ACDSee Pro 9 discoveries after purchase

is the ACDSee user's forum:

http://forum.acdsee.com/forum/acdsee-pro-mac

Unfortunately, the Mac software is considered a separate product from ACDSee Pro for Widows. They split off from each other, so most Windows users would likely be a bit uncomfortable in giving any advice of any importance.

--
I look good fat, I'm gonna look good old. . .
http://glenbarrington.blogspot.com/
http://glenbarringtonphotos.blogspot.com/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/130525321@N05/

Yes, and you should take a look at the msgs in that forum. Apparently ACDC Mac Pro is, to put it generously, hated and despised by all Mac users as a piece of very bad software that is riddled with flaws and faults and is more or less constantly crashing, so much so that the moderator of the forum has closed new registrations, presumably to avoid further embarrassment in an overload of bad reports from buyers. For myself, I bought and installed and the first few times I tried to run it ACDC Mac Pro crashed and burned. People on that forum recommend PSE a lot saying it's quicker, more efficient, runs like a top, has more editing controls, etc etc. The good news is that I bought it for $29 and I already own PSE.

Cheers--

fbx said:

Yes, and you should take a look at the msgs in that forum. Apparently ACDC Mac Pro is, to put it generously, hated and despised by all Mac users as a piece of very bad software that is riddled with flaws and faults and is more or less constantly crashing, so much so that the moderator of the forum has closed new registrations, presumably to avoid further embarrassment in an overload of bad reports from buyers. For myself, I bought and installed and the first few times I tried to run it ACDC Mac Pro crashed and burned. People on that forum recommend PSE a lot saying it's quicker, more efficient, runs like a top, has more editing controls, etc etc. The good news is that I bought it for $29 and I already own PSE.

Cheers--

Click to expand...

I'm a PC guy, I can't and don't vouch for the Mac products. I have long thought that ACDSee should either get serious about the Mac tools or quit trying to sell them. You have NEVER heard me praise the Mac product.

Use it, or don't use it. I don't much care one way or the other.

Sorry, did not mean to imply your rec of Mac product. Understood that you guys were discussing PC product (9). Though it was of interest that the forum for the Mac product was full of stinging criticism.

Meanwhile I have had more crashes with ACDC Mac Pro, looked again at PSE for a bit, glanced at Affinity (fatigued me), and gone back to LR which is somehow seeming pleasant and sensible now, with very good and delicate adjustments, decent presets and the ability to make more, camera and lens setups, and lots of users and informative discussion incl YouTube videos which I find helpful. Etc etc. So I think that's where I'm going to settle and just give up the search for a bit.

I'm moving from Photos (after PS, Picasa, iPhoto, Photos) which I've been trying since Apple served it up. It works well and the "Extensions" capability and the "Use Another Editor" extension app give it plenty of power, but I like the all-in-one aspect of LR, so that's where I'll be forthwith.

Cheers--

I bought an ultimate license and use it on two computers.

At this point only one guy really cares. But good luck anyway.

Glen Barrington said:

As an aid to new users that is the default methodology, however one CAN avoid this automatic import and import a specific folder or hierarchy of folders in the manual import dialog. To me, it seemed pretty obvious from the set up dialog that auto import is avoidable.
Alternately, one can avoid importing altogether, and just open the specific photo you want to work on. What occurs then, is that as you reveal information about the photo as you work on it, that data is then stored in the ACDSee database behind the scenes without you even seeing it occur.
- No history in Develop mode. I found this very annoying. You can undo/redo, but without a history window which shows all your steps I found using Develop mode much more cumbersome than pretty much any photo editor, Lightroom, etc. that I have used for many years. I often like to go back and forth checking the current state and some number of steps back (3, 4, 8, or whatever) by just selecting the point I want to go back to in the history window list, then going back to the top, etc. -- A/B comparison.
That's true, you can walk back to previous steps, but you can not display a list of history steps and select the specific step you are looking for. There are reasonably effective workaround methods, but if this is REALLY important to you, then The ACDSee product line is probably not for you.

