Paid + Free Alternatives to ACDSee

If you are interested in photo editing, you may use ACDSee as software for processing and organizing images. This program especially comes in handy when it comes to editing RAW pictures fast and with no quality loss. The program opens different possibilities in photo management, such as rating, sorting by categories and geotagging. The newest versions of ACDSee incorporate modern Digital Asset Management tools like Face Detection & Facial Recognition.

Sometimes you may need something new for editing, something with more powerful tools kit, simpler interface or some advanced features like AI Photo Editing which makes the process semi-automatic. Catch a list of ACDSee alternatives, we collect 5 programs with different useful possibilities.

1. Luminar 4 (7 days full free)

Luminar 4 is a photo-editing and management program with Artificial Intelligence technology. The most powerful Luminar feature is the automation of the editing process. The program allows you to choose from several different editing modes which will change your picture in a way you want. For example: with AI Sky Replacement you will make the sky on your photographs perfectly beautiful. The feature makes possible to align the color, tone, and texture of the sky. You can emphasize clouds shape, change contrast, re-color and re-light the rest of the image.

Most popular features:

• Sky replacement
• AI Skin Enhancer & Portrait Enhancer
• Sunrays tool
• AI Structure
• Smart contrast
• Objects eraser
• Dehaze a photo tool
• Noise remover

AI Skin and Portrait Enhancer will make human skin flawless. This tool turns a painstaking portrait retouching into a simple 3-clicks operation. AI Skin and Portrait Enhancer remove all the wrinkles, pimples, spots, align skin tone and texture, makes it soft and smooth without any long manipulations with brushes and masks. 

2. Adobe Lightroom

Try to find a photographer who doesn’t know Adobe Lightroom. You won’t be able to do it. 

Adobe Lightroom is one of the most popular image editor and organizer. Supports a lot of image formats: JPEG, PNG, RAW, TIFF and more more. In Lightroom, you can not work on layers but can set every possible image options like shadows, lights, contrast, exposure, and temperature. In the library you will find a lot of Filters which call Presets, you can also create your own preset by saving set customs. The last option will come in handy when you need to edit pictures in a certain style from one shooting. 

You will be surprised by the simplicity of Lightroom’s interface. The program is intuitive and clear. Functional includes Camera and lens-based corrections. Brush and gradient adjustments with color and luminance masking. Face detection and tagging for managing.

3. Corel’s PaintShop Pro 2021

Corel’s Painting interface is similar to Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. With this program, you can edit pictures in Automatic and Manual mode. It supports RAW format editing and a tool kit includes realistic art media brushes. With the Warp Brush, you can correct lens distortions, the program has red-eye and eraser tools for making other adjustments on the canvas. Of all the standard tools, the crop is particularly impressive. It's essentially a simple tool but has various thoughtful additions that help make this everyday task easier and more effective.

4. DxO Optics Pro 9

DxO PhotoLab 3’s new HSL Tool is an exciting and superbly visual way to manage color that can help you produce more creative and natural-looking images. The new DxO ColorWheel is a fantastic new color adjustment tool that you can use to select color ranges from eight separate channels, including orange and purple. The DxO ColorWheel can fine-tune color values, select replacement colors, and it can even adjust transitions and tints for truly distinctive effects.

Saturation and Luminance Sliders now work independently of each other, making them perfect tools for converting color to black and white without the use of complex masks. The Repair mode works as a retouching brush that samples pixels from one part of an image for you to use in an area you want to reconstruct or repair. It’s the perfect way to cover up unwanted objects and it adjusts pixels to match the color and lightness levels of the area you’re repairing.

5. Aurora HDR

There are several ways of editing photos in Aurora HDR 2021. The first one comes down to letting the app do all the work. Simply select desired brackets and let the Quantum HDR Engine merge the images and do its magic. At the same time, the new AI-powered tone-mapping algorithms will give your photo some love as well.

Aurora HDR does a great job as far as automatic editing goes. I can already see lots of improvements compared to processing that was done in the last year’s version of Aurora HDR, which was already pretty good. So, if you’re in a mood for quick editing, exporting the HDR photo there and there should still leave you with a great result.

Alternatively, you can pull-up the Looks (Presets) palette for a quick way of color-grading a photo to different styles. For more control and in-depth manual processing, you’ll want to look at Aurora’s Filter’s workspace.