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ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review

August 6, 2022 by Life after Photoshop

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 verdict

Life after Photoshop

Features
Usability
Results
Value

Summary

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 is the MacOS version of ACDSee’s all-in-one Photo Studio application. From its features, it looks like a strong rival to Lightroom or ON1 Photo RAW, for example, but the reality is very different. It’s both basic and technical at the same time, it’s missing features many might take for granted, and it looks like a Windows program ported on to the Mac, even if it isn’t.

2.5

Pros

+ Non-destructive editing
+ Decent editing tools
+ Local adjustments

Cons

– Dated and technical
– Redundant ‘View’ mode
– Basic cataloguing tools
– No virtual copies
– Basic preset management

  • What is ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8?
  • How does Photo Studio 8 work?
  • Photo Studio 8 editing tools
  • ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 verdict

What is ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8?

ACDSee is known for its Windows photo editing software ACDSee Photo Studio 2022, its standalone photo editor Gemstone and Luxea video editor. It does, however, make a Mac version of ACDSee Photo Studio, and this is the latest version.

It’s a kind of do-it-all image browsing, organizing and editing tool in a similar vein to ON1 Photo Raw or perhaps even Lightroom, but as we’ll see it’s also quite different, and not in a good way.

How does Photo Studio 8 work?

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review
This is Photo Studio for Mac 8’s Manage panel where you browse your folders, search and organize your images.
ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review
Photo Studio for Mac 8 remembers folders or images you’ve browed in its database. The ‘Special Items’ panel can search and filter the whole database (the Image Well shows all the images added) and the Calendar section below organizes images by date.

There are three main panels in ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8: the Manage panel, View and Develop panels. There is a further panel for the ACDSee 365 cloud storage sharing feature, but that’s a subscription service I’m not testing here.

The Manage panel is essentially a folder browser with filters, but with the additional ability to tag images with ‘Categories’ (albums, essentially) and keywords. Categories can store images from different folders, which is useful.

There is a search tool, but it’s quite odd – you drag a property from a panel on the right into the search field to find images that match that property. You can save searches too. Photo Studio does keep a catalog, of sorts, built up from folders and images as you browse them, and there’s a set of tools around this including an Image Well which shows all your photos. You might argue that at least you don’t have to import your photos… well you don’t, but instead you do have to visit a folder before Photo Studio knows it’s there.

I’ve used a lot of image browsing and cataloguing tools and this is the oddest. I can see how it can be made to work, but it’s pretty limited by the standards of its rivals and compared to Lightroom or Capture One it looks from a different era.

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review
The View panel doesn’t do a lot. It simply shows individual images as a large preview with an optional filmstrip below. Normally, cataloguing software would integrate this ability into its organizing mode.

The View panel doesn’t really do very much. It simply displays selected images much larger with a filmstrip underneath. Most other programs would build a viewer like this into the organization panel, and it hardly seems to deserve a separate window.

Photo Studio 8 editing tools

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review
ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 offers local adjustments via an adjustment brush, linear and radial gradients. Each can have up to eight adjustments applied – see the row of checkboxes at the base of the top panel.
ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review
The adjustment brush (or ‘Develop Brush’ in Photo Studio for Mac 8) has a Magic mode for more precise masking and object selection. It’s not bad, but it’s no more than you would expect in software of this type.

The Develop panel is where Photo Studio does all its image enhancement, local adjustments and non-destructive editing. The editing tools are arranged in a stack of expanding panels in the left toolbar and they look both impressive and technical.

It turns out that the impressively named ‘Light EQ’ panel is in fact a detailed kind of shadow and highlight adjustment – but with more ‘bands’ than just shadows, midtones and highlights.

The ‘Color EQ’ panel equates to the HSL hue, saturation and lightness adjustments in other programs, and the ’Tone Wheels’ panel is in fact like the shadow/midtone/highlight color grading tools in Lightroom. You can also apply and import LUTs, which is useful.

But then are some glaring shortcomings. It’s a non-destructive editor, but Photo Studio does not let you create multiple versions or ‘virtual copies’ of the same photo for experimenting with different looks. And while it does let you save your edits as presets, these are simply shown in a menu and are nowhere near as varied or as easily previewed as in other programs.

One further oddity is that it asks you if you want to save your changes when you leave one image to edit another. Remember, this is a non-destructive editor – the universal convention in other software is to save your edits as you go along. Luckily, it does not mean that Photo Studio is directly modifying your RAW file (it had better not be).

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 does not, incidentally, use its own raw processing and demosaicing engine but the one built into the Apple OS.

I’m left feeling that ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 does what it says, but in a singularly crude and old-fashioned way. I can’t imagine coming to this from any other program and not being a little intimidated, more than a little disappointed and probably both.

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 verdict

ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review
The editing tools in Photo Studio for Mac 8 are fine (yes, I know I still need to fix the white balance!) but the program as a whole just doesn’t do anything its much more modern-looking rivals don’t, and there’s a lot it doesn’t do that they do.

At the time of writing, Photo Studio for Mac 8 is reduced to $39.95 from $99/99. I think even that low price is too much, and that Mac users would be better off using Photos for organization (it’s better than this) and spending the money on Pixelmator Pro or Affinity Photo for serious editing.

I can imagine Photo Studio for Mac 8 might appeal to existing users who want to stay with what they know, but I can’t think of any circumstances where I would advise someone to get it. Frankly, getting back to my usual software after this is like stepping back into the sunlight.

I have invested in a pretty decent Windows laptop to start reviewing Windows software, by the way, as I’m conscious I’ve skipped some Windows-only candidates on this site. This means I can take a look at the Windows version of ACDSee Photo Studio 2022, Gemstone and perhaps the Luxea video editor. I hope ACDSee’s Windows software is better than Photo Studio for Mac 8.

Read more

  • ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 product page
  • Adobe Lightroom Classic review
  • ON1 Photo RAW 2022 review

Related

Filed Under: Best software, Featured, ReviewsTagged With: ACDSee, Browser (photos), Cataloguing software, RAW processing

Life after Photoshop is owned and run by photographer and journalist Rod Lawton. Rod has been a photography journalist for nearly 40 years, starting out in film (obviously) but then migrating to digital. He has worked as a freelance journalist, technique editor and channel editor, and is now Group Reviews Editor on Digital Camera World. Life after Photoshop is a personal project started in 2013.

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