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$129.99
The amateur video landscape has advanced considerably in the last few years, and software like CyberLink's PowerDirector video editing software bridges the gap between professional editing and consumer ease-of-use. It has often led pro products with support for new formats and new technologies such as 360-degree video. It's loaded with tools that help you put together a compelling digital movie, complete with transitions, effects, and titles. Best of all: It's fast. PowerDirector is the prosumer video editing software to beat.
CyberLink PowerDirector 16 Ultra (DVD) allows the enthusiast editor to create truly artistic and stylish videos. PowerDirector is a consumer-level editing system but from beginning to end it's loaded with pro-level features.
What's New?
For longtime PowerDirector users, here's a rundown of new feature highlights in version 17, reviewed here. I'll discuss and evaluate each in the appropriate sections below.
As a refresher, the previous version (16) added a raft of 360-degree capabilities, including stabilization, motion tracking, titles, transitions, and View Designer for cool effects like Little Planet. It also added color tools, including color matching, LUTs (lookup tables) filters, split toning, and HDR effects. Animated picture-in-picture templates called Video Collages and automatic audio ducking to lower background sound levels also made their debut in the previous version.
Pricing and Installation
PowerDirector runs on Windows 7 through Windows 10, with 64-bit versions recommended. You can try out the software with a 30-day downloadable trial version that adds brand watermarks and doesn't support 4K. Two editions of the standalone video editor are available, the $99.99 Ultra and the $129.99 Ultimate, reviewed here. (Note that those prices are often discounted.) Another option is to bundle it with CyberLink's ColorDirector, AudioDirector, and PhotoDirector in the Director Suite bundle, which lists for $299.99.
The higher-end options add loads of third-party special effects from the likes of BorixFX, NewBlue, and proDAD. To see exactly which is in each edition, go to CyberLink's comparison page. The pricing is competitive with that of Premiere Elements ($99.99), Corel VideoStudio ($99.99), and our Mac Editors' Choice for video editing, Apple Final Cut Pro ($299.99). You can also get the complete PowerDirector suite for a subscription at $49.99 for three months or $99.99 per year.
Installing the program takes up nearly a gigabyte of your hard drive, so be sure to use a machine with room to spare. I tested the Ultimate edition on my Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10.
Interface
The program's user interface is about as clear and simple as a program with such a vast number of options can be, but it can still get overwhelming when you're deep in the weeds of fine-tuning video or audio effects. It's not as unintimidating as Adobe Premiere Elements, however. You start off in a Welcome screen offering big button options of Timeline Mode, Storyboard Mode, and Slideshow Creator. Two choices below those include Auto Mode and 360 Editor—all these modes are self-explanatory.
If you don't need or want all these choices every time you start the program, a simple Always Enter Timeline Mode checkbox is for you. On this welcome screen, you can also choose your video project's aspect ratio—16:9, 4:3, and a 9:16 tall mode, since some people never seem to learn to hold their phones sideways for videos.
The PowerDirector editing interface maintains the traditional source and preview split panels on the top, with your track timeline along the whole width of the bottom of the screen. The storyboard view is more than just clip thumbnails. You can drag transitions between clips, apply effects, and add audio clips without switching to timeline view. Download tema bb 8520 zipcode. I also like the buttons at the top for showing just video, just photos, or just audio in the source panel. New for Version 17 are buttons that link to video tutorials that pop up in the upper-right corner based on your current activity.
Four mode choices line up at the top: Capture, Edit, Produce, and Create Disc. The timeline is easy to customize and navigate, with a button for adding tracks. You're allowed up to 100 tracks. Vegas Movie Studio limits you to 20 tracks, which is already probably more than most people need, though not enough for high-end projects.
The Edit mode is where you spend most of your time, and you can drag media directly onto its source panel or even onto the timeline. You can tag media and each project retains its own set of content, but you don't get bins, which bring together all the assets for your project, including transitions and effects, as you do with the pro-level products and Pinnacle Studio. You can, however, pack project assets into a folder, and use the new Nested Project capability, discussed below.
By default, you get three pairs of video and audio tracks with Cyberlink, as well as effects, title, voice, and music tracks. You can lock, disable/enable view, or rename tracks from the left track-info area, and you can even use drag and drop to move them up and down on the timeline. Zooming the timeline in and out is also a snap, either with Ctrl-Mouse wheel or a slider control.
Basic Video Editing
As with most nonlinear video editing software, PowerDirector lets you join and trim clips on the timeline. CyberLink has changed the default timeline behavior a bit with this release: Instead of a clip firmly snapping next to an existing clip on the timeline, when you drag one onto the timeline, you're likely to overlap with the existing clip to the left. You get a tooltip with five options: Overwrite, Insert, Insert and Move All Clips, Crossfade, and Replace. If you use the Insert button that appears below the source panel when you select a clip, you can get your clip lined up without any fuss.
The Trim tool (opened with a scissors icon) allows precise control (down to the individual frame) with two sliders, and the multi-trim tool lets you mark several In and Out points on your clip—a useful tool for cutting out the chaff. Some professionally trained video editors I know lament, however, that you can't do a rough trim on a clip before dragging it down into PowerDirector's project timeline, as you can in Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro.
