February 18- February 25 2001

ACDSee 3.1 PowerPack by Alessandro Cancian Ever look at a picture and find yourself utterly unable to remember where it was taken, or the name of the people portrayed? Me too, especially with old albums stashed away in the basement. Although todays technology has eliminated dust and paper yellowing, the situation has not changed at all. Collecting photos onto the hard drive of our computer is not a problem; the trouble starts when one wants to manipulate and manage these photo digital albums. In order to address these troubles, ACD Systems International Inc., a Victoria- (B.C.) based company, proposes ACDSee 3.1 PowerPack. This package, available for PCs, is composed by 3 programs. ACDSee is a picture viewer, graphic converter and image-sharing tool. Easy to use, the database is equipped with a user-friendly interface, providing for fast browsing of the various directories of your HD. The program can display several graphic formats (including QuickTime videos) or import images from external devices, such as scanners and digital cameras. After selecting an image, comments and keywords can be associated with it, useful for retrieving the image during a future search in the database. Fast enough, ACDSee also offers other interesting features like the possibility to send images via e-mail, create HTML tables, convert graphic formats, compress archives and more, with disarming ease. Speed suffers somewhat when working with directories containing high numbers of graphic and video files. Another component of Powerpack is FotoCanvas, a photo-editing tool. Perfect for newcomers and amateurs, this software sports a customisable interface, a little cumbersome from the graphic standpoint but surely functional. Thanks to FotoCanvas you can improve your photos with tools like red-eye reduction, free-angle rotate, crop and sharpen and blur image filters, apply special effects filters like sepia and emboss and much more. Everything is just a click away and in case you dont like the results, you have enough undo to go back. The last Powerpack tool is FotoAngelo, a piece of software allowing the creation of slide shows and screensavers using the pictures stored on the HD. It is also possible to insert text and add music and sound effects to specific digital images and share your slide shows and screensaver creations as executable files that run independent of FotoAngelo. The three pieces of software are perfectly integrated in ACDSee 3.1 Powerpack and work very smoothly together. Although the quality of this product is excellent, the $79.95 (US) price looks rather excessive, especially considering that today, in most cases, with the purchase of a scanner or a digital camera one gets photo editing software bundled with it. Aside from that, the software is a must if you want to manage your digital photo albums. Otherwise you will continue to ask yourself whos the person with you in the photo. For further information please visit www.acdsystems.com

 

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