Cyberlink Powerdirector 8 Ultra Trial

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Cyberlink Powerdirector 8 Ultra Trial 4,3/5 4403 votes

. Pros Friendly, yet powerful interface. Effective noise reduction. Cool multiple-exposure and faux HDR effects. Body shaper and other nifty editing tools. Layer support.

Exports directly to Facebook and Flickr. Cons Not enough lens-profile corrections. Chromatic aberration correction is inadequate. No geotag maps. Doesn't support tethered shooting. Bottom Line CyberLink PhotoDirector is a photo workflow and editing program that offers a smooth interface and powerful capabilities.

New in this version are multiple-exposure effects, more layer options, and a video-to-photo tool. PhotoDirector, CyberLink's, always impresses with its clear interface and quick operation. It's an affordable tool that gives Adobe a run for its money in photo workflow and editing software, though it lacks some of the most powerful features found in and Photoshop. Still, it offers drawing tools, gradients, face-beautification tools, blur effects, and camera-and-lens profile-based corrections.

Advanced features include face tagging, content-aware object removal, and there's even a body-slimming tool. With the release of version 8, PhotoDirector moves further into Photoshop territory, with an emphasis on layer tools and content-aware editing tools. Other cool new capabilities include multiple exposure effects and the ability to capture sharp stills from video content. Pricing and Setup PhotoDirector is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. The two versions for PCs are Deluxe ($59.99) and Ultra ($99.99, the version I tested). The Ultra level (which is the only version available for Macs) adds some high-power tools such as bracketed HDR, auto lens corrections, split toning, photo stacks, and 4K video slideshows. You can get PhotoDirector as part of CyberLink's $194.99 Director Suite, too.

Director Suite includes our Editors' Choice consumer video editor,. The suite is also available as a subscription for $99 per year. A fully functioning 30-day free trial for either version of PhotoDirector is available for the price of your email address. It's a 332MB download for Windows and 317MB for Mac, so expect it to take a few minutes if your Internet connection isn't very fast. Once installed, the program requires more than 600MB on disk, so keep some space available. PhotoDirector supports high-DPI monitors, such as the one on which I tested with, a 4K touch-screen all-in-one PC. And there's a complementary Windows tablet 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. Unlike Lightroom, PhotoDirector doesn't let you choose which of these mode buttons appears. So for example, if you never print, you still can't remove the Print button.

Switching modes is as simple as it is in Lightroom. Within each of PhotoDirector's modes, a left-side panel offers mode-appropriate options.

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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'd like to see more filter options, such as camera model and lens, as you get in Lightroom.

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, 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.

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. 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 Aperture (and better than with Photo Mechanic), you can select photos for import from these thumbnails.

You can even apply effect presets, such as B&W Cool, Faux HDR, or Fantasy Pink. Oddly, you can't apply basic adjustments such as auto-exposure. You can, though, 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. It even supports images from newer cameras, such as the and the Nikon D3400. Raw conversion detail and color were excellent, though Lightroom brought out more colors and Capture One Pro more detail.

And import speed was inconsistent; it went faster if I waited for the thumbnails to load into the import dialog. Another type of importing, tethered shooting, still isn't supported by PhotoDirector, making it inappropriate for some pro photogs.

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 (but not Lightroom) for a few 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.

Cyberlink Powerdirector 8 Ultra Trial

This setup lets you use the histogram's 'Show over/underexposed areas' tool and then correct these areas with a more appropriate slider. 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.

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. I'm still not overly impressed by the program's lens-profile-based geometry corrections (see below), and there is no equivalent of Lightroom's Upright feature, which corrects perspective issues. Some Newer, Cooler Tools Multiple Exposure Effect. This could be the coolest thing to hit PhotoDirector in version 8. 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. Sivapuranam download. 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. Showing its ambitions to be more than just a photo workflow application competing with Lightroom, PhotoDirector includes layer editing. I was 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 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, here are your layers. New in the latest version are more blending modes, blending mode preview when you hover the mouse over the options, and Express Layer Templates.

There are now 16 blending modes, 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. This new tool 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, but was less automatic than I'd like. You still have to 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. The tool does let you auto-fill areas of the photo that result from combining perpectives—a nice content-aware feature. Color Splash.

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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.

The Blur Tools section in Editing mode makes it easy to add not only blur but also, zoom focus, and tilt-shift effects. It's as fun, powerful, and interesting as the motion-blur tool in. Noise Reduction. This 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. 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 tool has been a feather in the cap of programs including Adobe Lightroom and DxO Optics pro 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 (aka 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 100 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, but Adobe actually lets users create their own lens profiles. PhotoDirector didn't have my zoom lens in its database, even though that lens has been out for more than a year. It also lacked a profile for the Canon EF-M 15-45mm.

