Like Adobe, ACDSee has been around since the early days of digital photography. Despite its comparative lack of name recognition, the company's photo workflow and editing software, Photo Studio Ultimate, has partisans who prefer it to Lightroom. The 2024 version of the app includes Photoshop-like layer editing, and some of its tools (such as its Light EQ adjusters) are particularly good. But it falls short of top competitors in initial raw camera file conversion quality, generative AI tools, effectiveness of some corrections, and interface usability. For all that, look to our Editors' Choice winner among photo workflow apps, Adobe Lightroom Classic.
How Much Does ACDSee Cost?
ACDSee sells its software as a one-time download for $99.95 or as a subscription starting at $89 per year (or $8.90 per month or $89 per year). The subscription lets you install the software on up to five devices, Mac or Windows, and gives you access to ACDSee Web galleries for showcasing your work, with 200GB of SeeDrive Cloud Storage included. That's a generous upgrade from the previous 50GB allotment.
The versions for Windows and Mac are a little different. The Mac version, which you can buy separately, is called Photo Studio for Mac ($79.95). Now at version 10, it requires macOS 12 or later. That program converts raw camera images, just as the Windows version does, and it includes most but not all features of the Windows app.
If Photo Studio Ultimate is more than you need—say you just want to organize your photo collection and do basic corrections and some effects—there's the less expensive Photo Studio Home ($49.95 one-time), which has a lot of Ultimate's organization tools but lacks layers and other new features. Photo Studio Professional ($79.95) also lacks layer editing but includes powerful raw camera file editing and AI tools. The final member of the ACDSee fleet is Gemstone Photo Editor ($29.95), which lacks all the workflow features but includes all the editing tools like AI selection, layers, and curves.
Similar Products
Adobe Lightroom Classic
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop Elements
Adobe Lightroom
Corel PaintShop Pro
CyberLink PhotoDirector
Capture One Pro
DxO PhotoLab
Skylum Luminar Neo
Adobe Photoshop Express
ON1 Photo RAW
The option to buy a permanent license for the software will appeal to Lightroom and Photoshop users who'd rather not pay Adobe every month, though ACDSee's subscription option is nearly the same price as Adobe's $9.99 per month for either of those applications. Other apps that cost about the same are Photoshop Elements ($99), CyberLink PhotoDirector ($99), and ON1 PhotoRaw ($99). Some pro-level apps, such as Skylum Luminar ($199), Capture One ($299), and DxO PhotoLab ($219), cost more. Zoner Photo Studio is subscription-only, but it's more affordable at $5.99 per month or $59 per year.
Can Your Computer Run ACDSee Photo Studio?
The Windows program, reviewed here, runs on Windows 10 (64-bit only) and Windows 11. It also requires at least 4GB RAM (6GB RAM or more recommended), an Intel i5 or better processor, 512MB Video RAM (VRAM), a DirectX 10 compatible graphics adapter, 1,280-by-800 display resolution (1,920-by-1,080 recommended), and 4GB of available hard drive space.
I installed the application on a Core i7-based PC with 16GB RAM, where it occupied a little over 1GB of disk space. That's half of Lightroom's 2GB footprint, but about double CyberLink PhotoDirector's.
What's New in ACDSee Ultimate?
For ACDSee veterans, here's a cheat sheet of the major new tools and features that arrived with the current version (in addition to new camera support):
AI keyword tags, automatically applied based on objects in your photos, making search more effective
Non-Destructive AI masking, and Edit mode tool that gives you automatic selection of subject, background, sky, for cutouts and effects that maintain your original image in a layer
AI Sky Replacement, which lets you change the sky to a more dramatic one with one click—Lightroom and Skylum Luminar have a similar feature
Improved AI face editing that lets you edit dimensions of several different parts of the face, remove blemishes, and whiten eyes and teeth
Develop Mode masking panel, which lets you automatically mask the subject, background, or sky in your photos
Improved Edit brush, with options for Flow, Opacity, and Jitter
Grain tool, which gives your photos a grungy analog look, similar to one in Lightroom
Skin Tune, a tool for portrait photographers in particular that evens out skin tone, restores glow to their subjects, and brightens and smooths skin
Several other refinements to the organization and metadata tools have also been introduced. Important new features in previous versions include panorama stitching, a People mode for face recognition, color wheels for pixel targeting, local noise reduction, focus stack support, text layers, custom LUT creation, PDF support, and support for Dropbox and OneDrive cloud syncing.
