CyberLink PhotoDirector

As usual at Cyberlink software are provided in different editions. I will deal with the Ultra Edition I own. Basically it feels pretty close to Adobe Lightroom in the interface though it is still a little bit under Lightroom for features and capability. But does anyone really need Lightroom especially when they gone the monthly subscription way ?

All the features are there to develop your RAW photos and manage them. You can deal with exposition and colours in a global or reginal fashion.

You have many tools to modify the picture such as make panoramas, add watermarks, make HDR from bracketed pictures or many tools for enhancing a person's look, content-aware removing and more.

In the 7th version you can also deal with layers. This is not my favourite feature. You can do basic stupid things such as adding text to you image but well used it might become more powerful.

In the Adobe Products these to parts would be done more likely with Photoshop which to me makes sense because PhotoDirector complexifies the file management for it needs to make a raster image from the modification it makes. Not very handy if you ask me.

But for most of it I adapt my work methods to something inspired by Adobe products in the limits of what I can do. Basically I develop my pictures and should I need it I finish the work on GIMP when I'm satisfied.

It does not have (at the moment) hyped features such as Dehaze but you can achieve better looking results manually if you know how. The benefit from Adobe being allowing to do this in no time and no effort.

I am personnally rather satisfied by this software eventhough there is still room for improvement.

Awfully slow to install and then a popup shows up to require that you register for a free account in order to test the app at all. No thanks.