Tapping a globe icon takes you to CyberLink's profile download page, where you can see all profiled lenses. For supported lenses, the program automatically chooses the correct model, but I was disappointed to see that chromatic aberration was actually made worse. (For excellent results, try.) Lightroom and DxO Optics Pro 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 was 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. Sharing and Output PhotoDirector offers clear buttons for sharing directly to two of the services you're most likely to want—Facebook and Flickr—after an initial sign-in. Email sharing is also now available from the button 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 and no soft proofing, as you'll find in Lightroom. 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.

8 CyberLink PowerDirector is a complete suite with which you can create professional looking videos by mixing all sorts of elements including videos, images, transition effects, clipart, text layers all with a custom background soundtrack. Powerful but easy to use editing suite CyberLink PowerDirector claims to be the fastest video editor around and while this is a bold claim, it does have a simplified, streamlined editing workflow which makes creating quality surprisingly easy. There are many templates to choose from which do much of the hard work and the rest is just a case of dragging and dropping footage as you please. It also includes a 3D Theme Designer that allows you to create 3D themes for your videos although some of these do look a bit cheap. Other than that, CyberLink PowerDirector includes all of the necessary tools to get creative with your videos, from assisting you in with the very first step (capturing video from several different sources) to adding the final touches to your creation via a customizable DVD-style menu. When you're done, CyberLink PowerDirector lets you save your video on your hard drive in different formats, publish it to, share it on or output it to a.

Most recently, CyberLink PowerDirector has been updated with enhanced 3D features and includes new ways to share creations with other Cyberlink users via Cyberlink's DirectorZone plus a few new 3D editing tools to complement to the 3D Theme Designer. If you want more effects, you can also download them from DirectorZone. Drag and drop video timeline interface The interface in CyberLink PowerDirector is divided into four main tabs ( Capture, Edit, Produce and Create Disc), all of them pretty self-explanatory. The layout is that of a standard video editor with raw footage divided from the editing timeline below. The editor in CyberLink PowerDirector includes all the essential video editing tools, with a library window to browse your media collection, a timeline to drag and drop elements and a preview window to check what your creation looks like when you put all the elements together. The Theme Creator uses a wizard style system to help you create your own theme and is easy to follow although the results can look quite cheap.

A solid multimedia presentation suite With CyberLink PowerDirector you can easily create multimedia presentations with video, photos and music. Whatever your presentation needs, Cyberlink PowerDirector is an excellent choice. Offers a wide range of similar programs, and if you are looking for free alternatives we recommend you to download and as well. Author's review. PowerDirector Ultra is an unbelievably fast and flexible video solution, offering a unique combination of high-end performance and advanced editing features.

Its intuitive interface makes it accessible to creators of all skill levels, from beginners to experts. A huge selection of customizable design tools, including unique alpha transitions, animated titles, particles and PiP objects, give you the freedom to explore your creativity and reflect it in your video creations. Create with over 500 Professional Effects New non-linear motion technology for PiP objects and titles lets you add hyper-realistic animations to your video projects, while a host of fresh fade-in and fade-out effects for the Title Room present exciting new creative options. Also brand new in PowerDirector 14 are 20 versatile alpha transitions that use a range of geometric shapes. Action Camera Center PowerDirector 14 introduces an all new Action Camera Center, which brings together all the ultra-powered features action enthusiasts need to create high impact videos—all in one place. Stabilize shaky action video, correct fish-eye distortion, apply slow motion or freeze & zoom highlights to parts of your footage, and correct color problems from filming in snow or underwater, all in a single, intuitive module.

Motion Tracking NEW Powerful new technology for motion tracking opens up great options to add new layers of creativity and sophistication to your projects. PowerDirector simplifies motion tracking from start to finish, enabling anyone to accurately track objects or people in video footage. Here are just a few examples of what can be accomplished with Motion Tracker: TrueTheater® Video Stabilizer PowerDirector Video Stabilizer function in the Action Camera center is ideal for use with videos taken without a tripod or recorded while moving.

It removes the shakiness from footage on all axes, even shakiness caused by rotational movement of the camera. 100-Track Multicam Editing Multicam editing is growing in popularity—editing video clips from different cameras into a single video is an effective way to add depth to a project by showing different perspectives.

This entry was posted on 11.01.2020.