Getting Set Up
No matter how you pay for the software, you need to sign up for an account and respond to a verification email. The program then restarts and has you choose a default photo folder. The next step is going through an introductory wizard with a quick start guide. It takes you through the program's setup and features and is thorough and helpful. After that, you're ready to edit photos.
After you decide which photo folders you want the program to monitor, ACDSee builds a catalog. It's a database that enables nondestructive editing, saving your edits separately from the original photo files. After editing, you simply export a version of the edited image. Lightroom uses a catalog in the same way. With either app, you can keep photos on whatever storage you like, and the catalog will keep track of its location. The catalog also stores any organization information you associate with a photo, such as keyword tags, ratings, notes, and more. As with most such software, ACDSee Photo Studio Professional prompts you to create a backup of the catalog file each month. If you're upgrading from an earlier version, you may need to convert your photo collection to the latest catalog version.
You can also use ACDSee as a Photoshop plug-in, convert Lightroom catalogs for it, and integrate with OneDrive for cloud storage. Once you finish the installation, ACDSee jumps you to its web video course for beginners hosted by the company's director of photography (and noted commercial photographer), Alec Watson.
The ACDSee Interface
ACDSee has a good many buttons, menus, modes, panels, and toolbars, all of which can be overwhelming. It uses the pleasing black (or very dark gray) background popular among pro photo and video applications. There's no accommodation for 4K and other high-DPI displays like my BenQ QHD monitor, so menus are tiny on these screens. At least the mode buttons at the top right are big enough to be easily visible and clickable.
A quick start guide that appears on the first run takes you through all the program's modes, accessible from controls on the top right: Manage, Media, View, Develop, and Edit. Buttons next to these take you to more views: People, 365 (the online view), Dashboard, and Connect (the message center). A Workspace button at the top left lets you enable the default as well as your own custom preset workspaces. Panels can be dragged out of the main window, but pinning them back isn't as straightforward as it could be. A lot of the program's features are only available once you go to the Panes menu and turn them on, like Maps and Collections.
Like many photo programs, the left sidebar has image sources, including hard drives, and ACDSee Mobile Sync, which sucks up photos and videos from your smartphone via the ACDSee Mobile Sync app. The company also has a full iOS photo editing app for $4.99.
Buttons at the top right let you quickly show and hide the left source panel, bottom filmstrip control, and right-side info panel, but other programs use the more intuitive collapse arrows for this. In adjustment sliders, double-clicking brings them back to the default, the way some apps work—and the way I prefer. There is, however, a reset button in each edit group. You can zoom with Ctrl-Mouse Wheel, click a 1:1 button at the bottom to see the full-size image, or use a slider next to that to set the zoom percentage. Unfortunately, there's no before-and-after side-by-side view for comparing edits to the original, but there is a toggle button that shows the original. A Snapshots tool lets you save copies of edits, too.
Photo Studio includes hundreds of shortcut keys for every possible function—B for brush, T for text tool, C for crop, and so on, with many multi-key shortcuts for less common actions.
Importing and Organizing Photos in ACDSee Photo Studio
An Import button atop the Manage mode lets you bring pictures in from devices, disks, scanners, or CD/DVD. On import, you can choose the disk folder destination and naming convention, but you can't apply adjustment presets, as you can in CyberLink PhotoDirector and Phase One Capture One Pro. If you just want to add photos on your hard drive to ACDSee's catalog, you can't do so in the import dialog; rather, you right-click the folder in Folders view and then choose Catalog files. Lightroom Classic lets you add photos from the same Import dialog. During import, you can see thumbnails of current files and a countdown of the number of files processed and left. Import with ACDSee Photo Studio was significantly slower than for other tested programs; see the Performance section below.
