ACDSee Photo Studio Mac 9 released: Includes face detection & major UI improvements: Digital Photography Review

ACD Systems has announced ACDSee Photo Studio Mac 9. It’s a powerful all-in-one photo editor promising convenient digital asset management tools and non-destructive raw photo editing.

Headlining the new features is face detection and facial recognition. ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 9 uses artificial intelligence to locate faces in your photographs. When faces are found, the user can name them. The software learns which names go with which faces, suggesting possible matches throughout your library. Alongside this feature is a new People Manager tool. This allows the user to merge, rename or remove people. Face data can also be migrated from software like Lightroom and Picasa.

A key user interface improvement is a new develop presets, history and snapshots pane. On the right-hand side within Develop mode, users can easily select from over 50 new Develop presets. You can also create and save your own presets to access from the same menu. With the new history pane, users can see each specific edit and adjustment they’ve made to their images and take the photo back to any individual step. Snapshots allow you to save sets of modifications that can be applied to an image at any time.

Alongside these new features, ACDSee Photo Studio Mac 9 also includes smaller improvements, such as an improved info palette that shows metadata for a selected image, and improved menu options. You can also now filter keyword and category lists, view an original image by clicking the new ‘Show Original’ button, enjoy new slideshow transitions, experience better video thumbnails and save files in HEIC file format.

ACDSee Photo Studio Mac 9 includes new AI-powered face detection and recognition tools

‘Mac 9 is another milestone release for ACDSee that gives you more freedom and control over organizing and editing your photos, and the people within them. Let your imagination run wild, and bring your memories to vivid life with this high-performance app,’ said Frank Lin, CTO & COO of ACD Systems.

Alongside the new features, ACDSee Photo Studio Mac 9 the same key features as prior versions, including in-depth digital asset management tools that don’t require you to import images, non-destructive raw editing, in-depth metadata tools, a printing interface, and much more. You can see a full rundown of ACDSee Photo Studio Mac 9 features here.

Like ACDSee Photo Studio Mac 8, the latest release runs natively on Apple Silicon devices. Last year’s major release also added a new color wheel in develop mode, color LUTs support, dehaze, skin tune, color EQ and numerous user interface improvements.

ACDSee Photo Studio Mac 9 is available now for $89.99 as a special launch promotion. The retail price increases to $99.99 on November 23.

If you’re not using Mac, ACD Systems has a separate product available only on Windows, ACD Photo Studio Ultimate 2023. We reviewed a recent version, Photo Studio Ultimate 2021. In that review, we concluded that it’s a capable all-in-one photo editing tool for amateur and enthusiast photographers. Since our 2021 version review, ACD Systems has added AI tools like AI Face Edit and AI Subject/Background Detection, panorama stitching, shape selection tools, improved file management, better masking using color and luminance information, performance improvements, color wheels, and much more. For more information on ACD Photo Studio 2023, click here.