Review by The Technologist

I am a novice by all meaning of the word when it comes to digital photography and photo editing, but I find CyberLinks Photo Director 6 easy to use and easy to get amazing results without much effort.

The program is broken down into several tabs: Library, Adjustment, Edit, Slideshow and Print. Library organizes and imports files. Adjustment has two settings, presets and manual. The multiple presets allow the user to choose from a number of built in color and photographic effects. The manual adjustment allows the user to have full control of the picture from a number of top level adjustments: White Balance, Tone, HDR Effect, Level, Curve, HSL / Color, Split Toning, Detailer and Lens Correction with multiple slider adjustments under each category providing unlimited image modifications. Some categories have an button to adjust the setting automatically. Sometimes the automatic setting needs a little bit of tweaking, but for the most part they are very good. Using the manual adjustment settings the user can also crop or straighten the image as well as provide red eye and spot removal as well as create a manual, radial, or gradient mask or for regional adjustments. If you like a particular setting that was created it can be saved as a user preset so it can be used again.

The Edit tab provides a number of tools to enhance photos of people using the multiple People Beautifier settings such as toothbrush, eye blinger, skin smoothener, skin tone, wrinkle remover and body shape. I found the skin smoothener and the wrinkle remover to be pretty effective, while having fun with the body shape to make buxom beauties. The Photo Effects are pretty minimal and probably should have just been made as presets. The Object Removal section is pretty cool, especially the Content Aware Removal is quite amazing. It does a great job of removing an object and replacing it with the background. It somehow interpolates what should be there and creates it. Smart Patch will replace one part of the picture with another as a simple way to fix a section of the picture. Extract or Compose allow removing a subject from its background as well as layering composite pictures. I have not yet played around with this feature yet, or the Photo Merge features such as Bracket HDR, Panorama or Face Swap. There is also a Tool to add a Watermark to the picture, which includes templates. The slideshow Feature allows the creation of .mp4 slideshows that can be shared on YouTube or saved to an output folder on the computer. The Print tab allows the pictures to be printed to just about any number of pictures to a page it is highly adjustable.

At any point a photo or photos can be exported to a folder or shared on Facebook. One thing I don’t like about Photo Director 6 is that it only gives two export format options, either .jpg or .tiff. Most photo editing programs have a multitude of output formats, but not Photo Director. In any event, I found this program the easiest photo editing program I ever used and had the most fun using it.