Cyberlink PhotoDirector 4 Ultra review

As with most of the tools under PhotoDirector’s Edit tab, Content Aware Removal and Body Shaper are destructive processes, so it’s not possible to go back and readjust raw-processing settings afterwards. However, considering that this kind of editing is otherwise only available in destructive editors, it’s a fair compromise.

Dazzle your online friends with the Body Shaper tool, bury those feelings of self-loathing deep inside your heart and never leave the house again

PhotoDirector 4 is heading towards a favourable review, but there are other changes that we’re less happy about. The Tone controls have been updated, with the old and new versions bearing uncanny resembles to the equivalent controls in Adobe Lightroom. However, while Lightroom takes files from the old to the new processing engine one by one and with the user’s permission, PhotoDirector 4 automatically updates the whole lot, and there’s no going back.

Some photos looked better under the new raw-processing engine, but this one is definitely worse

Some photos looked better under the new engine but some looked worse, and they all looked different. For us, this is unforgivable. We want to be able to return to our photos and find them exactly as we left them, not subtly altered – even improved – without our knowledge, and certainly not degraded. It’s a bit like getting home and discovering that someone has broken in and redecorated. Cyberlink has told us that a future patch will fix this problem, but for the time being you’re stuck with automatic conversion.

We also found PhotoDirector 4 to be a little unstable. We can forgive the occasional crash, but it also had problems converting our photo library database from version 3 to version 4, repeatedly crashing at the end of this lengthy process.

We hope that Cyberlink resolves these issues quickly, but regardless, our confidence in PhotoDirector is diminished. Choosing a non-destructive image editor means making a long-term commitment, as switching applications is much more burdensome than with destructive editors because the edits are tied into the software rather than written to the media files.

We need an editor we can trust to look after hundreds or even thousands of hours’ work. Based on this update, PhotoDirector doesn’t warrant this trust. We’ll be trying out the patch to see if it fixes the problems, but until then Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 is the better editor and Adobe Lightroom 4 the better organiser.