I look good fat, I'm gonna look good old. . .
http://glenbarrington.blogspot.com/
http://glenbarringtonphotos.blogspot.com/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/130525321@N05/

Click to expand...

Glen, two questions:

1) How do you find/exercise the import options you mention? I've spent some time searching the U9 help with various parameters and haven't found anything helpful. For example, 'manual import' returns no hits, and 'import' only talks about importing from removable drives, etc. The 'manage' options don't seem to throw much light on this either.

2) What are the work-arounds for the lack of history in Develop mode? (And have you suggested to ACDSee, gently or otherwise, that this needs to be fixed?) It is a meaningful help to the workflow to be able to easily go back to an earlier step. The ease and flexibility of doing this was one of the greatest strengths of the late (and missed by some of us) CNX2.

Thanks as always for your great help and reasoned contributions here.

yanisha said:

I thought I would post this just so others will have the information that I discovered on my own. I downloaded the trial of ACDSee Pro 9 a few weeks ago and a couple of days later I realized that the sale price would end very soon before I was able to do the full 30 day evaluation I had planned. I ended up buying it with less than a week of trial use since it seemed like it might be okay for me and I didn't want to pay much more if I missed the sale price. Unfortunately, soon after buying it I started to discover some things that made it much less attractive for me. Once I discovered these things I stopped further evaluation since I now have no plans to continue to use it.

Before I get to the things that were especially bothersome to me let me just say that in other ways it seemed to be pretty good, but it was still early days in playing with it. So, I am not trying to discourage anyone from trying it out and possibly buying it. I just want to let people know things that ACD is not up front about or is not clear on. Adobe, Corel, etc. play the same sorts of games with their customers sometimes so this is not a unique indictment. Also note that many people may not find my short list to be a problem for them or they may even prefer the way ACDSee Pro 9 behaves. Note my list below applies to ACDSee Ultimate Pro 9 also.

Of course, I found some things to like too, but this isn't a review so there is no need to try to give a rundown of everything. I just wanted to point out some things that ACD doesn't tell you, but you would likely discover later. If they don't matter to you then that is fine.

Click to expand...

I have been in the same place for a few days so I went back and spent some more time playing with Pro 9. I will comment a bit more in my next post.

After reading through the comments in this thread it seems that generally no one has shown that the 4 items I discovered are wrong. Most of the comments are just about how some people are happy with or satisfied with these Pro 9 things. Or people who are annoyed that I don't agree with their preferences. I also think I detected some annoyance that I had made these things public. Not quite sure why anyone would be annoyed about that though. Note that the main point of this was to help others by telling them about things that I learned after buying and not from reviews or the website. Just like other new users would discover, maybe after they had paid money.

I am both gratified and disappointed that no one has shown me that I am wrong about their existence though. I read multiple reviews and articles and read the stuff on the ACDSee website about Pro 9 before purchasing and I didn't see anything about these 4 items. It sort of boggles my mind that in less than a week of just playing around with the software for short periods off and on a little each day (I was traveling at the time) I found these things quickly. How can reviewers not find any of them after much more use...or felt they weren't worth even a mention? Oh well.

I guess I have provided a rather valuable service to people for at least bringing these things up. Being alerted some potential buyers might decide that they don't like one or more of these things and therefore they will not buy. Being alerted some other potential buyers might decide that they do like one or more of these things and therefore they will buy. In both cases though I helped them because they wouldn't have known about these from reading reviews or the ACDSee website.

yanisha said:

yanisha said:

I thought I would post this just so others will have the information that I discovered on my own. I downloaded the trial of ACDSee Pro 9 a few weeks ago and a couple of days later I realized that the sale price would end very soon before I was able to do the full 30 day evaluation I had planned. I ended up buying it with less than a week of trial use since it seemed like it might be okay for me and I didn't want to pay much more if I missed the sale price. Unfortunately, soon after buying it I started to discover some things that made it much less attractive for me. Once I discovered these things I stopped further evaluation since I now have no plans to continue to use it.

