Software Reviews

Every year member magazines from the Technical Image Press Association (TIPA) gather to consider and vote on the top products of the year in 40 categories, ranging from cameras to tripods to software and printers. This year’s selections represent technological sophistication along with features and functionality that make them leaders in their respective categories.

Looking for photo gifts that are a little different for the photographers in your life? Start here with our list of the 7 greatest new and/or unique photo gifts in the universe. If you are into digital photography or cameras of any sort yourself, odds are you’ll find something on this list of photo gifts that you’ll want to call your own. We did.

With each successive release of ACDSee Pro, the photo management suite adds ever-more-powerful features. In this review I hope to help you decide whether or not its features match up with your own workflow, meet your needs, or even improve on existing features to enhance your photographic creations.

In my own workflow, the new version, ACDSee Pro 5, smoothed over a few rough edges in the editing process and made my management chores a bit less time-consuming. The release is not so groundbreaking that it might make you consider abandoning Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture altogether, but there are some pro-level additions that are definitely worth considering. The program never crashed and operated quickly for just about any task on a standard desktop PC. Note I said PC—there is no Mac version available or considered at this point.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 caters to the entry-level crowd, but is imbued with several professional-level tools. Even when a feature is not really intended for serious photographers, there is a goldmine of functionality that could save countless hours. The app is celebrating 10 years on the market. Adobe has slowly revised the workflow, and it’s getting much better.

In this version, you’ll first see a start-up screen with two buttons, one for organizing photos and one for editing. It makes more sense to click the button to organize images first, especially if you’re not even sure which images need editing.

When you do, one of the first prompts you’ll see asks how you normally import photos. That’s handy, because even the most experienced pro has to get photos off the camera somehow. You might typically load images onto a network drive, or prefer loading directly off the camera. (An option to scan images seems woefully dated these days.) Whatever option you choose, you can always go back and select a different import default. For now, it just means, when you start Elements 10, the app will automatically look for that specific source.

Adobe just released a new version of Photoshop Elements, its popular image editor for photo enthusiasts and advanced amateur photographers. Adobe has added six new features and updated a couple more to Photoshop Elements 2021.

Lightroom has been always available as retail standalone software that you buy, install, update, and pay to upgrade when applicable. Well, that has changed, in part, thanks to the Adobe Creative Cloud, which unleashed a torrent of cloud-integrated apps, among them Lightroom CC.

Adobe’s Photoshop Elements favors the majority of the photo community, those who often get involved with the craft as they begin the family portion of their lives.