Adventures of Fuzz & Dakota: Review of Photo Director 3

A few months ago, I acquired a copy of PhotoDirector 2011 from CyberLink. PhotoDirector is a photo workflow tool which I have come to rely on for the processing of my photos from capturing them to placing them in my scrapbook. As an amateur photographer my main interest is not in showing off my creative talents in how well I can edit a photo but in capturing the stories of my life and placing them in photo albums to share with friends and family.

At the same time, I want my photos to look as great as possible.

Now I am using the beta release of PhotoDirector 3 and find the software even better than before.

There are several steps that I use for taking my photos from being shot with my camera to being placed in an album. PhotoDirector makes these steps fast and easy and allows me to use powerful tools to enhance my photos to make them even better. The current price of PhotoDirector 2011 (from the CyberLink web site) is only $60 and includes an upgrade to PhotoDirector 3. While I have never used Adobe's Lightroom, I have used Adobe Photoshop (CS3) and while there are more features in Photoshop than in PhotoDirector, PhotoDirector is several orders of magnitude easier to use than Photoshop and Photoshop includes lots of things that I don't need or want to do - such as making montages). When you compare the cost (Lightroom is $300 and Photoshop is $700 but you can save 30% on Lightroom if you also buy Photoshop), PhotoDirector provides an amazing value for a great suite of tools for only $60.

My Personal Workflow

I copy the images from my memory card to the hard drive into a directory that specifies the quarter (such as 2012-Q1) and sometimes a subfolder if I have a big event (like a wedding within that quarter).
I back up that directory.
Working from a portable hard drive I then "import" the photos that I want to work on into PhotoDirector. I can select a folder or a set of photos to import and then I can even de-selet images before I actually import them. This allows me to not even bother with photos that I know that I don't want to work with.
Once the images are imported, I create an album for those images so that I can quickly work on just those related images.
Now, I shoot a lot of images and one of the big tasks in getting my photos ready for my scrapbook is simply deciding which images should be in my album. In the past, I would create a duplicate folder of all of my pictures and then view them and delete ones I didn't like. But that was a clunky way of doing things. In PhotoDirector I have options for several ways to view pictures such as a filmstrip or as several images or even one image at time. This coupled with the support of flags, ratings, tags, and labels gives me several options for marking which images are the ones I want to use in my album.
In my recent work, I shot both RAW and JPG and so I had two images of everything I had shot. So I first put a label of "green" on all of the JPG images (don't ask me why "green" it just happened) and then I could choose to limit what I was looking at to either only the "green" labels or only the images that had no color label.
Next I went through a flagged as "rejected" those images that I did not want to keep. PhotoDirector has a very handy way of cycling through the images that makes that process easy and fairly quick.
So, for my recent project the steps above reduced the 654 images that I had originally captured down to 90 for use in my album.
Once I have selected the photos that I want to use, then I can go through and edit and make improvements to the pictures.
Most of my editing is limited to adjusting the white balance and "tone" which includes exposure level, black level, highlights, shadows, brightness, contrast, and fixing red eye. Occasionally I will venture into more advanced editing.
Once I finish editing the photos, I export them. It is the export process that takes the instructions regarding the edits and actually applies them to the photos. By default PhotoDirector will make new copies of the edited images leaving the originals untouched.
Now that the photos are exported in their edited forms, I can set about putting them into my photo albums (I use Book Smart by Blurb for that, another great tool worth checking out). I will often do a second export of a subset of these pictures at a reduced resolution to share on Facebook.

Great Features of PhotoDirector

Native support for RAW data files such as Canon's CR2 file format. PhotoDirector has actually licensed the SDKs to support the raw files from the camera manufactuers which results in the best possible quality of these images. To work with RAW files you don't need to do anything special, just import the pictures just like you do with JPG images.
Non-destructive editing of the images. As you work on the photos the editing details are stored in a project. No changes are actually made to the images until you are ready to export them
I absolutely love the custom white balance tool in PhotoDirector. Just select the eye dropper and point it at a neural gray point and voila custom white balance is achieved. You can fine tune the settings if you desire.
Changing various Tone adjustments is also very easy: black level, exposure, highlights, shadows, and brightness. The Auto Tone button usually does a good job and is also a good way to learn what impacts the settings have on a photo.
These coupled with the easy way to "undo" a series of changes makes is so easy and worry-free to play with the setting and get the best outcome.
Of course PhotoDirector also has tools for removing red eye, adding gradients to an area, straightening a photo, cropping, etc. All of those are easy to use and work very well.
PhotoDirector has support for more advanced editing such as healing and cloning and even tools to reduce wrinkles, improve the tone of the skin, whiten teeth, and add sparkle to someone's eye. The results, if applied sparingly, are amazingly good and so easy to do.

There are a number of other features in PhotoDirector that I could talk about and even more that I haven't explored enough to talk about. But I am convinced that the tool is very useful, user-friendly, and affordable. Comparing what I can do with this $60 program compared to what I can do with Microsoft's built-in Window Picture editor (which always left me frustrated when I used it plus it is destructive editing) or with Adobe's very expensive products, PhotoDirector is the hands-down winner.

Examples
A typical indoor scene of lots of people which usually provides poor lighting for good photographs.

Before/After photos showing the typical editing I do

Who doesn't take lots of pictures of their pets? Now you can easily make them look as good as your pet really does.

Before/After showing how lightening the shadows improve the photo.

The people-enhancing tools are easy to use and actually you must be careful not to apply "too much" as you don't want the people to look plastic and fake. These photos were just casual pictures so just think what you could do when you were really taking portraits.