I tried it out a few years ago (now called the “Classic” version) and recently upgraded to their PowerPack 3.1. Priced at a low $79.95, it includes ACDSee 3.1, FotoCanvas, FotoAngelo, and two plugins - LuraWave and LuraDoc.

ACDSee combines graphics management with graphic conversion and manipulation, which is great for web page design. With digital camera support and an HTML Album generator, you can whip out web page graphics in a snap. Installation is fast, you don’t need to restart your computer, and you can get to work right away.

Starting the program brings up a default “album” of thumbnails of graphics in a certain folder on the right of the screen. You can it to open up a folder from the previous session or to open a specific folder/directory each time you start it. The thumbnails show a small version of the graphic, it’s size (such as 1280x960x24b) and the name of the graphic. Placing the mouse over the graphic will pop up more information about the graphic, such as the previous information, plus its size and the date it was created/updated.

If you click once on the thumbnail, a larger version of it appears in the lower lefthand corner of the screen so that you can make sure it’s the one you wanted to select. This is great, because sometimes the thumbnails are too small if you have a group of graphics that do look similar.

Blur, sharpen, red-eye reduction (always great if you have pets - gets rid of those devil eyes), despeckle, sepia, negative, colorize, emboss and even more options with the plugins. I found the choices in FotoCanvas to be almost as good as Adobe Photoshop and definitely at a much lower price.

I despeckled the photograph, sharpened it and let the AutoLevel do its thing. I then resized it to 640x480. I closed FotoCanvas, went back to ACDSee, clicked Reload and there was the new and improved photograph - my girlfriend never looked better. I could now open more graphics, change them if I wanted, then create wallpaper, a slide show, a contact sheet, an archive file, send them by e-mail and more. I decided to try the HTML Album generator.


Recommended: Yes