The program supports raw camera file formats from all the major camera models, including some newer ones such as the Canon EOS R6, Leica M11, Nikon Z 6, and Sony a7 IV. It couldn't yet display an image from the Sony a9 iii, however. The raw import quality is acceptable, with decent sharpness and colors. Capture One and Lightroom produce the best images (left) in terms of color accuracy and sharpness. Of course, all three programs have tools that let you adjust those things, but it's good to compare what the program does by default, without requiring more work on your part. Here's the initial raw import of the same image in ACDSee on the left and Ligthroom on the right:
You can organize pictures by using Albums, People, Places, ratings (1–5), keywords, and colors. There's also a checkmark at the bottom right that you can click to pick photos. And, what I find helpful, you can filter by lens and camera model used as well as EXIF data like F-stop and ISO settings. One option I miss is to view the last import batch or recently edited images. Also, Manage doesn't have an all-photos view. The separate Media mode does show all photos, but it doesn't have a search capability. Anyway, the Quick Search box in Manage mode didn't work for me, even when I typed part of a filename that was showing in the thumbnails below. You can sort and group the displayed tiles by date, tags, filenames, camera, and image size. Manage mode lets you do a lot of this, too, so I'm not sure why the app needs a separate mode.
Applying keywords to your photos for organization is especially impressive, since it's now automatic, powered by image AI. The software automatically applied keywords to a collection of photos, letting me instantly show all photos containing buildings, birds, people, and so on. I found it extremely accurate, down to knowing the difference between a duck and a goose. You can transfer these auto-generated keywords to your photos' IPTC metadata so that users of other software can see them.
You can also create hierarchical keyword groups or choose from a selection of topics, such as Landscape, Wedding, and Portrait, but it's not as big a selection as some competitors have.
You can also group photos into Collections and Smart Collections. To create a new collection, you right-click on the blank area in the left folder panel. It works, but it's not very intuitive. The Collection pane wasn't even enabled after installation; I had to turn it on from the Panes menu. Image baskets let you hold photos you want to work with in a temporary tray below the main display area. You can now create five image baskets, which appear as separate tabs.
Organize With Faces and Maps
The People mode button (it looks like two heads) at the top right makes working with face recognition easier. The program automatically processes all imported images with face detection (you can turn it off in Settings if you prefer). Two tabs let you switch between Named and Unnamed faces. To get started, switch to Unnamed faces. After you've identified a few faces, name suggestion works with detected faces. Keep in mind that the technology finds art with faces and any random face in the background. It does a decent job of identifying those you name, though.
One fun organization feature is maps. ACDSee Photo Studio Professional can use GPS encoding in files that have it to show the images on a map. You can also drag photo thumbnails onto the map to create pins for their locations. There's no mode button for it as there is for People, and it's not even enabled by default. You have to go into the Panes menu and check its check box. The program highlights thumbnails shot in the location you select a pin on the map; I'd prefer it. Lightroom does a better job with maps, though, with thumbnail slideshows right on the map showing photos shot at the location.
Adjusting Photos
In Develop mode, you get all the standard light and color correction tools—Exposure, Contrast, Saturation—along with things like Vibrance and Clarity, which have become standards for prosumer software. The interface for adjusting them works well, with large bar sliders. Reset buttons helpfully appear for each section in which you make an adjustment, and B&W tools are just a click away, but there's no overall reset option to start over. That means if you try a bunch of different presets, you have to undo them all separately to get back to the original. Develop mode does have a slew of presets for targeted use like weddings, landscapes, and vintage looks. The program gives you abundant batch tools, too, for most kinds of editing and organizing. Actions include Instagram-like filters as well as many other editing and workflow options.