The new Precut tool lets you work on source clips before you add them to the timeline. This is how pro editors work, so it's good to see CyberLink add the capability. In previous versions, you couldn't do trimming until after you dropped a clip onto the timeline, which left professionally trained editors scratching their heads. You can either do a simple in-and-out trim to create a single trimmed clip, or use PowerDirector's wonderful Multi-Trim tool to create multiple Precut clips.
You use PowerDirector's unique and intuitive selection cursor to split video and delete sections. Fix/Enhance options also include video denoise, audio denoise, and enhancements to punch up color and sharpness. PowerDirector also makes it easy to fix lighting and color. You can independently adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, and white balance.
The included Color Match option is important for movies shot at different angles with different equipment and lighting. It appears when you have two clips selected. You scrub to the frame in each that you want to match. It did a spotty job in my tests with scenery and décor, sometimes not applying a darker look when my source clip was darker than my target. The tool could benefit from face detection, as it didn't match skin tones between clips very well. Color matching is apparently hard to do; when Final Cut Pro X first introduced the feature, it was similarly deficient, later to be greatly improved.
The support for LUTs, or lookup tables, can give your movie a uniform look by applying a color mood like those you see in the cinema—for example, the cool blue look of The Revenant. PowerDirector uses the alternate acronym in its interface—CLUT, for color lookup table. The program supports a healthy number of file formats, including 3DL, CSP, CUBE, M3D, MGA, RV3DLUT, and VF. Unfortunately, CyberLink doesn't give you much support in actually locating LUTs—you're pretty much on your own. I was successfully able to test LUT support using Kodak film-style and day-for-night LUTs from Adobe Premiere Pro.
Assisted Movie Making
One of the best things to come to home video editors in recent years was pioneered by Apple with the Trailers feature of the Mac's included iMovie app. Adobe recently added a similar tool, Premiere Elements' Video Story feature. With either of these, you fill templates in with video and photo content that meets the needs of a spot in the production, such as Group shot, close-up, or Action shot. These are elaborated with transitions and background music that match your chosen theme. PowerDirector has a similar tool, Express Project, which you can enter directly from the program startup panel.
Express Project joins another similar tool, the Magic Movie Wizard, which takes you through five steps: importing source content, adjusting that content, previewing, and producing. You can download nearly 50 Express Projects from DirectorZone.com, Cyberlink's Web resource site. Unlike the similariMovie tool, PowerDirector requires you to add your own background music—there are no canned scores in the wizard or for Express Projects.
An Express Project only requires two steps: Dragging an Opening, Middle, and Ending onto the timeline, and filling the resulting clip tracks with your media. It's nowhere near as intuitive or clear as Apple iTunes' Trailers feature or Adobe Premiere Elements' Video Story feature. But it does offer guidance in crafting a digital movie, it is actually more customizable, and the results look pretty cool.
Video Collages
You access the Video Collage Designer from the Plug-ins menu item. This opens a new window that shows templates with your clips on the side. You simply drag and drop the latter into the former, and you get a nifty animated picture in picture. PowerDirector already had one of the strongest picture-in-picture tools around, but this is an easier way to get a pleasing result.
A new way to get to the Video Collage Designer is via the Multicam Designer, which now offers collages and an output for its multi-angle clip syncing. Unfortunately, when I synced two clips, the extra portion of the clip was still transferred to the collage. The root of this problem is that you can't trim in the Multicam Designer.
Working With 360-Degree Footage
When you add a 360-degree clip to your project, PowerDirector pops up a dialog box asking whether you want your output to be 360 or 2D. If you choose the latter, the View Designer window opens, which let you choose the resulting movie's point of view. You can move the angle around in this window's preview in three axes (x, y, and z) with the mouse pointer.
Clicking on up, down, left, and right, arrows alters your point of view, and clicking the center of the arrow control snaps the view to straight on. You can zoom the view, and very usefully, use keyframes to automatically switch from one viewpoint to another. That last option can take advantage of the Ease In option, which makes the motion more naturally accelerate and decelerate, rather than happening mechanically.
A very cool effect, which I first saw on Vimeo, is produced by the Little Planet dropdown in the View Designer. This takes 360-degree content and realigns it so that the ground is shaped like a ball that any people in the video are walking around. Drag on the image downward and you can create the opposite type of world, in which the inhabitants are on the inside of a sphere. A cool option is to use keyframes to rotate the world smoothly.
Stabilization and, remarkably, motion tracking can also be applied to your 360-degree videos. CyberLink has really pushed the envelope with these first-mover features. When I tested 360 stabilization in the last version, I could not get good stabilization results in footage from my Samsung Gear 360, but when I tried sample shaky footage from CyberLink's Steven Lien, the feature worked well. With version 17, the company has added a new Enhanced VR Stabilizer that gives you more controls to adjust the stabilization effect.
Motion tracking works about the same as it does in 2D footage, except the selection box changes shape to reflect its position in 3D space. It's a simple three-step process: You box the object you want to track, run the tracker, and then attach text or graphics to follow it. Lo and behold: It works better than any motion tracking I've tested to date. The tracker displayed a circle centering on and a box around the colleague's head I was tracking, and it locked on perfectly. In the past these tools have tended to lose the tracked object, being distracted by background objects. It even kept up with the trackee when he walked behind a glass door. That's impressive!
For projects that you intend to output in 360-degree format, you can still use the basic trimming, splitting, and joining editing tools, but there are a bunch of PowerDirector features you cannot use: Magic Movie, video cropping (think about it), and content-aware editing. You also cannot successfully mix non-360 content into a 360 project.
