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Selective coloring in ACDSee is SO easy now! Before ACDSee 10 in order to achieve this I had to use masks in ACDSee Photo Editor.

This can be done in both ACDSee 10 & ACDSee Pro 2!

• Open your photo in ACDSee by double clicking on the thumbnail.
• Use the pull down menu on the Palette Icon & choose Edit Mode

A new pane opens on the left

• Click on Selections
• With Freehand Lasso tool selected, draw around the item
• stay fairly close, but it doesn’t have to be exact.
• when you get back to where you started the selection will be made
• Click on Invert, Click on Done if you’re satisfied with your selection

Click on the Color - in the left pane & this is when the magic happens!

• Move the Saturation slider to the left to desaturate the background

To make up for the area around the image, on the top

• Move the slider for the Feathering to the right.
• Decide what looks the most natural.
• Click on Done

This will bring you back to the Main Menu of the Edit Panel

• Click on Finished Editing at the bottom
• And your photo is finished!

I’ve written a lot of tutorials, so I always appreciate those made by others. JD generously posted a link to his tutorial on Creating Vignettes with ACDSee. He  posts under the username ‘TherealJD’ in the ACDSee Product Forums.

On his blog, CadGFX, JD says:

Acdsee is an excellent image manager. And for quick photo editing, it’s an excellent tool. Pro 2 has added a selection tool to apply various effects to only selected portions of an image. I will be using this new feature to create some custom vignettes for an image.

In his tutorial, Better Vignettes with ACDSee Pro 2, step by step instructions are provided to create this custom vignette (the tutorial will also work in ACDSee 10).

If you’re not familiar with ACDSee Pro 2 or ACDSee 10, here are instructions for opening the editor.

And here’s a screenshot of the features that JD used:

If you’ve created tutorials using ACDSee products or are interested in writing some, please let me know at cbensen@acdsee.com  The blog is a great way to share them.

Other tutorials that you may be interested in

Before & after photo

Shadows and Highlights Tool in ACDSee Pro 2

ACDSee rescues lost photos

Here’s a quick tutorial for opening the Advanced Editing mode.

You’ll find it in both ACDSee 10 & ACDSee Pro 2.

Under the palette icon’s pull down menu, choose Edit Mode

This opens a new pane on the left with the icons described. And now you have access to the Selections tool.

I have the BEST job! I get to introduce you to all the great people at ACDSee.

Last week I started dabbling with adding audio to blog posts. What do you think?

Click on the photo for a larger view.

Listening & gathering information is a large part of my role as Community Manager for ACDSee. Reading Jason Dunn’s post this morning made me smile. I know that we’re listening but to hear it so passionately expressed by someone truly exemplifies ACDSee’s commitment to building better products!

Yesterday I joined a phone call with one of our long time users, Jason Dunn. He has incredible insight into our products & here are his thoughts on the call:

…they let me open up my brain and dump all the ideas, fixes, improvements, and concepts I had for how I thought ACDSee could be made even better.

I feel very passionate about computer hardware and software that I use, and am always looking for opportunities to improve it. That’s partially out of a desire to have a better tool for my own needs, but it’s also because when I pick a product I tend to stick with it - I have a very strong sense of loyalty, like a sports fan to his home team, so I want to see the product I’ve picked “win” in the market.

Jason, we really appreciate your enthusiasm & your feedback is invaluable!

The folks at ACDSee are great - they listened intently, engaged me on many levels to drill down into my ideas, and were genuinely enthused to listen to me talk about how I’d like to see the product improved. The next version won’t have everything I asked for of course, but I bet I’ll see quite a few of the little things addressed.

Improving the product for what the customer’s want is a total win-win situation.

Any company that’s willing to engage deeply with their customers is a winner in my books - more companies should do it, but most are afraid of their customers and try to keep them at arm’s length.

ACDSee is committed to that effort! I’m not able to post a comment on your blog, so I’ll say it here - thank you, Jason, for your considerable thought in regard to improving ACDSee products. Everyone will benefit!

If you have ideas for improving ACDSee products please feel free to share them. You can email me at cbensen@acdsee.com