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ACDSee Photo Studio also costs $99.99 one-shot, and Corel PaintShop Pro lists for a one-time price of $79.99. For Adobe Lightroom, you pay $9.99 per month as long as you want to keep using it. That's a $29.99-per-month ($129.99 per year) plan that includes all of CyberLink's media software along with plug-ins, content packs, and 100GB of cloud storage.īy comparison, Photoshop Elements costs a one-time fee of $99.99. Another subscription option is to get the full Director Suite 365. A $54.99-per-year (often discounted) or $14.99-per-month subscription called PhotoDirector 365 gets you the photo program along with frequent updates, content packs, and 50GB online storage. The subscription options are a little different. You can bundle PhotoDirector together with our Editors' Choice-winning consumer video editor, PowerDirector, for $169.99. The non-subscription version of the app is called PhotoDirector 13 Ultra, and it has a list price of $99.99.
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Though all the additions could be considered feature-creep, the program remains impressive in both its usability and breadth of capabilities.
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And unlike Photoshop, it has nondestructive workflow and collection organization features. Still, it goes beyond Lightroom with drawing tools, face-beautification tools, blur, and cartoon effects. But PhotoDirector lacks some powerful features Lightroom and Photoshop have, such as Subject Select and geotagged maps. You even get some impressive AI-powered image abilities like style transfer, content-aware removal, sky replacement, people masking, as well as with GIF animation. You get Photoshop-like tools such as adjustment layers, masks, text kerning, and guided edits.
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PhotoDirector does, however, give Adobe a run for its money in terms of photo workflow and image editing. We highly recommend PhotoDirector, though our Editors' Choice photo applications remain Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Elements.
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