Adding titles and transitions is still possible, as is making color corrections, and time speedups and slowdowns. The program offers ten 360-degree title options, including some with fly-in animations. You can also change up the fonts with over 100 choices and apply effects like stroke and drop shadow. These 360 titles stay in place as the viewer moves around, rather than just statically remaining over the image. But you can also move them around, change transparency, and scale, all using keyframes—pretty cool.
Once you've edited the content to taste, you output to H.264 AVC .MP4 format, and now to H.265 HEVC as well. Alternatively, you can upload directly to Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo. The exporter lets you choose a privacy level and resolution, including 4K as an option.
Action Camera Tools
PowerDirector can of course import and edit footage from GoPro cameras, as well as from other action cameras from the likes of Sony, Kodak, and Ion. But the dedicated Action Camera Center under the Tools menu item appears when you select a clip. This offers effects like camera-profile-based corrections for fisheye distortion, vignette, camera shake, and color. It also includes effects favored by action cam users, such as freeze-frame and time-shifts like slowdowns, speedups, and replays.
The fisheye fix has an advantage over GoPro's own video editor in that it cuts off less of the edge of the screen, and in my test shot it distorted faces less than the GoPro software. Stabilization isn't an option in the stock GoPro software, and CyberLink offers enhanced stabilization and the ability to fix camera rotation for a smoother look. The enhanced stabilization (which takes much longer) did a nice job of smoothing out bumpy shots, but I still occasionally saw some warping—a common artifact of stabilization technology.
The Effect tab of Action Camera Center is where you find the highly in-demand Replay, Speed, and Freeze-Frame tools. The first offers buttons for replay and reverse, and speed effects. You choose how long a piece of the clip the effect should be applied to, and from check boxes you can choose Ease In and Ease Out options. The tool lets you easily create fun effects that are prized by skateboarders, surfers, and other fun lovers.
Another tangentially action-cam related capability is the ability to import and edit clips shot at a high frame rate, such as 120fps and 240fps. I imported a sample of the latter from an iPhone 6, and when I dragged it into my timeline, I got a warning box telling me the frame rate differed from that of my project, but Settings only offered a maximum of 60fps for a project. A CyberLink contact informed me that the limit only applied to the timeline view, and assured me that 240fps content is preserved at output time. Adding a slo-mo effect to my test clip turned a hand clap into a terrifying bass thump.
PowerDirector has a Stop Motion effect in the Action Camera Center, but it's not like Corel VideoStudio's real stop-motion tool, which lets you create your own Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In PowerDirector, the tool simply freezes the action for a specified amount of time on selected frames.
Motion Tracking
Motion tracking lets an object, text, or effect follow around something moving in your video. You pick the Motion Tracker choice from the same Tools menu as the Action Camera, after selecting a clip in the timeline. The tool makes tracking an object and adding a title, effect, or even another media clip a simple three-step process. You start by positioning a target box on the object you want tracked, then press the Track button, which runs through the video while following your boxed object. And then you choose what you want to follow the tracked object.
As mentioned above, the 360-degree tracker worked extremely well, but the 2D tracker still lost track of my subject's face when he turned around, a common limitation in such tools. I fixed this pretty easily by stopping the tracking, realigning the box, and starting tracking again. It's easier to get a track correct than in Corel VideoStudio. Adobe Premiere Elements' motion tracking tool also lost track of a skateboarder in my test footage when he passed behind a pole.
For attaching text to motion-tracked objects in PowerDirector, you can easily attach a mosaic, spotlight, or blur effect, and you get a good choice of many fonts, colors, and sizes. You can even rotate the text with a handle. One thing I'd like to be able to add, however, is a speech bubble, something offered by Adobe and Corel.
Content-Aware and Multicam Editing
PowerDirector can analyze your clip for people, zooming, panning, speech, motion, and shaky video. This enables you to select or reject areas of interest or boringness. Premiere Elements has a tool that lets you manually pick your favorite moments, but it's not automated like PowerDirector's. The Edit using Content Aware Editing right-click choice processes a clip, and then it shows a dialog with tracks for each of the detected events, such as Zoom, Pan, Faces, Speech, Shaky video, poor lighting, and more. Clicking on any of the detected clip segments lets you easily select or deselect that portion of the clip for use in your project. Note that this feature doesn't work with 360-degree content.
With so many people shooting events simultaneously with their HD camera phones, multicam is no longer just for professionals. PowerDirector allows up to 100 multicam tracks, but what this really means is that you can sync that many tracks by audio in the main timeline. The actual multicam-switching interface still just has four video sources.
For synchronization, you get a choice of Audio Analysis (the best choice for amateurs), Manual, Timecodes, File Created Time, and Markers on Clips. When I used Audio Analysis, my two clips synced perfectly. The program lets you choose which track's audio should be used, or you can import a separate audio track. Hitting Record played all angles synchronized, letting me switch among them. The tool creates sub-clips labeled 1 to 4 for the camera angles, with adjustable split points.
When you're done cutting, the clip sequence appears on the regular timeline. Subclips are in separate tracks, but you can't adjust the cut points there without losing footage and messing up the synchronization. The multicam designer itself lets you adjust these. Thankfully, you can also reopen a multicam sequence in the designer after you've sent it to the timeline. In all, it's a well-done and powerful tool.