Switching to Standard mode for the Light EQ tools presents detailed sliders that let you adjust more specific levels, another good tool I haven't seen in other software. The Auto button only appears under the Light EQ controls when you open them, and you can click it to get the program's best-guess settings, though I didn't have as good luck with this auto-tone tool as I have with Lightroom and Capture One. Even cooler, you can adjust with a wand tool over the image that adjusts brightness based on the area under the cursor. It's sort of like the iPhone's "tap on the screen to set exposure and focus" feature, minus focus.
ACDSee includes tools to correct pincushion and barrel distortion based on known characteristics of the equipment used. The program correctly identified my camera model, and applied the auto-fix, making a subtle improvement to a wide-angle shot, but there were still skewed objects at the image's edges. You can increase the effect, but I missed Lightroom's Upright option, which completely aligns vertical lines. ACDSee fares even worse when it comes to chromatic aberration correction. You have to try to move sliders just so to correct it, but the defringe tool worked more automatically and effectively.
ACDSee handles cropping fairly well (if you can find the Crop tool) and is now available in Develop mode (though you can't summon it with the C shortcut, which only still works in Edit mode). It defaults to an unconstrained aspect ratio, which I prefer. I also like how you can hide the area outside the crop, and how spinning the mouse wheel changes the photo's angle. You can also straighten a photo with a guideline, but there's no tool for auto-straightening based on the horizon like Lightroom's. Note that the straightening tool is found in Develop mode's Geometry section.
Brushes (up to eight of them) give you feathering and tolerance settings for most Develop adjustments, but there's no subtract brush, only a Clear All Brushstrokes button. The Magic option does a nice job finding edges, even in complex areas like palm leaves. As mentioned, brush capabilities include vibrance, white balance, color overlay, color EQ (saturation, brightness, hue, and contrast), and tone curves. The last is a cool capability that I haven't seen elsewhere. New for brushes in 2024 are Flow, Opacity, and Jitter settings. These let you control how much "ink" is poured as you draw, how strong the lines are, and how much randomness you want to add, respectively.
You can't, however, use brushes with the Effects in Edit mode or with Skin smoothing. The Repair tool also disappointed me in that it didn't let me see the source area; even after I'd chosen a source, my result had unwanted textures applied. The Blended Clone option is better, but still gave me the same problem, though to a lesser degree. The Repair tool in Edit mode was more successful, and in that mode (see next section) you can use a brush with Skin Smoothing.
Masking in ACDSee Photo Studio
Both Develop and Edit modes now have masking panels. The one in Develop only lets you apply standard light and color adjustments to the selection, so if you want to blur or remove the background, head to Edit mode. Here's the new masking panel on the left in Develop mode:
Here's the job it did masking the subject automatically:
On a more difficult subject with unruly hair, the mask wasn't as accurate, though that's the case with similar tools in other software as well.
Fortunately, you can invert the mask to make edits only apply to the background (or just start with the AI Select Background option). When making adjustments to either the subject or background, it's a good idea to turn off the red highlighting, so you can see what you're doing. There's also a Pixel-targeting tool, which I didn't find very useful; an eyedropper tool in it would help to select the tone you want to target. You can try to refine your selection with a brush, but it pales by comparison with Adobe's Refine Mask tools.
Edit mode's Blur background button was fine as far as it goes, but I wish it would let you adjust the amount of blur. You can adjust the amount of blur, however, by adding a Blur adjustment layer after auto-selecting the background.
Editing With Layers
ACDSee Photo Studio Professional's Edit mode is where you find pixel-level functions such as watermarking, and text overlay. The mode sports a long list of tools down the left panel. There you find watermark, tilt-shift, grain, and special effect, which opens another selection of nine filter types, including artistic, distort, painting, and retro.
Some Develop tools are also found in Edit, but I'd prefer a design that keeps tools in their place, giving the Edit mode a friendlier look. Note, too, that you can go back to Develop mode after doing layer edits. Photoshop lets you use Adobe Camera Raw as a filter for it. You can open Adobe PSD files, but when I did, layers weren't preserved.
