Cyberlink PhotoDirector 9 Ultra: Complete Photo Editor For Travel, Landscapes and Portraits

A good program from a popular manufacturer. Considering the abundance of features, it does take some time learning the program's capabilities. Installation is a breeze on a Windows 10 Spring 2018 (ver. 1803) edition in my case. The program hasn't crashed, even when multi-tasking. Customer Service, I would grade adequate. I can detect when I am dealing with someone with limited English reading/ writing skills. Communication for Technical Support is strictly email based. Needless to say, I have created a lot of emails under one Ticket number.

This is a very rich and dynamic photo-editing application. Do not expect to be an expert right out of the box. You will want to experiment and play with it, and yes, definitely download the user manual.Photos can be manipulated with precision details, but there are presets available for those who don’t want to master the fine points. For instance, I had happy results using a tweak that with one click brightened some photos I took on a day when there was a lot of dust in the air, creating a haze. They weren’t my favorite photos, not ones I was going to print enlarged, so spending just a few seconds on them was just what I wanted.So I would give five stars to the application itself. I have to deduct, though, for how it is being advertising as a product you can use to “improve” the appearance of women. One whole section of its packaging covers distorting women’s images. They take photos of lovely women and talk about cutting these women up to make unnatural Barbie dolls out of them. For instance, they suggest disfiguring a woman’s face to “achieve a slimmer, perfect V-shaped face.” First of all, who decided a woman is defective if she doesn’t have a “V-shaped” face and why V-shaped? And why would you want a picture of a woman that doesn’t look like the woman you took the picture of? If you don’t care about her, don’t take her picture and get out of her life. But to say a woman you care about needs to have her face distorted in order for her to be worthy is sick and twisted.It goes on. They show another “before” picture of a woman with beautiful eyes. She appears to be smiling, with slight laugh lines. Oh, no! We can’t have that. They suggest enlarging her eyes (I am not making this up, they actually say that) and removing her “eye bags,” which she doesn’t have, and the “after” picture leaves her face looking like it was molded out of plastic, totally non-human. How is this better?And then there is the “before” picture of a beautiful woman with a lovely figure. They tell how they removed “unwanted sagging or bulges.” The “after” picture again shows unnatural, nipped-in, plastic results.Why are there no pictures of improving/distorting images of males? What about all the bald heads and jowls and hair growing out of ears? Pot bellies? Wildman eyebrows? Huge noses? Receding lip lines and disappearing lips? Bad skin? Hairy hands? Beady eyes? Hair don’ts? Shaving fails? Saggy pants? Bad posture? I could go on and on. (Yes, I know boys will be freaking out and leaving vulgar comments about how no one is allowed to criticize males, only females, and I have stepped over the line -- it's okay, I never read them). If it’s okay to mutilate women’s images to fit an unrealistic and non-human standard, we must set requirements to improve boys’ appearances as well.

A bit of a learning curve here as this product has so many features it takes a little time to become comfortable. That said, overall a really great product and worth the money for anyone looking to improve the quality of their photos.

Bought the boxed version to avoid internet connection ,even after connecting to net the program refused to activate ,tried everything from reinstalling to turning of windows defender ,In the end the program refused to work even in trial version ,Cyberlink support is the worst ,It does not have easy steps at all , and the laughing matter is you have to buy a package of $30 to talk ......are they kidding ???..may be Amazon is selling the trial version ??......spent two hours today and did not help will try one more time before it hits the garbage .two weeks later still no resolution........complete waste of time more important than the money spent on the software .......

Still don't care much for it.

This is as close to a perfect software as can possibly be. Have been using it close to 6 months and dont have one complaint especially for the price.

After using this software for a few days, I have mixed feelings. I have not tried all of the features yet, but will report on what I have tried. First let me say that no software can keep promises like this one does: "Perfect Portraits Every Time." You cannot turn a lousy photo into a good one.The Adjustment section provides a lot of standard tools for adjusting the color, exposure etc. The Global Adjustment tools worked well and easily. You can do the same thing in Irfanview (Freeware), but not nearly as easily.I start having issues when you get to the Regional Adjustment Tools. For example, in Spot Removal, there is a clone tool. The only available shape is round. You can adjust the feathering and opacity, but for some reason at 100% opacity it's not 100% opaque. Not even close. I had unexpected opacity issues with other tools as well.The masking tools work well and almost as expected. You can mask with a brush or as a selection. But you can't use a brush within a selection.The Edit set of functions brought out what I consider a fundamental flaw: there is no global selection feature. You should be able to select a portion of the image and then do stuff to that portion without affecting other parts of the image. Instead they opted for an inconsistent set of selection tools. For example in Object Removal, there is a function called smart patch. I use this to remove a couple of small vehicles in the distance of the photo and it worked pretty well. Don't expect to use this on large objects. The brush is strictly a manual circle brush with a size option. There are no feathering or opacity options, which might come in handy in some cases. The Background Removal tool has a similar functionality. But the brush option also gives you a "Intelligent" choice, making it similar to Photoshop's Magic Wand tool. It works really well! There is also a lasso tool.So why aren't these features available in the other tools? Why have an intelligent brush in one tool and a stupid brush in the other tools?Another minor annoyance if you are used to working with two monitors: you cannot organize your workspace or undock toolbars, other than to project a full-screen copy of your image on the second monitor.Enough ranting. I tried the Panorama tool and was pleasantly surprised at how well that worked. There are many other features I have not tapped into yet.Since Adobe has priced itself out of the market of mere mortals, I guess this is a good deal for the amount of features it has.I have not tried other Adobe alternatives to compare yet. I notice on the Cyber website that you can download a free trial. I highly recommend that before purchasing to see if it does what you need.

Excellent !!!