Before I get to the things that were especially bothersome to me let me just say that in other ways it seemed to be pretty good, but it was still early days in playing with it. So, I am not trying to discourage anyone from trying it out and possibly buying it. I just want to let people know things that ACD is not up front about or is not clear on. Adobe, Corel, etc. play the same sorts of games with their customers sometimes so this is not a unique indictment. Also note that many people may not find my short list to be a problem for them or they may even prefer the way ACDSee Pro 9 behaves. Note my list below applies to ACDSee Ultimate Pro 9 also.

Of course, I found some things to like too, but this isn't a review so there is no need to try to give a rundown of everything. I just wanted to point out some things that ACD doesn't tell you, but you would likely discover later. If they don't matter to you then that is fine.

Click to expand...

I have been in the same place for a few days so I went back and spent some more time playing with Pro 9. I will comment a bit more in my next post.

After reading through the comments in this thread it seems that generally no one has shown that the 4 items I discovered are wrong. Most of the comments are just about how some people are happy with or satisfied with these Pro 9 things. Or people who are annoyed that I don't agree with their preferences. I also think I detected some annoyance that I had made these things public. Not quite sure why anyone would be annoyed about that though. Note that the main point of this was to help others by telling them about things that I learned after buying and not from reviews or the website. Just like other new users would discover, maybe after they had paid money.

I am both gratified and disappointed that no one has shown me that I am wrong about their existence though. I read multiple reviews and articles and read the stuff on the ACDSee website about Pro 9 before purchasing and I didn't see anything about these 4 items. It sort of boggles my mind that in less than a week of just playing around with the software for short periods off and on a little each day (I was traveling at the time) I found these things quickly. How can reviewers not find any of them after much more use...or felt they weren't worth even a mention? Oh well.

I guess I have provided a rather valuable service to people for at least bringing these things up. Being alerted some potential buyers might decide that they don't like one or more of these things and therefore they will not buy. Being alerted some other potential buyers might decide that they do like one or more of these things and therefore they will buy. In both cases though I helped them because they wouldn't have known about these from reading reviews or the ACDSee website.

Click to expand...

Thank you for your service to the community. You brought up some good points.

I guess I just use the forward/back buttons instead of a history list, contact ACDSee to get my single user license on multiple computers, and to be frank, switched to ACDSee for DAM precisely for the reasons you find unappealing.

if you are turning to ACDSee just because you don't want a subscription with Adobe CC, but expect it to function like CC, you'll be disappointed. CC is a more capable program in most respects and a tremendous value. I just don't like using it due to its cataloging and UI.

Its great to have choices.

ACDSee comes with a free 30-day trial, which I used for a full 30 days, and figured most of this out prior to purchase.

photofisher said:

Thank you for your service to the community. You brought up some good points.

Click to expand...

You are welcome. For people who are alerted about these things and who prefer them my thread here might be just the encouragement they need to click the buy button.

photofisher said:

I guess I just use the forward/back buttons instead of a history list, contact ACDSee to get my single user license on multiple computers, and to be frank, switched to ACDSee for DAM precisely for the reasons you find unappealing.

if you are turning to ACDSee just because you don't want a subscription with Adobe CC, but expect it to function like CC, you'll be disappointed. CC is a more capable program in most respects and a tremendous value. I just don't like using it due to its cataloging and UI.

Click to expand...

As I said several times, I expected that some people actually prefer things such as a single computer license, prefer that many Photoshop plug-ins don't work, etc. I just provided information that ACDSee and reviews didn't tell us. For some people these are negatives, but for other people they are positives.

I am playing around with the catalog and file handling some more and making some notes. I have found a few more strange things. This isn't about comparing to any other program. I am looking at Pro 9 on its own.

yanisha said:

photofisher said:

Thank you for your service to the community. You brought up some good points.

Click to expand...

You are welcome. For people who are alerted about these things and who prefer them my thread here might be just the encouragement they need to click the buy button.

yanisha said:

I guess I just use the forward/back buttons instead of a history list, contact ACDSee to get my single user license on multiple computers, and to be frank, switched to ACDSee for DAM precisely for the reasons you find unappealing.

if you are turning to ACDSee just because you don't want a subscription with Adobe CC, but expect it to function like CC, you'll be disappointed. CC is a more capable program in most respects and a tremendous value. I just don't like using it due to its cataloging and UI.

