ACDSee Pro is a result of software piece developing quickly out of a small image viewer into a comprehensive image file management and editing tool.

The program that won't give you all the flexibility of PhotoShop but will provide with basic options for smooth workflow - from photocamera to a printed image.

Camera support and destination formats

ACDSee Pro supports a wide span of cameras excluding only some fringe brands like Samsung, Sigma, or Mamiya. Major product lines, like Canon, Nicon, Pentax,  Fuji, Sony, Kodak, and Casio, are supported almost in their entirety, with 1-3 exceptions. With other camera brands ACDSee supports only some models.

As most other converters ACDSee does not change RAW files permanently. They remain intact after processing to preserve all the data captured by your camera. The processing settings are saved to the database and associated with the image.

ACDSee offers a large variety of file formats for saving. The largest variety, in fact than any other converter reviewed here. That comes, of course, from the fact that ACDSee positions itself as an all-purpose image file manager.   

Tools

ACDSee is not very rich with raw processing tools although it does have the basics like WB, Exposure compensation, Sharpness, and Noise reduction.The main issue is their performance though.

Exposure

Exposure tab contains the exposure slider and a Levels tool. The exposure-warning button when pressed, color-codes the underexposed and overexposed pixels and this can help with adjusting the exposure value or other parameters of the image as the button is visible on every tab.

The notable features of the Levels tool are the possibility to work in RGB channel separately and the setting of clipped % option (it also works as an indicator when you move white/black/midpoint gliders).

Color

White balance of ACDSee is in a usual format. There is a number of usual presets usually found in cameras too. You can find a white spot with a color picker. Or Temperature and Tint can be set by moving the sliders or entering numbers into boxes.

The performance of the White Balance tool is another issue; you can check it in our table. The Auto preset may give a very funny violet tint to the whole image; other presets also give a visible color aberration. With especially difficult images with no clear white areas I tried entering numbers (that worked well with other converters) but to no satisfactory result (see the table below). However, custom adjustment can give fine results with most photos if not with all of them.    

Some WB presets

As shot

Auto

Sunny

Custom

ACDSee does not fix brightness or contrast in raw images (except with the Levels tool) giving it as an option for converted files only. The same is true for Crop and Rotate functions. While the latter is not critical, the former, I think, is better fixed in a raw file if you take time to work with one at all.

Detail
The Detail group has usual tools: Sharpness (the default settings are amount 20, radius 5, freshhold 20) and Noise reduction (default radius 15, color noise reduction 50).
Noise reduction is not bad; though it can produce artifacts at extreme values (see the image table)

Amount 0 Radius 15	Amount 10 Radius 15	Amount 25 radius 15
Amount 50 radius 15	Amount 10 Radius 25	Amount 10 Radius 80