The market for pro and prosumer photo workflow apps seems pretty tied up by Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom, Apple's Aperture, and ACDSee Pro. Despite that, CyberLink, the Taiwan-based maker of our Editors' Choice consumer video-editng app, PowerDirector, thinks there's still some opportunity in the space, and has today launched a new $99 photo app, PhotoDirector.
PhotoDirector has already been out in the wild in beta form, and in return for the valuable feedback users provided so that Cyberlink could improve the released product, the beta testers will get a free copy.
PC Magazine was briefed under NDA last week by CyberLink's senior vice president of global marketing, Richard Carriere, and senior marketing manager Tim Estes. "We decided we were missing a product on the photography side that's the equivalent of PowerDirector's video editing," Carriere said. "The idea was to bring Cyberlink's knowledge of how to develop good workflow, a good user interface, and powerful functionality."
Carriere also alluded to the entrenched competition and its higher price point: "Because we are not well established in the market, we are very aggressive in the pricing."
Compared with PhotoDirector's $99 price tag, Adobe's Lightroom sells for $299, though Apple recently dropped the price of Aperture to $79.99 when purchased through the Mac App Store. But of course, you'll need an expensive Mac or MacBook to run that. The CyberLink software is PC only.
And while PhotoDirector does include most of the basic tasks you find in Lightroom or Aperture, it still has quite a bit of catching up to do. PhotoDirector supports popular camera raw file formats natively, including those from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, and more. And indeed, adjustment brushes, multiple undo history, noise reduction, smart collections, and side-by-side views did mirror capabilities found in the competition from Adobe, Apple, and ACD.
PhotoDirector, however, lacks several of the sophisticated tools found in those more veteran apps. You don't get Lightroom's lens-specific corrections, which rectify things like the exact chromatic aberration and geometric distortion introduced by specific lens models. PhotoDirector also lacks Aperture's face recognition, which, though it sounds like a consumer feature, can be of great value to a portrait or wedding photographer wanting to show a client all photos of a particular person. And tone curve manipulation, found in any of the competition, wasn't available, though histogram manipulation was.
But the CyberLink execs reassured me that the new photo workflow software would be updated in 6 to 8 months with a second version, for which existing owners would not be charged. And as with PowerDirector's online DirectorZone user exchange for effects and templates, PhotoDirector users will have access to an online section for sharing adjustment presets.
In a quick trial run with PhotoDirector with a set of DSLR raw photos, the import, quick corrections, tagging, and export options got the job done simply, effectively, and quickly. Built-in support for Flickr and Facebook uploading eased the sharing process at the end of the workflow.
For more information or to buy PhotoDirector online, head to www.cyberlink.com.
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