Presenting the ACDSee product is akin to presenting masterpieces by Galsworthy or Hemingway. ACDSee is one of the world's most powerful and popular photo viewers and managers. A giant of a program. It combines numerous options with fast processing and impressive results and is appreciated by both professionals and home users. ACDSee allows acquiring, browsing, viewing, editing, organizing and sharing images. It supports all the formats we are likely to come across. It's one powerful tool to complete various tasks.

A print version of an ACDSee User Guide counts about 250 pages. I do not possess such resources. I can only briefly touch upon some program's benefits and new useful features while my secret idea is to convert you to the keen follower of the ACDSee program.

Step 1: Acquiring

We can acquire imaged from a USB device, digital camera, scanner or a mobile phone. It means we do not have to download pictures to the hard disk before launching ACDSee. Some modern cameras have TWAIN drivers and ACDSee itself offers a pack of plug-ins for different camera types, so we can start the process of acquiring without taking any additional steps. We can scan images or pick and choose among a thumbnail display of photos stored in a digital camera or other devices and just then download the pictures we choose.

Pay attention to one more type of device in the Acquire Wizard window: Windows Image Acquisition (WIA). This works only with a scanner or camera that has a WIA driver. Microsoft representatives say new devices will have the driver. They claim that 60 percent of the cameras on the market will support WIA…soon. Personally I have not heard about a mobile phone with TWAIN or WIA. ACDSee developers look into the future and go in advance.

Step 2: Browsing

Browsing pane layout is fully customizable. 9 possible panes can be organized according to our tastes. We can move and locate them in the different parts of the Browser window. They can even be piled one over another, if you find it useful.

We can dock a pane. For example, during an initial browsing and sorting or for selecting images for slide shows and albums, I prefer to have Image Basket right under or over the File List pane (browsing results pane). We also can stack panes and switch between them for different types of browsing: Folder (according to files location) and Calendar (using the dates associated with files).

Whatever you prefer, do not choose this layout. It's inconvenient, I've tried :-)

Here we can copy and move file and images, replace, rename and overwrite files, or work with offline media: ACDSee stores thumbnails and database information for images contained on CDs or other removable media. And we can browse the thumbnails and view the information even when the disc is not in the CD-ROM drive.

Step 3: Viewing

Actually, it's the step you've been anticipating since taking photos or video filming. Here a set of useful tools is at our disposal: we can rotate, zoom, select parts of images, copy and print them etc. I always use Heading/Footing option and add some humorous remarks to my pictures that are usually a fruitful ground to exercise one's wit. Do not forget to incidentally create desktop wallpapers and savers.

It's up to you either to view images one after another, or in the slide show mode. ACDSee support TIFF and JPEG images with embedded audio. And we are also welcome to embed audio inside or associate images with any WAV file. No problem.

We can set the options on the Viewer page in the ACDSee Options dialog box to specify the Viewer window's size, background, and how it zooms images. And, of course, the Viewer window is customizable.

The fact that ASDSee plays audio/video files, or some parts of them is not itself the reason to get excited. But the Extract option is useful while working with media files. We can extract an individual/multiple frames from a video and save them as still images. Personally I appreciate it very much and use Extract all Frames option. From a 4-second video clip I managed to extract 72 screenshots. And it is nearly the only way to find a shot I would be pleased with.

Step 4: Editing

Let us speak aloud an obvious truth "No editing can turn a photo taken with a cell phone into a piece of photo art". Mobile phones are created to communicate and even ACDSee is not in power to change the situation. What is in ACDSee's power is to reduce red-eye effect, remove unwanted color cast, add and remove image noise, adjust sharpness, light and color level as well as apply some effects.

ACDSee's scope of editing tools and options is quite scarce, and, frankly speaking, if an image needs thorough editing, I choose Adobe Photoshop. ACDSee developers foresaw such a possibility and gave users an opportunity to configure ACDSee to work with a variety of editing applications, including Photoshop.

But often we can do quite well with ACDSee's 8 editing tools and special effects. Just for example: the Mirror effect or The Bathroom Window effect. The latter divides images into bars, transforming them so they resemble the view through privacy glass often found in bathrooms. ACDSee includes several filters, such as Oil Paint and Emboss. Upgrading to ACDSee PowerPack will expand the number to more than 20.

To lighten the problem of choice, at the top of the screen there are the Current, Saved, and Preview tabs. We can select these tabs at any time to compare our original image with the edited version, and preview editing choices before saving them to the hard drive.

Just look at the flowers. I Changed brightness, sharpness,… obviously did something with colors…and applied the Mirror effect…

Step 5: Organizing

Independently of image locations, we can create a virtual folder structure and organize our pictures and media files into various categories. We can also rate them. Physically images can be located in, let us say, 20 different folders, but being organized into the Places category, all of them will be displayed with a single click. The same is the approach to image rating. Convenient, isn't it? Without creating extra copies we can assign files to multiple categories. We can create a new category or subcategory. I created the Children category and two subcategories: Andrew and Mary.

Step 6: Sharing images

It is the step I like the most. It is the process my friends, newly emerged parents, can't stand anymore. And which is simple and not time consuming if we are with ACDSee.

First of all, we can e-mail images. Wizard guides us through the process till the appearance of a default mail agent. If pictures are organized into categories and rated, to find and download them takes just several seconds. Then we can compress photos and change sizes of images being sent without actually changing their properties. So, even when sending individual mails, it will not be that long and boring.

Secondly, the process looks even easier if we create albums and store them on ACD Systems' servers. They will stay there for 30 days. SendPix sends an email to selected recipients who can then view your albums using a standard Web browser — no special software is required.

Thirdly, ACDSee helps to create an HTML album: to prepare photo collections for posting on the Internet. It includes a CD and DVD recording wizard to help us burn images onto a disc. We can also create slide shows and screen savers and give or send them to anyone because they don't need ACDSee to view them. If you have a TiVO box, you can even publish your images to your TiVO, and view them on your television screen.

All I can say in conclusion is "ENJOY using ACDSee". ACDSee is an effective tool plus an affordable price plus years on the market.