Near-Pro Video Editing
Both Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro X let you combine edited groups of clips and move them around as a unit. With Version 17, PowerDirector's Nested Projects feature adds this capability. To use it, you simply create a new project, and drop an existing one onto the timeline. This creates a tabbed interface above the timeline, which lets you edit the nested project separately from within the new main project.
If you're into keyframe editing (which allows precise control over when effects begin and end based on exact frames you choose) PowerDirector is there for you. It offers picture-in-picture (PiP), overlays, motion, cropping, and time codes. All effects and adjustments can be pegged to keyframes. You get over 100 transitions and special effects to choose from, including ten from NewBlue. And the app lets you install third-party effect plug-ins from Pixelan and ProDAD.
Transitions are easy to add, and the program can decide what material before and after to use when you drop this kind of effect to a join line between clips. A search box lets you find a specific type, like Page Curl. And you can even create custom transitions using your images with the Alpha set of transitions, which rely on masking and transparency. It's fun making a transition out of a friend's head, as shown below.
PowerDirector's chroma-key tool lets you shoot someone with solid-color backgrounds (usually green) and create the appearance that they're in an exotic scene by choosing a different background. CyberLink has simplified the controls from four to two: Now there are just Color Range and Denoise controls. You can now add more than one color key, too. I tried this with an orange and gray background and with a yellow and gray background. These color choices showed me why pros use green: The orange background keyed out my subject's lips, and it was harder to get the correct mask.
With a greenscreen, the keying worked well. Even in the default mode, I noticed none of the green halo I sometimes see around test subjects in other programs.
The Mask Designer lets you add transparency to mask objects (including your own images) and text. It was pretty fun to use my mugshot as a mask over a flowing river in the test video below. As with just about every effect, you can use keyframes to gradually ease in and out of these mask effects.
The Title Designer gets even more powerful in version 17, adding new effects like fire, electric waves, and neon, along with a good selection of fly-in animations. Two-color gradients, lighting, and glow are also at your disposal. These can give those weekend George Lucases blockbuster opening credits. You can also put boxes around text to get a button, which you could use as your Subscribe button on online media.
The program offers preset PiP grids—from 2 by 2 to 10 by 10—and your clip tracks snap to fill the resulting spaces. The PiP Designer window makes creating PiP movies simpler than in any competing app. And none of the competition can preview these types of movies without stop-and-start jerky playback.
AI painting style filters were popularized by the iPhone app called Prisma. Now PowerDirector offers plugins that perform similar magic on you video clips. Four packs of these AI styles are available with PowerDirector 17: Chinese Painting, Van Gogh, Impressionists 1 (Manet), and Impressionists 2 (Monet). CyberLink plans to produce new AI packs on a monthly basis for subscribers. Note that they're not small, at around a 300MB download.
You don't get to these new styles from the Effects tab, but from the Plugins menu choice. (Effects already include non-AI Chinese Painting). The new styles open a new window, where you need to open the clip for the effect again. So it's not really integrated into the editor as the old Effects are, which work right on timeline clips selected.
The effects, like those from Prisma, are quite entrancing and beautiful. I do wish you could adjust their strength with a slider, but I guess that's up to the AI, rather than my inferior intelligence. You can trim the clip you're applying the effect to, and then you hit the Transform button. It's not superfast: A 16-second clip took two minutes to transform.
4K and 3D
PowerDirector supports 4K video content. The software supports XAVC-S standard of 4K and HD videos used in Sony cameras and camcorders. This joins support for Canon 1DC, JVC HMQ-10, and GoPro Hero3 4K content.
In editing Go Pro 4K footage, performance is better than I expected, not even slowing down with complex transitions. Being first with 4K capability is a real feather in CyberLink's cap, but much of the competition, such as Corel VideoStudio, also supports 4K.
Unlike Premiere Elements, PowerDirector can import, edit, display, and produce 3D video. It can even attempt to convert 2D content to 3D. It supports various 3D systems, including anaglyph (red/cyan glasses), 3D-ready HDTVs, and popular video and photo 3D formats. I downloaded several 3D samples, including high-definition content, and PowerDirector had no problem displaying it. Once you've got your 3D content in the program, you can add 3D transitions, particles, and titles.
Audio
Audio tracks in the timeline by default show waveform lines, and you can turn up and down volume by grabbing and dragging them. The Audio Room, a simple track-volume mixer, features Normalize buttons for each track to even out clip sound levels. It's also easy to create voiceovers with the Voice-Over Recording Room, accessible from a tab sporting a microphone icon. CyberLink's WaveEditor is a separate included app that lets you correct distortion, equalize, generate reverb, and apply a few special effects. It also includes VST plug-in support for third-party effects.
You get loads of canned background music, and the standard video editor includes beat detection, which puts markers on the timeline at music beats so you can synchronize clip action.
For really advanced mixing, recording, syncing, cleaning, and restoration, there's AudioDirector (included with the Ultimate Suite edition). With this separate app you can easily apply effects and fixes that are preserved when you later open them in PowerDirector. New in AudioDirector is Auto Remix, which fits soundtrack music to your video length. It can take any song, analyze it, and often convincingly shorten or lengthen it. But you need to manually enter the new length time; it doesn't bring your movie in for automatic fitting. You can see where the edit occurred with a squiggly line. Listening to the result, I couldn't tell that the music had been cut at that point.
