Image viewing? I wanted to view some images, select some and copy to my hard disk. What options do I really have? Lets check them one by one.
Adope Photoshop – a professional photo editor costing a few months salary for me. It took some 5 seconds and several clicks to open the photo. The program needs to initialize several things like color tables, suits, engines, menus, tools, plug-ins. This explains the time.
Photo Editor – It comes with Windows (I am not sure). I opened an image by Ctrl + O, and selecting the file, another Ctrl + O to open another file and another… Sea – Good one with most simple and wonderful features like quick previews and minor image enhancements but DOS interface (?)
ACDSee – 1 right click in Explorer + 1 left click (“view with ACDSee” in menu) and 0.2 sec. Space bar to open next image in 0.1 sec and so on. Is the message clear? Just a rhetorical question you see. But ACDSee 3.1 build 921 (latest as on 3rd May 2000, is what I am thoroughly impressed and I will tell you why.
Normal Features:
1) It opens nearly all the existing image file formats.
2) It’s AMAZINGLY FAST. I love this speed. You can verify by clicking on “view file with ACDSee option” as described earlier and BLINKING your eye!
3) It has a browser (image viewer with a browser of its own!) thus enabling file-handling features such as copy, move, delete, rename. Its like Windows Explorer, but there is a preview area where the image gets displayed. It has a thumbnail panel on right side where list of files is displayed with its size, type, date, and time and just as in Explorer you can view the files as small or large icons. But the uniqueness lies is thumbnail viewing where all images supported as displayed as thumbnail. All photos at a glance! This helps in easy and fast selection.
4) Changing file formats (memory hogging bmp to compressed jpg format) etc.
5) Easy zooming with plus and minus keys. I am extremely impressed by ACDSee because of its new unique features. Its like “Ah! Did you know….?”
1) ACDSee has a basic photo enhancer now. So you need not shell out large bucks on Photoshop or Corel Photopaint (unless photography is your profession). It can adjust levels of brightness, contrast, gamma correction, hue, saturation, whitepoint, blackpoint. It can flip and rotate images, crop them, resize them using box, triangle, Mitchell, b-spline filters. There are image filters that helps to blur, sharpen images and despeckle is a marvel in removing all the noise. This amazing wonder called ACDSee also has preliminary effects like converting to negative, sepia (converts to black and white), colorize (adjust hue and saturation). The “emboss” effects are wonderful with adjusting azimuth, weight and elevation levels.
2) The images can be grouped and emailed at a button click (it uses the default email client like Outlook).
3) If a file is copied to a folder where another image file of same name already exists, then it opens a unique dialogue box providing a visual of both the images and options to replace the file or rename the file being copied. This is a totally unique feature, which I fully appreciate.
4) The plug-in html generator creates a html album. Just select all the photos that you want in your album and select this feature. The file is generated in a snap of fingers…. complete with the code using nice table tags. Put the thumbnail image files it creates with the html file on a web host and then the album is available on the INTERNET.
5) A contact sheet with thumbnail images can also be printed using another plug-in called as contact sheet.
6) Try file-properties after selecting an image file (jpg for eg.) and details like size and uncompressed size and compression ratio, width, height are available at a glance. You can feed in notes, description for that file, too. Such a unique feature is also available at a heavy price but you can use it FREE for unlimited period too by connecting to their InTouch Service once in a month. It downloads some advertisements and messages (advertisements and links again!). Well you have to bear this one but the pan with “GREAT UTILITY FOR FREE” far out-weighs the pan with “INTOUCH advertisements”. I bet you cannot live without ACDSee if you are a net buff. Is there a close competitor? Ummm yes another small utility called Picaview – ACDSee’s child but it’s growing bigger now.
Ameet
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