Hands-On Review: ACDSee Ultimate 9

ACDSee Ultimate 8 was actually the first release of ACDSee Ultimate, which combined the image-editing capabilities of ACDSee Pro 8 with the digital asset management (DAM) capabilities of ACDSee 18. ACDSee Ultimate 9 adds a host of new features and updates to Ultimate 8, continuing the quest to combine the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Bridge and many of the features of Adobe Photoshop into a single, lower-cost program. Ultimate 9 is available only for 64-bit Windows computers. Upgrade pricing begins at $49.95 for Ultimate 8 users while new users pay $149.95. There’s also a $99/year subscription plan that bundles Ultimate 9 with several other programs and 5GB-worth of cloud storage. 

What’s New
Ultimate 8 introduced adjustment layers, and Ultimate 9 increases their usefulness by making them non-destructive and re-editable. You can add lighting, color, special effects, clarity, skin tuning, vignetting, sharpening, blurring and noise removal adjustment layers, and you can control them with layer masks, opacity changes and a variety of blending modes. The new Dehaze slider restores contrast, color and detail that is obscured by dust, smoke and fog; it’s especially effective when these appear in the sky. The new Skin Tune retouching tool will be of particular interest to portrait and wedding photographers. 

Increased automation in several areas saves you editing time. ACDSee Actions allow you to record and batch-apply any of the more than 200 adjustments in the Edit mode to breeze through repetitive tasks. The new Lens Corrections automation for barrel and pincushion distortion and chromatic aberrations allows you to map these to your lens so that they are applied every time the camera metadata indicates that lens was used. 

A new Photos mode organizes your photos by date even when they’re not in folders by date, and it provides you with yearly, monthly and weekly viewing options. 

Also new is the Snapshots feature in the Develop mode. Snapshots acts like a manually controlled history record, allowing you to move back to a previous version of the image after performing other edits. To speed your batch printing, batch editing, sharing to web or gathering images for a slideshow, you can create collections and smart collections. The Collections tool also allows you to import your Lightroom database into Ultimate 9 while keeping your Lightroom collections intact, viewable and editable in Ultimate 9. Ultimate 9 also accepts Photoshop plug-ins and will automatically load them if they are stored in their default location.

User Friendliness
Users upgrading from Ultimate 8 will find a familiar user interface, with the only big change being a new tab for the Photos mode and a new ACDSee Action dropdown menu in the menu bar. New users will likely find the user interface unfamiliar, but ACDSee greatly eases the transition to Ultimate 9 with an extremely helpful Quick Start Guide on the opening splash screen and many instructional videos on their website, acdsee.com. Once you understand that the Develop mode is generally used for global changes to an image and the Edit mode is designed for pixel-level adjustments, you are well on your way to getting the most out of the program. However, new users and photographers moving from other programs will still have a learning curve to adjust to the positions of the tools, their somewhat different icons and a new set of keyboard shortcuts.

What We Liked
The new features generally deliver on their promises. I organize my photos by subject or assignment rather than date, but Ultimate 9’s Photos mode did all the organizational work of sorting my image library by date, and I find it kind of nice to be able to look at my photos from that perspective. Non-destructive editing and re-editable adjustment layers in the Edit mode are a welcome addition and perform very similarly to those in Photoshop, but with even more possible options for what can be edited in a layer. Having skin retouching available as a tool that you can apply globally, brush on and use in an adjustment layer is a major step forward in Ultimate 9, although its implementation could use some fine tuning. 

Dehaze seems to be the latest tool that all image editors must have, and the version in Ultimate 9 works well, although I found that it tends to add a strong saturated blue cast when used in Los Angeles. In Portland, with clearer air, or in the dust of Mexico, it works wonders. And it’s nice to have Ultimate 9 automatically apply lens corrections by reading the EXIF metadata rather than having to manually apply them. It takes a couple of seconds to set this up for a lens initially, but it will save you lots of time in the future.

What We Didn’t Like
With all of the new features in Ultimate 9, it is pleasantly surprising that they all work as well as they do. Yes, the Skin Tune needs some finer adjustments, Dehaze can cause color and saturation issues, and Adobe compatibility isn’t perfect. But what is disappointing is that little effort seems to be made to fix the shortcomings in Ultimate 8. For me, those shortcomings centered on the weak selection and masking tools, including the inability to refine or easily invert a mask. And the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights sliders in the Basic panel of the Light EQ pane in the Develop mode still adjust values outside of their ranges.

I was also disappointed to see that importing a Lightroom database only imported the ratings, keywords and labels—not the image adjustments. And saving a layered ACDSee file in the PSD format required flattening the image rather than saving the layers for adjusting in Photoshop. This may be all the compatibility possible with Adobe programs, but I wish it could be more and that these limitations would be made clear to photographers who are considering the move to Ultimate 9.

How It Compares
The competition is fierce these days as increasing numbers of advanced amateurs look for more sophisticated image editors and as all image-editing programs move closer to one another in features. By combining a powerful digital asset manager, a RAW file converter that now handles Fuji X-trans images and a well-featured image editor with adjustment layers into one program, ACDSee Ultimate 9 is a serious contender in the field. Users of Ultimate 8 should definitely upgrade, and other photographers on Windows who are unhappy with their present image editor need to take a long look at ACDSee Ultimate 9. 

Stan Sholik is a commercial/advertising photographer in Santa Ana, CA, specializing in still-life and macro photography. His latest book, Shoot Macro, for Amherst Media, is available now.

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