Click to expand...

As I said several times, I expected that some people actually prefer things such as a single computer license, prefer that many Photoshop plug-ins don't work, etc. I just provided information that ACDSee and reviews didn't tell us. For some people these are negatives, but for other people they are positives.

I am playing around with the catalog and file handling some more and making some notes. I have found a few more strange things. This isn't about comparing to any other program. I am looking at Pro 9 on its own.

Click to expand...

Perhaps you should just email them and ask for more activations or for a refund if you are that unhappy.

SantaFeBill said:

Glen Barrington said:

As an aid to new users that is the default methodology, however one CAN avoid this automatic import and import a specific folder or hierarchy of folders in the manual import dialog. To me, it seemed pretty obvious from the set up dialog that auto import is avoidable.

Alternately, one can avoid importing altogether, and just open the specific photo you want to work on. What occurs then, is that as you reveal information about the photo as you work on it, that data is then stored in the ACDSee database behind the scenes without you even seeing it occur.

- No history in Develop mode. I found this very annoying. You can undo/redo, but without a history window which shows all your steps I found using Develop mode much more cumbersome than pretty much any photo editor, Lightroom, etc. that I have used for many years. I often like to go back and forth checking the current state and some number of steps back (3, 4, 8, or whatever) by just selecting the point I want to go back to in the history window list, then going back to the top, etc. -- A/B comparison.

That's true, you can walk back to previous steps, but you can not display a list of history steps and select the specific step you are looking for. There are reasonably effective workaround methods, but if this is REALLY important to you, then The ACDSee product line is probably not for you.

I look good fat, I'm gonna look good old. . .
http://glenbarrington.blogspot.com/
http://glenbarringtonphotos.blogspot.com/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/130525321@N05/

Click to expand...

Glen, two questions:

1) How do you find/exercise the import options you mention? I've spent some time searching the U9 help with various parameters and haven't found anything helpful. For example, 'manual import' returns no hits, and 'import' only talks about importing from removable drives, etc. The 'manage' options don't seem to throw much light on this either.

2) What are the work-arounds for the lack of history in Develop mode? (And have you suggested to ACDSee, gently or otherwise, that this needs to be fixed?) It is a meaningful help to the workflow to be able to easily go back to an earlier step. The ease and flexibility of doing this was one of the greatest strengths of the late (and missed by some of us) CNX2.

Thanks as always for your great help and reasoned contributions here.

Click to expand...

Sorry for the delay in response, I've stopped following this thread and only came here because I occasionally revisit unfollowed threads.

Q1: ACDSee is set up so that when an SD Card is connected to the PC, Windows will offer to auto import the contents of this card via ACDSee. As with all Windows OS that I'm aware of this is user controllable. One can maually import media from media cards by selecting the import option from the File menu. Once a media card is attached to the PC it is considered a Disk by ACDSee. The ACDSee import utility seems pretty intuitive from that point on.

And, of course, you could just drag and drop the files on your media card to the appropriate folders and not import the photos at all. ACDSee is happy to work on them without an import.



Q2: One can step back in history one step at a time. It's not as if the history isn't there, it's just that the entire history is not displayed so that it allows one to move directly to the historical point desired. If this is a major problem for someone, then this is not the software for them. No I have not suggested they add this for two reasons.

1. I'm not an employee of ACDSee and have no pull or push in that regard. I'm a user who likes the results I get with ACDSee Ultimate 9.
2. I don't see this as an issue that needs 'fixing'. Those who do, need to contact ACDSee and make their wishes known. I'm hardly going to push for a change I don't believe in.

I personally use the ACDSee equivalent of Virtual copies (Called Snapshots) in my workflow. When I get to an interesting point in my development, I create a Snapshot before moving on to do other things to the photo. If I want to move to a point between the snapshot and the current development point, I step back through history to reach that point. ACDSee is fast enough that is not a major problem in terms of response time. And the virtual snapshots give me the ability to create and explore a variety development options as well as the history option some seek.

