CyberLink PhotoDirector 2011 review

If there was a Lightroom Lite, this would be it. Like Adobe Lightroom 3, PhotoDirector dictates your workflow by breaking itself down into a series of panels – Library, Adjustment and Slideshow in this case. The similarities are so pronounced that experienced Lightroom users will be up and running in no time.

Still, imitating market-leading software isn’t necessarily a bad way to go, and we like PhotoDirector’s layout. Short, swift animations add an air of elegance to proceedings, while the big, bold font and chunky icons make navigation easy without becoming patronising. Unlike ACDSee it supports multiple monitors, allowing you to run a full-screen image on one monitor and your library on the other.

PhotoDirector’s organisational abilities are pretty good too. If you want to find all the images in your library taken at f/8, for instance, you can sort your photos by aperture size, or other EXIF data such as focal length, camera model or shutter speed. Finding exactly what you want takes a little longer than with Lightroom – you can’t restrict the view to photos only taken with a particular lens, for instance.

There’s a good flagging and rejection system, though, so as long as you’re diligent when you import images, finding your best shots is simple. Importing images themselves is straightforward and fast: importing a year’s worth of shots (around 3,000) took under an hour, and PhotoDirector didn’t mind being pointed at images hosted on a networked resource.

The implementation of ITPC tags is somewhat half-hearted; PhotoDirector supports tags, but not captions. Owner and location fields are also missing, which will limit PhotoDirector’s appeal to both the anally-retentive and professional photographer alike. There’s also no support for video – Lightroom will at least point out that a folder contains video, even if it doesn’t allow you to do anything with it. PhotoDirector is strictly stills-only.

PhotoDirector is a non-destructive editor, and keeps a list of the changes you’ve made in a Project file, without touching your original files. This is useful, particularly as it can handle RAW files from a range of cameras ranging from obvious consumer DSLRs to high-end medium format backs. Like Lightroom, it has the ability to create virtual copies, allowing you to create multiple virtual versions of the same picture without duplicating the original file.

The list of editing tools is good, although those looking for some original thinking will be disappointed. Even the order in which the editing tools appear in the adjustment panel runs in exactly the same order as in Lightroom. Still, adjusting the tonality of your image is simple, with the changes you make on the sliders reflected in real-time on the preview of your image.

It’s a comprehensive set of tools, including local adjustments such as cloning and healing, as well as a general adjustment brush that can be used to adjust a variety of brightness, saturation and sharpness values. Lightroom’s graduated mask filter has made the cut, allowing you apply progressive changes.

Those wishing to edit without getting stuck into the manual sliders will find a series of preset effects, although some of these are rather heavy-handed, introducing sharpness artifacts and posterisation that are unlikely to create good-looking prints.

On the negative side, there’s a near-total lack of keyboard shortcuts. A few obvious ones are included, such as CTRL-E to export an image, or CTRL-P to print it. You can hop between the Library, Adjustment and Slideshow panels using the F keys, but selecting tools in the Adjustment pane must be done with the mouse.

That isn’t a problem initially but one that makes its presence felt when you try to blitz through a shoot of a few hundred images. You can at least copy the settings you’ve applied to one image and paste them into a series of following images, which is handy for correcting repeated white balance misjudgments.

Sharing options are a little thin on the ground: you can output to Flickr and Facebook, as well as a reasonably detailed export option that allows you to create JPEG or TIFFs of your originals. The print engine leaves a lot to be desired: given PhotoDirector’s Lightroom pretensions it’s surprising you can’t set a custom border for your images. There’s also no mention of colour spaces anywhere in the application, so it’s of limited use for those with a custom printer profile.

There is a slideshow creator built in, however, which can mix together a series of images with a choice of three transitions and a backing soundtrack. You can share slideshows either directly to your YouTube account or produce a video file in a choice of H.264, MP4 or WMV formats, at up to 1,920 x 1,080. It’s a well-implemented, easy-to-use feature, although it doesn’t quite make up for the lack of a web slideshow creator.

Lightroom 3 was awarded five stars with good reason, and it’s pleasing to see such a capable, consumer-oriented clone at such a tempting price. For our money, though, PhotoDirector falls slightly between two stools. The cheaper, A-Listed Photoshop Elements offers equally good – if not superior – editing tools and reasonable organisational abilities, while Lightroom continues as the gold standard when it comes to professional workflow. With a few more features PhotoDirector could become a real contender, though, and we can’t wait to see the next version.

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