A few Edit mode features are straight out of Adobe's playbook: Subject Select, Select Sky, and Remove Background. The latter worked well in my test photo.
New for 2024 are sample skies you can replace your drab sky with after detection. You get 40 sky choices in categories like Blue Sky, Sunset, Storm, and Night Sky. Or you can use your own image. The interface lets you move and scale the sky, helpful since the canned skies don't always fit your detected sky area.
The AI-powered Face Edit tool is also updated for 2024. It lets you resize parts of the head, including Face Width, Jawline, Jaw Length, Chin Size, Forehead, and Cheekbones, as well as many aspects of the Eyes, Nose, and Mouth. It also lets you apply digital makeup. It's the very top choice in the left-panel selection of Edits when you're in Edit mode. The tool identifies all the salient points of a face, and you can edit these points if you want.
You can have a lot of fun with all these face edits, and come up with some far-fetched looks. You can even change the direction of the person's gaze.
The Smart Erase tool (only in Edit mode) is equivalent to Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill tool and does a decent job of automatically removing unwanted objects from a photo. Note the removed gray tape on the right side of the floor in the nearby image. Lest you think that this kind of tool is gimmicky or just for hobbyists, you should know that Andreas Gursky's Rhein II, the most expensive photo sold ($4.3 million) up till 2014, used digital manipulation to remove people and objects.
The Dehaze tool worked well enough on my test winter landscape shot, but it tends to jack up the color saturation more than I'd like. I do like that it has a brush for applying dehaze just to selected areas of the photo. Adobe's similar tool also lets you add realistic haze; ACDSee's slider can only remove haze. DxO PhotoLab does the best job at haze removal out of the box with its automatic corrections, and it doesn't introduce a color cast, as Adobe and ACDSee do.
Skin Tune is a tool for portrait photographers. The three tools in this set—Smoothing, Glow, and Radius—make easy work of making people's mugs look dreamier. One thing I'd wish for in this tool, however, is a Before-and-After view.
Noise, in the Detail group, differs from Noise Reduction in Develop mode. The Edit tool has three options: Camera, Median, and Despeckle. By default, the first option is too aggressive for my taste, smoothing out the image excessively. Median leaves the sharpest but noisiest result, while Despeckle is something of a compromise. I'm happy to see that those last two modes don't require trial-and-error moving of sliders back and forth, the way they do in some other apps. You can also brush on noise reduction to selected areas of a shot. That said, the results aren't on par with those you get with DxO's DeepPrime and Topaz DeNoise, which preserve detail while removing noise.
You can also target color ranges for selection. Using Noise Reduction illustrates how it works. In the photo below, I want to keep more detail on the catbird and smooth away the noise on the out-of-focus green background. Targeting the green pixel range in the color wheel enables me to do it. The same method of selection can be used for other types of edits simply by tapping the Pixel Targeting button.
The Grain tool has improved, looking more like actual film grain to me, but I suppose you could tinker with the slider controls for Amount, Smoothing, and Size to get a convincing enough look. There are 22 artistic special effects, including Grunge, Orton, and Stained Glass. These are fun, old-school Photoshop-like effects to play with, but there aren't AI filters that apply Van Gogh and other artists' styles intelligently. In addition, you can record your edits as Actions, or use prefab Actions that apply grain, film styles, fade, and more. Further, the program supports plug-ins.
Text layers let you customize fonts, color, and opacity. It's an easy-to-use feature, with WYSIWYG text entry and a convenient move icon.
Effects and LUTs
ACDSee throws in 10 LUTs for use with the LUT tool, and they're fun to try, with names like Elegance, Film, and Tinsel. You can also import LUTs in CUBE and 3dl formats, and you can create your own using the program's color and lighting adjustments in an adjustment layer (or layers). The updated Black & White conversion tool is indeed powerful, with brightness sliders for eight colors. I would like to see presets for the B&W conversion, however.
