Photo editing has never been more popular, with influencers, content creators, and businesses taking advantage of pervasive technology to create and enhance images and assets.
If you need to make changes to your photos, whether it's retouching them, creating a digital montage, or anything else, the best photo editor is hands down the industry standard Adobe Photoshop. But such power requires a Creative Cloud subscription which may not fit the budget you're looking for.
For one of the best Adobe Photoshop alternatives, look no further than ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023.
- ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023 at ACDSee for €74.95 (Opens in a new tab)
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023: prices and plans
- Affordable whether you buy the software outright or subscribe to it
Not only will you find the price of Photo Studio Ultimate to be more affordable, but you also have two options.
The photo editing software can be yours, for the one-time price of €150/€132/AUD€239. This includes one year of free updates and technical support.
Of course, as you'd expect these days, a subscription option is also available. This not only covers Photo Studio, but also includes Gemstone Photo Editor, Video Converter Pro, Photo Studio for Mac, and Luxea Video Editor.
You'll get free updates and upgrades as long as your subscription remains active, you'll be able to share these apps with up to five users per product, get 100GB of cloud storage, and access tutorials and workshops. All this for only €9 / €8 / AUD€15 per month or €89 / €79 / AUD€142 per year.
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023: AI Tools
- The AI can produce great results, but unsurprisingly, the output depends on the quality of the image
The latest version of Photo Studio Ultimate brings many new features to an already impressive photo editing app. We can't cover all of them here, but the ones that caught our attention the most were based on machine learning algorithms or AI.
Take 'AI Actions' for example. These can be accessed through the Edit section, in a panel that also contains Histogram and Color settings. These are tools designed to speed up your workflow. In fact, you can perform the same actions manually, especially if you are familiar with the software, but if you lack skill or time, this allows you to make complex edits at the click of a button.
You'll find actions to isolate specific elements of your photo, allowing you to blur the background or desaturate it (or both). You can select the theme, or even the skies. We tried to complicate things for the AI by using a photo of a cloudy sky over a gray sea, but it was smart enough to tell the difference and make the right decision. Awesome.
Another new computer-assisted tool is AI Face Edit. This can be found in the Filter sidebar, on the left side of the interface. Obviously, you need a face to work with (sorry animal lovers: it has to be a human face; Photo Studio Ultimate didn't understand that a dog or a cat have faces). Select the tool and after a few seconds of analyzing the image, you are offered a series of parameters that you can modify, such as the width of the face, the cheekbones, the size of the eyes and even the direction in which the eyes look
But that is not all. You will be able to modify the points generated by the AI with which you can make these modifications. Editing stitches is as easy as drag and drop, which makes the result even better.
As for the results, well, they will largely depend on the quality of the source image, although we have to say that the virtual plastic surgery, so to speak, looked amazing and was somewhat unsettling at the same time. After all, when does a photo become a digital construction? But putting that ethical dilemma aside, AI Face Edit works surprisingly well.
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023: Photo Stitching
- Clever idea, but doesn't seem to have any editing options.
Who doesn't like panoramic views? Being able to compose a much wider shot than your camera lens would allow is a fun thing to do. It's easy to take the photos one by one, but the tricky part is putting them all together to create an extended canvas.
As you may know, smartphones can do all of this for you right out of the box, but these little lenses lack the depth and quality of dedicated DSLRs, so an assembly tool is welcome when working with images taken of cameras.
Photo Studio Ultimate 2023 makes it as easy as you can imagine: select your photos, click Process > Panorama, wait a few seconds and voila, or rather, the software is ready.
However, we couldn't find any way to modify the output. We've placed options for changing the file format and selected where to save the resulting image, but what if there's a problem with merging? Sounds like you're stuck with it. We tried it several times and most of the results were almost perfect, but we also got poor results, especially if there was an object in the foreground.
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023: new tools
- Many welcome improvements and new features across the board
The new features in Photo Studio Ultimate 2023 aren't just about intelligent AI. It also introduces new color presets, for example. You will find five in 'Food' and another five in 'Vintage'. Presets are a great way to make color changes quickly and often efficiently. As their titles suggest, the first five are meant to make your food stand out, while the next five are there to give your photo an "old school" feel.
The new shape selection tool is interesting. Once selected, it now behaves like a similar tool you'll find in Photoshop: keep clicking around an object to create your selection, and move points to refine it. You can add curves to create a more precise round canopy. It is a very good tool, well implemented.
Photo Studio Ultimate is a versatile photo editing app, and the latest additions make this affordable software better than ever. Just like the company's video editing software, this photo editor is a hidden gem worth trying.
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2023: Dashboard
Pricing and plansAffordable subscriptions and lifetime licenses4AI toolsExcellent AI implementation4Photo stitchingGood idea, with limitations3New toolsLots of new and updated tools for photo editors4I should buy?
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