Automatic ducking doesn't add quacks to your soundtrack. Instead, it automatically lowers background audio during dialog on another track. It didn't do much for a loud concert video on top of an interview but worked better with a standard background track.
Performance
CyberLink's investment in 64-bit optimizations and graphics hardware acceleration has paid off. Other speed-boosters include OpenCL (Open Computing Language) support and intelligent SVRT, which determines how your clips should be rendered for the best-quality output and fastest editing. In my latest round of performance testing, the program remains the fastest among its peers.
I tested rendering time by creating a movie consisting of four clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions and rendered it to 1080p30 MPEG-4 at 15Mbps, H.264 High Profile. Audio was MPEG AAC Audio: 192 Kbps. I tested on the Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card.
The test movie (whose duration is just under 5 minutes) took 1:29 (minutes:seconds) for PowerDirector to render. The next-best competitor this year was Pinnacle Studio 22, with a time of 1:54. Both of those handily outpaced Corel VideoStudio's 4:20 and Adobe Premiere Elements's 5:18. Its render speed with OpenCL acceleration enabled is nothing short of astonishing. During rendering, PowerDirector also shows you the time elapsed, time remaining, and what frame in the movie you're at during the process.
Real Power for Your Video Editing
PowerDirector continues to lead the way among consumer video editing software. The latest version's Precut, Nested Projects, and advanced titling features bring it closer to the professional level. There isn't room here to discuss the vast feature set, including slideshows, disc menus, and animated object design tools to name just a few. Its wealth of powerful tools would be enough to give it a strong recommendation, but the speed with which PowerDirector handles editing and rendering digital movies really gives it the upper hand in the face of many competing products. CyberLink PowerDirector 17 Ultimate remains PCMag's Editors' Choice for enthusiast-level video-editing software, along with Corel VideoStudio and, for Mac users, Apple Final Cut Pro X.
Bottom Line: PowerDirector is one of the fastest and most capable consumer-level video editing apps for Windows around, and the first to support 360-degree VR footage.
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$99.99
CyberLink PhotoDirector started life as a workflow alternative to Adobe Lightroom. While Adobe's photo editing software has gotten simpler, PhotoDirector has gone in the other direction, accruing many new tools, some of which enter Photoshop territory, such as adjustment layers, masks, and text kerning. The latest version, 10, even adds the kind of painterly AI filters made popular by the Prisma app. Despite what some might see as feature creep, the program remains capable, usable, and worthy of consideration.
While PhotoDirector does indeed give Adobe a run for its money in photo workflow and editing software, however, it lacks some powerful features found in Lightroom and Photoshop, such as raw Profiles and geotag maps. Still, it goes beyond Lightroom with drawing tools, face-beautification tools, and blur effects. Advanced features include face tagging, content-aware object removal, and there's even a body-slimming tool—a feature of undeniable power, whatever you may think of its .
Pricing and Setup
PhotoDirector is available for both Windows (7SP1 and later) and macOS (10.11 and later). It's only available in one level, Ultra, at a list price of $99.99, though you'll usually see it discounted online. You can get PhotoDirector together with our Editors' Choice consumer video editor, PowerDirector, for $139. Another option is Director Suite 365, a $29.99-per-month ($129.99 per year) subscription plan that includes all of CyberLink's media software along with plug-ins and content packs and 100GB of cloud storage. For comparison, you get Photoshop Elements for the same $99, but for Lightroom you pay $9.99 per month forever. ACDSee Pro also costs $99 one-shot, and Corel AfterShot Pro costs a one-time price of $64.99. The more pro-targeted DxO PhotoLab and Capture One Pro cost $199 and $299, respectively.
A fully functioning 30-day free trial of PhotoDirector is available for the price of your email address. It's a 285MB download for Windows and 425MB for Mac. Once installed, the program requires more than 800MB on disk, so keep some space available. Unfortunately, the trial is not upgradable to the licensed version, so you have to reinstall if you decide to buy.
PhotoDirector supports high-DPI monitors, such as the one on which I tested, a 4K touch-screen Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC all-in-one PC. And there's a complementary Windows tablet version of PhotoDirector that lets you edit photos on the go.
PhotoDirector is a 64-bit application, meaning you can take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM—something you'll want when you have a lot of high-res photos open and are doing heavy image manipulation.
Interface
The latest PhotoDirector version doesn't include any drastic changes to the program's interface, which was clear and attractive already. PhotoDirector bypasses Photoshop Elements' separate Organizer app, too: You can do everything inside the main PhotoDirector application.
As is common among pro- and near-pro-level photo workflow apps, PhotoDirector uses modes. That means there are global tabs or buttons that switch the interface among different functions, usually organizing, editing, and sharing. PhotoDirector has six modes: Library, Adjustment, Edit, Layers, Slideshow, and Print. Like Lightroom, PhotoDirector lets you choose which of these buttons appears, though the option for this is down with the toolbar customizations or by right-clicking on the title bar, rather than in Preferences.
Switching modes is as simple as it is in Lightroom Classic. Within each of PhotoDirector's modes, a left-side panel offers mode-appropriate options. In the Library and Adjustment modes, the panel is further broken down into two tabs, Project and Metadata for the first, and Manual and Presets for the second.