Photo merging options in ACDSee Photo Studio include Panorama, HDR, and Focus Stack. I tried the panorama, and it did an excellent job stitching together shots of the Montreal skyline. You can choose to crop to a rectangle.
The HDR stitching result was a bit overly juiced up for my taste, but I was able to tone it down with exposure and color adjustments. Lightroom's similar tool produced a more realistic look, and CyberLink PhotoDirector lets you choose from several HDR styles ranging from natural to jarring.
ACDSee's focus stacking lets you take several shots in increasing or decreasing focus distances and joins them to create one all-in-focus shot. You need to carefully shoot on a tripod, as the program needs to align and blend the images. The feature worked as advertised in my quick test, but still leaves me pining for the abandoned Lytro project.
Performance in ACDSee Photo Studio
In everyday photo manipulation, ACDSee feels responsive and not as sluggish as Zoner Photo Studio (though Zoner has very good import speeds, as we'll see). Switching between modes, however, feels slower than it should.
For a quantifiable result, I tested import speed with 200 raw images (a total of 6GB) from a Canon 80D. I tested on a Surface Pro 3 laptop with a Core i7-1065G7 CPU at 1.30GHz, 16GB RAM and Intel Iris Plus graphics. I compared this import job in ACDSee with the same one in Adobe Lightroom Classic. In fact, ACDSee beat Adobe this time, reporting an import time of 4:42 (minutes:seconds) compared with 5:18 for Lightroom Classic.
Sharing and Output With ACDSee Photo Studio
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate's 365 mode is the starting point for sharing, but it's nowhere near the slick experience you get with Adobe Lightroom (the non-Classic version) which easily syncs everything in a clear UI. ACDSee 365's mode embeds a web browser into the application, where you sign into a cloud account.
Storage plans are still not especially generous, though they've improved since last year. You get 2GB free and pay $89 per year for 200GB or $69 for 50GB. To be fair, those plans do include application updates. Once you log in, you can upload photos via the Transfer sub-mode, including by drag-and-drop. As in Lightroom Classic's Publish Services view, you see online photos on the top of a split gallery thumbnail view and local ones at the bottom. You can drag and drop images to the ACDSee's online storage, called the SeeDrive.
By default, you upload JPGs to 365, but you can choose raw files with associated data. You can designate local folders to sync with the online storage, but syncing only happens when you click the Sync to Web button. There's no link to your online gallery from the application, and the only sharing options are email, Twitter, and web widgets.
At www.365.acdsee.com, you can see all your synced photos, and the public can see them too if you allow it. The attractive, dark image pages show tags and allow comments and downloading. There are some appealing photos on the Popular page, but if you're looking for a social photography experience, it's hard to beat Flickr. Instagram, though very popular, is a different beast, more about social networking than photography, and doesn't have things like EXIF or even full-size viewing.
In any case, I'd rather see ACDSee put its effort into better tools for directly sending images to services like Flickr, Instagram, and SmugMug, rather than into creating its own web galleries. There are right-click options that do let you send photos to those services as well as to email, but they're not as robust as Lightroom Classic's equivalents.
When it comes to printing, ACDSee Photo Studio Professional gives you a full set of tools, with a good choice of layouts including custom layouts. It can show soft proofing with gamut warnings and supports the EXIF 2.2 printing standard. You can choose between having the program or the printer handle color management.
Is ACDSee Right for You?
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate is a powerful photo organizer and editor, and the company continues to add worthy tools to its sizable repertoire. Especially noteworthy is the Light EQ feature. The app's panels, tools, buttons, menus, and tabs can get dizzying, however, and we're not sure a subscription model makes sense for this product. Despite its advances, ACDSee still trails Adobe Lightroom Classic, our top pick for pro-level photo editing and workflow management in terms of interface design and image-correction tools. Adobe Photoshop also remains unbeaten as our Editors' Choice for pixel-level photo editing.
ACDSee's pro-level software gives you many powerful photo organizing and editing features, combining functions of both Lightroom and Photoshop, but its tools aren't quite as state of the art.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