I will point out that the Bit mapped editor portion of ACDSee Ultimate DOES have a standard 'History' layout and that seems entirely appropriate since there are no 'sidecar' files associated with traditional destructive bit mapped editing:



Like I said in another post somewhere in this thread, no software is for everyone. You need to try the software out and decide for yourself.

--
I look good fat, I'm gonna look good old. . .

Thanks for your always helpful help!

Has anyone checked to see if any of these 4 things have changed with the new Pro 10 and Ultimate 10?

yanisha said:

- ACDSee wants to put all image files (raw, tiff, jpeg, gif, png, bmp, etc.) in its catalog no matter where they are on your computer. Rather than tell it which folder(s) you want to have in the catalog the best you can do is tell it which folders to exclude from the catalog. Of course, that would be a long, ever growing list and a constant pain in the butt. Then on top of that, anytime you happen to look at a folder even when not in catalog mode it will then add the images from that folder to the catalog too. Some people probably prefer this behavior, but I most definitely do not. It would be nice to have an option to tell Pro 9 to only catalog stuff in the place or places you specify.

Click to expand...

Actually, you can control that pretty effectively. You can create and manage a list of exclusions. Exclusions can be folders or entire drives.

This is my list of exclusions:



To arrive there, in Manage mode, you go to Tools/Database/Excluded Folders settings...

yanisha said:

- Although ACD claims they support Photoshop plugins I discovered that only a few plugins are supported. None of the ones I use work. I was in contact with a helpful support person and he sent me a short list of plugins that they have found that work. ACD doesn't tell you this upfront though on their website and, in fact, says Photoshop plugins are supported with no mention that many don't work. I don't use plugins much, but for film scans I use Focus Magic 3.02 and Neat Image 5.8. I use them with PS CS2, PSE 9, and PSP X with no problem, but they don't work in Pro 9. I contacted support and they sent me a short list of plugins they say work. I downloaded the free Virtualphotographer to try since they suggested it would probably work, but it didn't. Works in my other 3 editors though. They said that maybe it doesn't work after all.

Click to expand...

In PhotoShop, I use the Nik plugins pretty often, mainly Raw Presharpener, DFine, HDR Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro.

In ACDSee I have defined them as external editors and they work splendidly that way.

The more interesting thing is: I don't need them as much.

My preferred RAW developper is RawTherapee. Using it from LightRoom is a chore because LightRoom does not allow to pass a RAW file to an external editor. Not so with ACDSee, where it is easy as pie and works beautifully. The resolution and sharpening quality I get in RawTherapee make Nik Raw Presharpener obsolete.

My main, I should say only, need for noise reduction is in blue skyes before B&W conversion. Nik DFine is excellent for that. I can still do it from ACDSee. But ACDSee noisereduction, combined with the now excellent selection brush (new in Release 10 and essential to me) also makes DFine redundant.

I used Silver Efex Pro because its B&W conversions look great and the U Points allow for precise, localized adjustments more easily than on PS or LR. Now, ACDSee B&W conversions look beautiful too, really, and again, the new smart selection brush makes Silver Efex Pro redundant forme.

That leaves HDR Efex Pro, which I still use occasionnaly, but the LightEQ control in ACDSee's Develop mode goes a long way into replacing altogether HRD from multiple exposures.

yanisha said:

- No history in Develop mode. I found this very annoying. You can undo/redo, but without a history window which shows all your steps I found using Develop mode much more cumbersome than pretty much any photo editor, Lightroom, etc. that I have used for many years. I often like to go back and forth checking the current state and some number of steps back (3, 4, 8, or whatever) by just selecting the point I want to go back to in the history window list, then going back to the top, etc. -- A/B comparison.

Click to expand...

I know what you mean and I agree. Well, no package is perfect. For me the advantages of ACDSee in release 10 more than compensate for that kind of loss coming from LR.

I hope this helps.

--
Stéphane

yanisha said:

Has anyone checked to see if any of these 4 things have changed with the new Pro 10 and Ultimate 10?

Click to expand...

They have not.

However, to me, release 10 is a much more mature product than the previous releases and it has now replaced CC.