The main viewing area is flexible, with a few options of its own. In Library mode, a large view of the photo sits above a filmstrip-style look at other pictures in the folder. Alternatively, buttons at the top let you see just the photo, a gallery browser of thumbnails or filenames, or a full-screen view of just the current photo. In addition to viewing one large image, you can also compare two or several in Library mode.
The Gallery view can be filtered by photos you've flagged or color labeled, or those you've edited. I'm happy to see that you can now filter the view by camera model and lens, as you can in Lightroom Classic (but not Lightroom CC, which only lets you filter by camera model). Hover the mouse over a thumbnail in gallery view, and you see star rating and flagging buttons for easy rating and selecting. When you're viewing one large image, the same choices appear along the bottom with color labeling added; optionally, you can add controls for rotation and back and forward arrows.
In Adjustment mode, you can see a split view showing an image before and after your edits. Flipping through images was snappy and delay-free in testing, as was overall program response—even on a less-than-stellar 2.5GHz dual-core laptop. Like Lightroom, PhotoDirector lets you zoom only to preset sizes—25 percent, 33 percent, and 50 percent, and so on—rather than offering a full-range slider like the one on ACDSee Pro. But a single click switches between zoomed and unzoomed, which is convenient.
You can't detach the program's panels to float anywhere on screen, as you can in ACDSee Pro. Undo is well implemented, and an excellent adjustment history panel shows not only all previous tweaks but also a thumbnail at the top displaying a mini view of those tweaks' effects. Clicking on any history entry applies that point to the full image view. In all, PhotoDirector gets high marks for its interface.
Importing Photos
The photo import dialog groups zoomable thumbnails of images on the card by date. As with Lightroom (and better than with Photo Mechanic), you can select photos for import from these thumbnails. You can apply Auto-tone, Auto-Denoise, and even effect presets, such as B&W Cool, Faux HDR, or Fantasy Pink during import. You can also apply keyword tags, renaming, and a copyright notice.
The program can import raw camera files, of course, in formats such as Canon's CR2 and Nikon's NEF. Raw conversion detail and color are excellent, though Lightroom brought out more colors (especially with its new Adobe Color and Vivid Profiles) in testing, and Capture One Pro more detail.
PhotoDirector came in first place in my import speed comparison test. I imported 157 24MP raw files in .CR2 format from a Canon EOS 6D. Each file weighed in at about 25-30MB. I tested on an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card.
PhotoDirector led the tested pack with a time of 1:03 (minutes:seconds). AfterShot was a close second with an import time of 1:04 (though that program deosn't actually move the files onto disk, but just adds them to its catalog). These results compared with a much slower 2:35 for Lightroom, and 2:41 for Capture One.
Another type of importing, tethered shooting, is finally supported by PhotoDirector. The feature only works with some Canon and Nikon DSLRs for now, but you get a shutter button, along with the ability to change shooting settings like f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO.
The program offers all the expected organizational tools with easily accessible ratings, color coding, and flagging tools in the Library interface. And as I'll show in the next section, it even offers face tagging—a powerful organization tool that's been available in Photoshop Elements for several years. Geotagging and maps, however, are still absent.
Basic Photo Adjustments and Edits
PhotoDirector offers all the basic adjustments you'd expect, including exposure, contrast, white balance, and sharpness. And the ubiquitous fixers—red eye and blemish removers—are added to the local adjustment brushes. Cropping and rotating follow the brilliant approach of Lightroom and Photoshop, showing you the final result rather than an outline of your intended crop.
PhotoDirector also has pro image-editing tools, such as curves and levels. The latter lets you manipulate highs, lows, and midtones with controls on a three-color histogram, with optional quarter-tone controls, too. The tone curves tool gives only three control points.
When it comes to pumping up or cutting down on overly dark or bright areas, PhotoDirector adds a couple of levels in between the standard brights, midtones, and darks. You get five sliders—Brightest, Bright, Midtone, Dark, and Darkest. This setup lets you use the histogram's 'Show over/underexposed areas' tool and then correct these areas with a more appropriate slider. Crataeva nurvala ayurvedic diet. PhotoDirector's 'Auto tone' magic wand button, like similar tools in every photo app, worked beautifully for some photos, but not so well for others.
Another image-correction tool that worked well in testing was Dehaze. I found that this did a better job than Lightroom, which tends to add a color cast, usually blue. PhotoDirector's Dehaze was nearly as good as DxO PhotoLab's, best-in-class ClearView tool.
On the right, the Auto Keystone tool has straightened out the building's vertical lines.
The program's geometry adjustment tools let you fix the barrel and pincushion distortion of telephoto and wide lenses. The Keystone correction tool's vertical and horizontal controls let me straighten distorted lines at the sides of photos of buildings. A new Auto Keystone option did a good job straightening out buildings shot from below, and cropped the unusable sides of the photo.
AI Style Transfer
If you've seen the Prisma mobile app, you know how fun it can be to turn prosaic cameraphone shots into artsy, painted-looking images. PhotoDirector's AI Style Transfer, available in Edit mode, does the same thing for your DSLR photos. You only get 10 styles included with the program, unless you subscribe to Director Suite 365. Otherwise, AI Style Packs cost $149 each, but they are very cool, especially the Chinese Painting pack. The effects took about 20 seconds to apply on my photos.
