First Look: ACDSee Gemstone Photo Editor 12 Beta

In summary
Only available as a public beta download for Windows users at present, Gemstone appears to have been designed for photo enthusiasts who want extensive editing capabilities but prefer to carry out their own file management. By our estimate, it offers a good selection of tools that will suit most photographers but doesn’t quite provide the extensive range offered by Photoshop.
Like its main competitors, it supports non-destructive editing (which lets you undo adjustments at any time up to a certain point) and offers raw file processing for a surprisingly wide range of proprietary formats. There are also some good online tutorials available when you’ve signed up to help you navigate the various functions.
Gemstone looks like an interesting application and worth a look for anyone who doesn’t want a program with integrated file management that takes over cataloguing the user’s image files.
Full review
On 30 June 2021, ACDSee launched a beta version of its new Gemstone image editing software ‘with the goal of gaining the photography community’s feedback and support before officially launching the product’. The company already has a tried-and-proven photo editor, ACDSee Photo Studio, which we reviewed in April 2020 and has recently announced an update, Photo Studio Ultimate 2021, which we will be looking at in the near future. So why go to the trouble of producing a new application?
The box shot of the up-coming ACDSee Gemstone application. (Source: ACD Systems International.)
Key features of the Gemstone application include the following:
- Carry-over of popular features from other ACDSee software, including Light EQ, Frequency Separation, Path text, Pixel Targeting, Colour and Tone Wheels and the Liquefy Tool.
- Comprehensive Layers support for non-destructive adjustments and effects plus the ability to go back to tweak them at any time.
- Multiple selection tools for applying edits to discrete parts of the image.
- Automatic adjustments for adjusting lighting and colour plus manual Exposure, Levels, Auto Levels, Tone Curves, Light EQ, Dehaze, Dodge and Burn tools..
- Sharpening, Noise removal and enhancement, the Detail Brush, Blur and Clarity tools.
- Crop, flip, resize, rotate and liquefy tool plus adjustments for correcting perspective, barrel and pincushion distortion.
- Red eye removal, skin smoothing and chromatic aberration corrections.
- Adding watermarks, vignettes, a tilt-shift, special effects, a grain effect, and drawings.
- The Print dialog box enables users to add text to images that will be printed, with optiosn for adding captions, headers and footers and create custom print layouts that can be saved for future use.
- Custom print formats can also be created and saved. These can include the size of the images for printing, the size of the margins and the positioning of images on each page as well as the number of prints in a job for a specific printer.
Users can also add details by saving layered images to the default *.acdc file format, which makes all layers accessible for future edits. Gemstone also supports 64-bit Adobe Photoshop plug-ins, although not 32-bit plugins.
New features include the MDI (Multi Document Interface) interface which allows users to have multiple documents open at once; view or edit in a split view or child view. The inclusion of ACDSee RAW provides a dedicated interface for editing RAW files using Tune, Detail, Geometry, and Repair tools. Providing support for more than 500 camera models (including GoPro .GPR files but not Canon C-RAW, compressed Fujifilm X-trans RAW, DNG.RAW and the raw files from some of the latest cameras) the interface includes Presets and History panes.
Missing features appear to include batch processing and direct output to social media – both of which are available in Photo Studio. Also missing is a way to combine layers selectively, which means focus stacking isn’t supported.
Who’s it For?
Only available as a public beta download for Windows users at present, Gemstone appears to have been designed for photo enthusiasts who want extensive editing capabilities but prefer to carry out their own file management. By our estimate, it offers a good selection of tools that will suit most photographers but doesn’t quite provide the extensive range offered by Photoshop.
Like its main competitors, it supports non-destructive editing (which lets you undo adjustments at any time up to a certain point) and offers raw file processing for a surprisingly wide range of proprietary formats. There are also some good online tutorials available when you’ve signed up to help you navigate the various functions.
Gemstone looks like an interesting application and definitely worth a look for anyone who doesn’t want a program with integrated file management that takes over cataloguing the user’s image files. (Our experience is than many ‘asset management’ programs make images more difficult to find and, hence, they can be very frustrating to use.)
