Hey, this is Scott of Photography Banzai.
Today we're taking a look at Acdsee Photo Studio Ultimate
2020. I recently bought this version of it
because it has CR3 RAW support. So with the Canon EOS M50 that I have. Now I
can finally go into their software and not have to convert to DNG RAWs to edit
with Acdsee. Super nice! That is the main reason I
picked it up. We're gonna go over the software itself. I've modified some
things in the settings. It might look a little different if you download the
demo. Here's the manage tab. You have a folder list on the side. On the center,
all of your options on the top. And the main tabs on the top right. I have those
little smaller than usual, but you get the idea.
So in the "manage" this is basically a lot of the ways to move files around.
Change some settings. Copy, paste, and all of that. Let's go into this folder here.
We'll just looking a few different photos. So we'll go into CR3...
See it is reading those files, that's a big deal for me! You can easily select
things. See on the side here of the EXIF information that it pulls. And of course
DNGs work just fine as well. What I was doing previously is using the
DNG converter which I'll pull up real quick. If you have an older version of this or
some other software. Usually you can convert to DNGs and they're more
compatible, in general. Acdsee is database focused. It's good and bad in some ways.
I just try to ignore it. It's just one way of storing information about photos
that it reads from the disk and all that. Or any edits and changes that you make.
That's just fine, I just let it do its thing. But you can push the XMP sidecar
files for RAWs and you can push information into DNGs, files like that...
There is a setting, which I want to show you first. So you go into the options...
tools > options and database here. It says display embedded Acdsee
metadata reminder. I have this on shutdown. So when I close the application
if it needs to make those sidecar files, it'll do that. It'll give you option to
do that. On the top right here we have a photo tab. Let's look at that real quick.
Now, I don't have a lot loaded into this database for the new version. I didn't
try to convert anything. I just want to start fresh. As you can see it pulls up a
lot of information. You can look at a ton of photos. It does
dates and everything. So that's just a few files that I've loaded into here.
That's one way of looking at your pictures. Pretty nice, I don't really use
it too much. But it is an option. Go back to manage, select one of the photos and
go into "view". I use this quite a bit. It's very quick to look at the pictures. We
can zoom in. You can scroll very easily. You can switch down here with the keys
on the keyboard. And there's... it's a really nice way to view files. Gives you
some information on side. You can do the embedded preview, or the RAW that it
generates a preview for that directly, which is a nice. So if I want to get into
actually editing this file, I go into "develop". This is the main tab that I use
a lot, besides the "manage" and the "view".
Here in "develop" you can zoom in.. whatever you want. Scroll around. Works pretty
nicely. They've improved the speed of this through the different generations
of software that have used. I started with 2017. But here you can do the
standard adjustments.. contrast.. just a lot of options. White balance.. light EQ.. I use
these quite a bit. You can push some of the shadows, highlights, it works really
well. Can change the different types. So definitely a good amount of options.
You've got color adjustments, saturation.. You can go in the picture itself and adjust
with the mouse. Photo effects if you want like the Instagram looks of pictures.
That's in there. Grain, color LUTs, which I haven't used that. This is a newer
feature. That's just the main tab there. "Detail" gives you sharpening and noise
reduction, things of that nature. Skin tune is another thing to adjust for
the people's faces. And chromatic aberration adjustments. With the geometry,
it's nice that with the new CR3 support I'm seeing that the M50 is in there. The
profiles.. they have quite a few more, at least than previous, so we've got the
original EOS M, M50, M5, M3..2..M100, M6... I'm not seeing
the M200, but it's better than nothing. So here you can
crop and do things of that nature. Everything in developed tab is
non-destructional. Also that way you can do things, like this tab, which is repair. You
can actually right click here. It's basically a healing tool. You got the
"clone" and it works like you would expect. So if I try to erase things you get the
idea. Now, it's not the fastest thing ever, but it does work. So you can actually
copy and paste settings. So if I wanted to.. change.. save all these settings
and push them into another picture, I can do that with selections of what I want
to copy and paste. Then just right click on another one paste it in there, and it
will push those changes. So everything from the repair tool to any of these
sliders will be pushed. The edit tab is like Photoshop. You have different layers.
You can basically do a lot of the similar things. You do a lot of the
adjustments in the "develop" tab as well. But these are raster based. So you are gonna
have to save a new file for these edits. But you do actually have more settings
here, like "liquify". Things you won't be able to do on the develop tab.
It does have some special features like frequency separation, which I haven't
really gotten into. Even though I've had it for previous versions. But it... things like
that you want to use with portraits of people. So as you can see here, it wants you
to save a new file because it is raster based. Basically like a Photoshop file,
but with Acdsee. They have an add-on that comes with the application that you can
right click on files in folder Explorer. And you get a preview of it. As you can
see it's got Canon EOS M50, the CR3, which is great. And you can click on that.
It pops up in another application for previewing. So a nice quick way of
doing that. I'll go into "develop" with a person photo. We can do quite a few
adjustments that I didn't mention with the other type of photos. So I said this
soft focus. You can add a glow to it. I think that's actually a new one I remember
being in the previous version. We also have... This one here, the skin tune. Let's
go in a little closer. You can adjust that to basically remove some of the blemishes
from people...
See the differences...
So a nice little feature there. A quick way to simply adjust the skin a
little bit, which I do use. Some of the things that I also do with this program
is rename files to use it in my videos. So if you've seen some of my videos where it has
on the top, it's got the EXIF information, I rename the file themselves.
That way, I have some of that information embedded in there. When I pull it into my
video editor, I can just copy paste that information. It's a quick way to do that
stuff. So go into renaming. This drop-down, you just have to add some information that
you want. So insert metadata...
You could add different things like aperture, ISO...
Then it'll change. It'll give you a way of seeing what it might look like. Really
nice way to adjust naming and such. Of course, you have the different
information like adding colors to different pictures, or ratings.
You could right-click and rating. It's a nice way to
pick files.. cull files.. which I do a lot with
the photography. So far so good. It feels a little quicker than the previous
version, which is very nice. Any-any tiny little improvement in processing speeds
helps out a lot. Because you're doing maybe a ton of
photos. It really helps. There is so much to it. It does face detection. It does a
whole bunch of things that I haven't even tried out, and it did it in some of
the previous versions as well. But in this one maybe I'll eventually get a
chance to check it out. That was look at Acdsee Photo Studio ultimate 2020.
Hope you enjoyed the video, just a quick look going over some of the things that
I use. And talking about CR3 RAW support, which is a big deal for me...
Gonna say it ten millions times!
I'm Scott of Photography Banzai. I hope you enjoyed the video. Thanks!