You can adjust the strength of these effects, and erase it for select areas of the image with a brush. Another option is Apply original color. This creates a color palette for the painting effect using your image, rather than using the palette included with the effect. I found that using the template color scheme produced a more drastic, artsy result. I would like more controls, and remixing capabilities. For example, the canvas creases in the example above weren't adjustable, and applying the effect a second time produced the exact same effect, meaning it doesn't recalculate the effect. A Reapply tool would be nice here.
Multiple Exposure EffectCyberlink Powerdirector 7 Download
This is one of PhotoDirector's coolest features. Take a group of up to 10 action shots while keeping the camera still, and PhotoDirector can automagically produce a multiple exposure like the one below. Doing the same thing in Photoshop would involve selecting the person in all six images and creating masks and layers. PhotoDirector even lets you apply a fade-in or fade-out effect to the sequence. It also lets you reduce the number of exposures from a drop-down, rather than making you recreate the merge.
Layers
Showing its ambitions to be more than just a photo workflow application competing with Lightroom, PhotoDirector includes layer editing. I was initually leery about this kind of tool cluttering a program that's designed for efficient workflow—there's a reason Lightroom doesn't require photographers to mess with layer editing. But PhotoDirector's tool doesn't clutter things up, unless you consider a Layers mode button atop the interface to be clutter. When you enter the mode, a Photoshop-lite appearance takes hold, except the layer controls are on the left and the tools (Text, drawing brushes, gradient, fill, shape, blur) are on the right.
As mentioned above, the text controls are fine-detailed, letting you adjust not just font and size, but also kerning, shadow, and border effects.
A dialog tells you it's best to complete all overall photo adjustments (lighting, white balance, and the like) prior to working with layers. If you don't want to spring for Photoshop CC, here are your layers. Work with layers is saved in PhotoDirector Layer File format (.PHI), not in the more standard PSD.
New in the latest version are the ability to create empty layer projects, edit with layer masks, to group layers, to add adjustment layers, and to create clipping masks. These techniques will be familiar to Photoshop users, who now have fewer reasons to stop paying that subscription.
There are 27 blending modes (the same), which offers a lot of creative options, though it's still short of Photoshop's 27. I like how you can solo and edit a layer by double-clicking on its thumbnail image, but Photoshop's right-click options are a bit more helpful.
Only four Express Templates are included by default, but you can download a choice of 16 more from CyberLink's online repository, DirectorZone, and users of that service can contribute their own creations. The templates usually include filter effects and text overlays. You can customize them with drawing and selection tools, including a Magic Wand selector.
Video-to-Photo
This set of tools actually offers more than its name suggests: You can use it to create a panorama from a video clip, a group photo from a video with everyone making an acceptable expression, or a multiple-exposure image like those you can make from stills. You start from the Video-to-Photo button right above the Import button. Of course, the feature does let you make still photos from video, but in my testing, it couldn't sharpen a moving subject. And the same problem made multiple-exposure shots from video a lot less appealing than those created from stills.
Likewise, the Panorama feature worked in testing, but was less automatic than I'd like. It works best if you manually select frames from a video you play through, and in my first attempt I hadn't overlapped the frames enough to get a full panorama. There's an Auto option, but that also took a few tries to get a full pano result. The tool lets you auto-fill areas of the photo that result from combining perspectives—a nice content-aware feature.
Speaking of content-aware features, CyberLink has added content-aware cloning to the program's content-aware remove and move tools. The remove tool works well, as you can see from the photo above, where I've removed some unsightly tape on the court floor. I had less success with the new content-aware clone feature, which produced unwanted transparency in the object I was cloning. But note the fun trick of resizing the cloned objects.
Color Splash
This is an effect that's been around for a while, at least since Spielberg's Schindler's List. It's where you only let one color in a photo appear, and leave the rest in black and white. PhotoDirector's tool not only lets you select a specific color to show, but you can have it appear only on a selected object, rather than every instance of that color, with a brush that selectively removes the color. A Tolerance slider is also helpful in isolating a color. Below is an example where only the blues appear.
People Beautifier
This tool has three subsets: face tools, skin tools, and body tools. The first includes Face Shaper, Shine Remover, Eye Bag Remover, Wrinkle Remover, Tooth Brush, and even Eye Blinger, which brightens the whites of the eyes. Note that anything you do here can be undone, since a working copy is created. On my test image, the Face Shaper basically tucked in jowls.
These tools let you draw on top of your images and superimpose text, as well as add shapes, fills, and gradients. You can select areas with a lasso and a smart lasso, but PhotoDirector's selection tools are not as smart as Adobe's. This program offers a lot of the layer-blending modes found in Photoshop, including Darken, Multiply, Difference, and Exclusion—14 in all. You can drag layer entries to change their order. You can even go in and adjust any layer separately with the standard lighting, color, and detail tools.
Blur Tools and Noise Reduction
The Blur Tools section in Editing mode makes it easy to add not only blur but also bokeh, zoom focus, and tilt-shift effects. It's as fun, powerful, and interesting as the motion-blur tool in Photoshop Elements.
The Noise Reduction tool does a good job of cleaning up a noisy shot, and makes doing so a snap. Often this kind of feature make you tinker with sliders to deal with chrominance and luminance noise, and PhotoDirector does offer these sliders, but its magic wand de-noising button did a fine job of reducing noise from my test images' dark areas. At full zoom, my results did look a tad blurred, but when viewing the whole photo, the smoothing was a big improvement.
