Any ACDSee Pro 6 User's on this Forum?

[Stardog2]

Just checking to see how many of us there are! I switched to it from Lightroom 3.6 about 4 months ago when I decided my workflow wasn't really working for me anymore. So far, I'm pleased, however the amount of training material for this rich and complex software is pretty scanty.

[shreds]

Not sure how it has changed, but I had a much earlier version and to be honest wasn't that enamoured. Well before Lightroom predominated. Perhaps it has improved? I have to say I am a Lightroom fan nowadays, though.

What was it that you didn't like in your LR workflow?

[Stardog2]

No I didn't like ACDSee Pro 1 or 2 much either and decided to go with Lr. I've used Lr ever since that first version 1 beta. I became disenchanted with Lr 3 when I realized that I always seemed to be waiting for it to complete some action, that it was too easy to "orphan" a thumbnail image, that I had a consistent look and feel to my photos that didn't really reflect me. I felt Lr 3 was having an effect on how I perceived my photography, and how I was interacting with it. I began to feel that other people were just as influenced in their photography as well. We are all using the same tools and the rigid Lightroom workflow pretty much forced us to use it the same way. So I never got around to upgrading to Lr 4, and really, I just sort of slowed down what I was doing in photography.

Now this may be true of all tools, that they influence how we work, how we judge what is possible and what is not possible, or even desirable, but Lightroom has somehow become a standard. A LOT of people use it, and I was concerned that I was becoming one of the crowd, and I wanted a change. I wanted to see if my photography would be different somehow, away from the Lightroom way of doing things.

I started casting about looking for other workflow tools. (And not just Workflow tools either, but editors as well) I used the ACDSee Pro 6 30 day free trial, I liked it quite a bit, the controls are competent, complete, the image quality is high, and the flow of work is radically different from Lightroom. (well, I don't really like the sharpening in ACDSee) BUT, I chickened out and continued to use Adobe. About 6 months later, Adobe made their 'cloud' announcement and I began to feel that Adobe and I just weren't interested in the same things, photographically, any more.

So I got a licensed copy of ACDSee Pro 6, and I do feel it has affected how I work and how I see and produce photos. I'm much more inclined towards B&W conversions than I used to be, more interested in the shadows than I used to be. The margins I guess you could say.

If it turns out that all I've done is trade in one sort of photographic 'good luck' totem for another, I'm OK with that. It has reawakened fires in me that were fading.

Maybe our photographic work flow is a lot like our insurance policies. Maybe we need to review them every so often to make sure they remain in alignment with our goals! So now I use ACDSee Pro 6, Paint Shop Pro X5, and the just released Open Source version of Lightzone (excellent sharpening tools). Except for some dng files, I am Adobe free. Maybe in a few years, I'll move on to CaptureOne or something else. I do know I don't want to rely too heavily on a database anymore, that changeover from Lr to ACDSee Pro 6 was painful. I don't want to be locked into anything too permanently.