Offering versatile organizational tools along with rich photo editing capabilities, ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 5 from ACD Systems features a useful set of features to benefit a post-production workflow. Updated to greatly benefit image organization and handling, this version sees the inclusion of an Image Basket tool, along with a suite of features for filtering, rating, categorizing, and tagging your files to help find photos quickly. Rich metadata editing capabilities are also supported along with a dedicated Map pane for geotagging your files using embedded location data. For editing photos, a raw development pane lets you easily adjust a variety of image attributes, and capable adjustment tools let you refine the look of photos. Additionally, straighten and sharpening tools put the finishing touches on photos and support for external editing applications helps when integrating ACDSee within an existing photo editing workflow.
- Image Basket allows you to gather and hold multiple files from different locations or folders, and then work from this desired assortment. This helps to retain original file organization while being able to work with groups of images.
- Filtering tools allow you to isolate desired files using metadata, ratings, color labels, tags, and categories, as well as the ability to identify images missing specific types of metadata, labels, or ratings.
- Up to four images can be compared at a time using the Compare Images tool, which helps to identify similarities using zooming and panning functions.
- Auto Advance lets you seamlessly update metadata without having to sift through folders; this function automatically moves on to the next image in the File List pane for faster, more efficient updating.
- External editing applications can be used in conjunction with ACDSee, and images can be opened using these other applications directly from the Manage or View modes.
- Unlimited image databases can be created for faster switching between groups of images.
- Batch adding of watermarks is possible, along with the ability to adjust watermark size, position, and opacity as well as save watermark settings as a preset for future use.
- A Batch Add Border function lets you add a frame around images en masse, with customizable color, texture, and thickness styles.
- Existing databases from versions 3 and 4 of ACDSee Photo can be imported into this new version, alleviating the need to re-catalog or organize image libraries.
- The overall appearance of imagery can be enhanced through the use of color and tone adjustments, exposure adjustment, shadow and highlight recovery, fill light, and contrast and clarity sliders. Additionally, a Soft Focus tool produces an ethereal, dreamy quality akin to using a diffusion filter, that reduces harsh lines and intensifies colors.
- RGB color channel adjustments allow for fine-tuned control over tonal range, color temperature, tint, and mid-tone, shadow, and highlight adjustments. Using Light EQ technology, detail can also be faithfully rescued from shadow regions for natural brightness and contrast from underexposures.
- Dedicated Straighten function requires drawing a line along an image's horizon to easily straighten and level it.
- Integrated sharpening tool preserves edge detail while helping to increase the overall apparent sharpness of an image. This tool can be controlled by the number of pixels from a recognized edge that are sharpened, along with coarse and fine settings and noise reduction control.