Bracket HDR
I've long been impressed with PhotoDirector's single-shot HDR (high dynamic range) effect, but this true HDR tool is no less remarkable. It's accessible in Edit mode, and you can drag up to five photos shot at different exposures of the same subject from the tray to the main editing area. A merge button combines all the images, which took about 15 seconds on my five-shot test.
The merge lined up the images well, and a checkbox let me remove 'ghosting'—in the case of my shot, traffic that differed from shot to shot. The end result is pleasing, and you can tinker with it even further by adjusting Glow, Edge, Detail, and Tone, or by choosing a preset look. These include Colorful, Detail, Light, Natural, and Surrealistic. It's fun to see the dazzling artistic effects all these choices enable.
Lens Profile Correction
This kind of tool has been a feather in the cap of programs including Adobe Lightroom and DxO PhotoLab for a while. The idea is to fix issues introduced by the lens the photo was shot with, such as warped perspectives and darkness around the edges (known as vignetting). The technique, as with most photo adjustments, works best with raw camera files.
The problem with lens-based correction is that a program has to have a lot of lenses in its database to be useful for most photographers: CyberLink claims more than 150 lenses for PhotoDirector, Adobe has about 600, and DxO claims more than 17,000 camera-body-plus-lens combinations. You can manually adjust the distortion, and CyberLink users can create their own profiles and make them downloadable from DirectorZone.com. PhotoDirector still didn't have my Sigma 150-600mm zoom lens in its database, even though that lens has been out for more than a year. The webpage states that 'this lens profile will soon be available on DirectorZone.'
A profile for the Canon EF-M 15-45mm is now available. Tapping a globe icon in the Lens Correction option group takes you to CyberLink's profile download page, where you can see all profiled lenses. DxO makes the process more efficient by asking you to download the appropriate profiles whenever you load a photo.
For supported lenses, the program automatically chooses the correct model, and those I tested did improve barrel distortion and vignetting. I am disappointed to see that chromatic aberration (CA) wasn't improved when applying profiles. PhotoDirector offers sliders for CA correction that did let me remove some color fringing, and the program's Defringe tool, though manual, does a great job of removing color strokes from object edges. For excellent automatic results, try DxO PhotoLab. Lightroom and DxO PhotoLab are still way ahead of PhotoDirector when it comes to lens profile corrections, for both geometric distortion and CA (chromatic aberration).
Face Tagging
To get started with face tagging, select some photos in Library mode, and hit the Tag Faces button above the thumbnail grid. This starts an Analyzing dialog, which goes through each photo one at a time. Processing 129 photos took just under 3 minutes. As with all face-recognition software, there were a few false positives—bushes were identified as faces, for example. But I am impressed that it picked up profiles as well as full faces.
The interface for assigning names to faces is, as with much of PhotoDirecter, clear and simple. Once you assign one name, it becomes a button for one-click assignment to other photos with faces. After this, you can just click Faces on the Library's left panel Project tab, and then click on a name to display photos only of that individual. You can also choose 'Find more Faces of this person in the selected photos,' but the program doesn't do as good a job of suggesting names that belong to a face as competitors do.
Cyberlink Powerdirector 8Sharing and Output
PhotoDirector offers clear buttons for sharing directly to Flickr, Email, and CyberLink's cloud galleries from a dropdown. You can generate slideshows for instant viewing, saving to an MPEG-4 video file, or direct uploading to YouTube. Lightroom goes beyond this, though, with some actual video editing capabilities.
PhotoDirector's dedicated Print mode offers every imaginable paper size, custom grid settings, and watermarking, but it has no presets for standard sizes. The company has added a soft proofing feature, which will please pros who print their pictures. There's also a Watermarks feature—something Corel only added to AfterShot Pro in its most recent update.
One final note about help: PhotoDirector includes a comprehensive, organized, searchable help system, along with video tutorials, both accessible from clear buttons in the interface. Unfortunately, the help is now on the web rather than a local file. Adobe's software also takes you to the web for help, but you usually have to hunt through info on other programs than the one you're using and even through user comments before you possibly find what you're looking for. CyberLink wins on this count, and you can download its User Guide, in case you're editing on the road with no connectivity. Wildlife photographers can relate to that situation.
CyberLink also offers a mobile version of PhotoDirector for both iOS and Android. It's pretty powerful, with a lot of fun effects and editing tools. The app is ad-supported, or you can pay $4.99 to remove the ads and allow higher output resolution.
A Good Direction for Photos
You can have a lot of fun at a reasonable price with CyberLink PhotoDirector. Its interface is well thought out, and it has all the standard photo-editing tools, along with a bunch of cool extra goodies. But faster import, geotagging, and much more effective lens-profile-based corrections combine to keep Adobe Lightroom our top pick for pro photo workflow. And for pixel-level photo editing you really can't beat our prosumer Editors' Choice, Adobe Photoshop Elements. Pro-level photographers will still want Photoshop CC.
CyberLink PhotoDirector
Trim enabler mac keygen torrent torrent. Bottom Line: Photo workflow and editing program CyberLink PhotoDirector offers a smooth interface and powerful capabilities. New in this version are multiple-exposure effects, more layer options, and a video-to-photo tool.
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