Check out ACDSeeTV on YouTube. There you’ll find the Pro 3 Series with Cam Carmichael and our favorite videos from other ACDSee users. Plus, coming soon, new videos from Tarjin Rahman on ACDSee for MAC and much more.
Oh and don’t forget to subscribe to get the latest as it happens.
Black and white images have always had a power to them, with the absence of color able to convey a story of its own. With digital, effectively removing an image’s color without washing it out and diluting the influence and authenticity is important. ACDSee Pro 2.5 offers two easy ways to achieve a powerful look.
Shooting in a studio has its advantages, and one of the biggest ones is that you have control of lighting—you set the intensity, the color, the shadows, and you stay in command throughout the shoot. Basically, you can make the light adapt to whatever scene you wish to illuminate, in whatever manner you’d like. When you’re outside of a controlled environment, however, you are at the mercy of the “ambient” lighting conditions and you must adapt to them.
Occasionally you may need to get photos processed in a big hurry. Here at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, I have several clients who need photos less than 20 minutes after a fencing match has concluded in order to optimize their editorial image sales – a tall order, especially given that it can take almost ten minutes alone to get to my office in the Olympic fencing hall.
Working as a photographer at the Olympic Games is all-consuming. Finding time to do anything other than take photos, get from one place to another, and get images processed and delivered to those waiting for takes precedence over sleep, eating, or other trivial needs.
I was fortunate to be given a media credential for the Opening Ceremonies (in addition to my regular credential), which was an astounding event; I’ll have more on shooting an event like this in a later blog. Photos from them along with images of fencing championships from each day will be posted on FencingPhotos.com (my Web site, which is the official photo site of the International Fencing Federation); I already have a few images online, including a couple from the opening ceremonies.
I’ve been traveling lately across the Western U.S., mostly in Nevada and California. Due to recent wildfires, there’s a tremendous amount of smoke and haze in the air that’s blocking some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. Some useful ACDSee tools, along with a few photography tips, can help “cut” the haze so that you can still get good photos–and maybe even use the haze to your advantage.
ACDSee Pro 2 & ACDSee 10 can be used to add a white or black border to a photo. If you’d like to get creative & nest the borders, that is possible too. This tutorial shows how to change the color of the border also.
Special thanks to JD for explaining how to do this! I just added the steps here.
This would be much easier in ACDSee Photo Editor. (If you’d like to a tutorial for that, let me know).
1. Click on the thumbnail of the photo that you’d like to put a frame around.
2. Under the Palette icon, Choose Edit Mode
3. Click on Selections on left & the window below opens.
4. Click on Marquee. Make the inside selection. Try to keep it even all around.
5. If you need to do it again, click on Clear & redo it. When satisfied, click on Invert.
6. Click on Done (on bottom left).
7. Click on Exposure.
8a. To make a black border, click on the top right & drag it down the right side to bottom.
8b. To make a white or colored border:
Click on the top right of the line & drag it to the left along the top as shown.
9. Click on Done.
10. On left side, choose Color
11. Under the RGB tab, move the sliders to adjust the color of the border.
12. Click on Done.
Now repeat from Step 3 on to create a black border.
(You can add as many borders as you’d like, just work towards outside.)
When you get to Step 8 use 8a.
Click Done. Click on Finished.
Close window on top right & Save as new file to protect original.
If you use this tutorial, please link to your creative work! I’d love to see it.
As a parent who loves taking pictures and videos of my kid at soccer or hockey games, now that digital cameras are able to produce better quality videos, I found ACDSee has made it more fun to record a game and post to a video hosting site for my parents to enjoy overseas.
One of the challenges I faced with out ACDSee was that although it was very easy to create a single video with all my many shots from a game, I had a really hard time deciding which ones to keep and which ones made it to the final cut.
Sure, you can use the tools your Operating system provides for creating videos, but I was already very comfortable and used to working with ACDSee.
This is my very first post to a blog, so bare with me and I hope it helps you with your own workflow to make and manage your own videos.
If you installed ACDSee Pro 2 with the standard default settings, you will already have ACDSee associated with multimedia files and whenever you select a multimedia file your preview pane in the ACDSee’s browser will display your video ready for playback.
I found this takes away from performance for what I needed to do, so I disabled the preview and added more details to my file list pane.
Then I opted for creating an entirely new workspace that allowed me to only see what I wanted my layout to display for dealing with videos. You are able to save as many layouts as you want with ACDSee and go back to the original layout using the workspace feature from the View menu.
Once you create the workspace, you can select what details are shown in the file list pane. I chose Filename, Size, modified date and length as the main items to keep in my file list pane as these are important to the final file size on my video. Some sites allow files more than 10 minutes in length and 100 MB In size, but others limit your choices.
That is where the length and size columns really came handy.
If you have QuickTime Pro, it is really easy to then decide what videos to piece together as you are able to drag and drop from ACDSee to QuickTime Pro and save these files as a single .mov file or export it to a different video format ready to upload to a video hosting site.
Here you can see the duration of the video and decide how long you want the video to be. If you want to add another video, all you have to do is drag and drop from the ACDSee file list pane to the last video in your sequence.
If you don’t have QuickTime, no need to worry. ACDSee also comes with the tools you need to get your videos ready for the web.
you can read more about the Create Video or VCD feature on the ACDSee help file, but here are a couple of steps to get you started:
From here you select the Video option.
You are now ready to prepare your camera made videos of your kids
favourite activities using ACDSee Pro 2.
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!
A new pane opens on the left
Click on the Color - in the left pane & this is when the magic happens!
To make up for the area around the image, on the top
This will bring you back to the Main Menu of the Edit Panel
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
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