Review by SevereWX

Installation was easy and glitch free, and did not take long at all. I enjoy the smooth installation processes like this that don’t make you jump through a bunch of hoops just to get started.

The program runs okay, but seems a tad on the sluggish side, even on an i7 processor with hyper-threading and 6 gig of ram.

This seems to be Cyberlink’s answer to Adobe Lightroom, which I use extensively for all my NEF (RAW) photo processing, cataloging, and publishing. In that respect, I admit a fair amount of bias towards Lightroom as it is what I’m well versed in using and used to using on a daily basis. For someone who has never used Lightroom, Cyberlink PhotoDirector 6 Ultra is a viable alternative that is well worth consideration. It is very easy to use and you can get very similar end results using either one.

The only issues with Cyberlink PhotoDirector 6 Ultra I’ve run across is how it specifically handles NEF files from my D300 and D610. There is slightly more noticeable color banding than what Lightroom gives, and significantly more than what Nikon’s own Capture NX-D software gives. I would also give the Nikon Capture NX-D software the edge in noise reduction.

Here’s the thing though, this is a 3rd party software no matter what brand camera you use. In the case of Nikon DSLR’s, any of the advanced in-camera settings you use such as Active D-Lighting, lens correction profiles, long-exposure noise reduction and so-forth are completely ignored by anything but Nikon’s own proprietary software. You can emulate some of those things in post-processing, but not all of them. One must take this into account when choosing what to edit your raw files with, if for no other reason than time and convenience.

Overall this is a very competent program that might suit the student, casual, and amateur photographer’s needs better than less comprehensive packages out there.