of ACDSee Pro 6 to see whether it's your cup of photo-editing tea. It's Windows-only (sorry, Mac users), working from XP SP3 to Windows 8. Once you download its small installer, which handles the actual large download. The program size showed up in Control Panel as 177MB, compared with Lightroom's 835MB, so it will put less of a dent in your disk space. When you first run the app, a Quick Start Guide appears over the interface, offering to take you through a tour of its modes and tasks. This is a great help, considering the extensive number of modes, features, and tools in the program.

Like Lightroom, underneath ACDSee builds a database, or catalog to save all your image file preferences and edits. This means the originals, or negatives, are left untouched, so you can always revert to the photo's original state; you can save files containing your edits with the Export command.

Both editors also offer plug-ins, but there's a wider range of offerings for Lightroom?in fact, Adobe maintains an online plug-in-sharing section on its site for this. One important set of plug-ins that you can use in Lightroom, Photoshop, and Aperture, and Corel PaintShop Pro are those from Nik Software, which do things like precise sharpening and color effects and are a standard among pro photo editors.

Interface
ACDSee's interface always feels fast and fluid. Everything just works the way you expect it to, making switching between different activities intuitive. I had no trouble getting back and forth between organizing, viewing, and editing; even large camera raw files displayed quickly. Like Lightroom, ACDSee uses a modular approach: All this means is that there are big buttons that set up the app for the different types of tasks involved in the photo workflow process?importing and organizing, adjusting, enhancing, and outputting. Since I last evaluated ACDSee Pro, the module selection has changed, with Manage, View, Develop, Edit, and Online the current choices. Previously Develop and Edit were combined within the Process mode.

I mostly like ACDSee's mode options, especially splitting the manage and view modes, though I think a more generic output mode that included Print, rather than just online, would be preferable. And Lightroom outdoes ACDSee in the modes department by letting the user choose which modes should be available; that way if you, for example, never print photos, you can remove the Print mode.

Aside from this mode lock-in, the application's interface is very flexible: You can undock any panel so that it floats freely on your desktop, customize toolbars, and view in full screen.? It also makes extensive use of keyboard shortcuts for quick operation. You can change the photo background shade from the default dark gray, but not the overall interface from that same shade. Reset icons are everywhere, so if you goof, it's a cinch to get back.

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