A lot will depend on how ACD Systems decides to price this application; in our opinion it will need to be well under the US$149.99 asking fee for the Lifetime License for ACDSee Photo Studio since it’s a much simpler application. We’re not sure a subscription plan would work for a product like Gemstone, especially when there are plenty of rival programs available and some of them are being offered at discount rates. The freeware application, GIMP, is another competitor – particularly for those who seldom need to resort to Help resources.
We can’t publish ratings for this product without knowing whether it represents value for money – and that means knowing how much consumers will pay for it. We reached out to ACD Systems for details of the expected release date for the final software and its anticipated selling price.
To date we have had no response but will add a footnote to this review (and an alert in our Newsletter) once we obtain this information. In the interim it’s worth knowing the Beta download will expire on 1 October 2021 so if you want to try it out you should get in well ahead of that date. The developers welcome input from users during the Beta trial period.
Installation and Set-up
Currently Gemstone is only available as a download from the ACDSee website. It’s a 135MB file for Windows and once installed, it opens with the Home Screen shown below.
The initial Home screen (top) when the application is first opened. As the user opens new files or starts new projects thumbnails are displayed in the lower section of the page making it easy to continue working on previously opened projects.
The top toolbar on the home page is pretty standard for an image editor with tabs for File, Edit, Document, Layer, Select, Filter, Tools, View, Window and Help. Below it the workspace splits into two sections, with a data panel on the left and a larger area on the right with four tabs: Photo, Web, Paper and Custom. These are largely self-explanatory.
The Photo tab provides nine templates for popular print sizes; the Web tab does much the same with 10 templates for images that will be viewed on different internet platforms (such at Instagram, Facebook and YouTube). There are 23 templates in the Paper settings, covering popular paper sizes but only two for the Custom settings: Default and Last Used.
The Photo Workspace
Images can be opened by clicking on File> Open or double-clicking on a thumbnail on the Home page. Either way, the image opens to fill the space; adjustments can be made via the settings provided in the top toolbar or down the left hand side of the pane.
The photo editing workspace.
Tabs along the top of the screen provide three viewing options: 100%, Fit Screen (the default) and Fill Screen. The illustration below shows them in order, top to bottom.
Display options.
Essential functions like Levels adjustment are accessed via the Filter dropdown menu, as shown below.
Selecting the Levels adjustment from the Filter dropdown menu.
The Levels dialog box.
The Selection and Layers tools provide similar functions to most editors. To use the Selection tool you have to select the Brush Selection Tool from the left hand panel and then use the options provided in the Select dropdown menu in the top panel It’s a bit more complicated than the tool in Photoshop but Gemstone has the advantage of letting you choose between a ‘marching ants’ selection brush or a coloured brush overlay.
The Brush Selection Tool in use.
Once an area has been selected it can be saved as a new adjustment layer, opening a wide range of subsequent adjustment options.
The New Adjustment Layer adjustment options.
The Colour EQ and Light EQ functions in the Filter dropdown menu are essentially the same as their equivalents in Photo Studio Ultimate. Colour EQ provides the same two modes: Standard and High Quality (the default). Light EQ provides selective adjustments for adjusting highlights, midtones and shadows as well as an Auto setting. Screen grabs of both are shown below.
Colour EQ.
Light EQ.
Sharpening tools are also accessed via the Filter dropdown menu using the Detail setting. As well as the expected Amount, Radius and Threshold sliders, there’s also a Mask adjustment and the option to use a sharpening brush on a selected area in the image. this facility is not found in Photoshop.
The sharpening brush in Gemstone lets users apply sharpening to selected areas in an image.
Raw file conversion is integral to the Gemstone application and we found it was able to open raw files from our existing cameras, including the Canon EOS 5D II, Olympus OM-D E-M1 II and Canon PowerShot G10 – but not the uncompressed raw files from the Canon EOS RP, nor the raw files from the Nikon Z fc, which we were reviewing at the time. Support for Fujifilm raw files is also limited, which isn’t unusual as many third-party developers have problems reverse-engineering raw files recorded with cameras that use X-Trans sensors.
The user interface for raw conversion is similar to that provided in Photo Studio and supported raw files open immediately when loaded into Gemstone.
Gemstone’s user interface for raw conversion.
Adjustments at the user’s fingertips include the standard brightness, contrast, saturation and clarity sliders as well as sliders for tuning highlights, adding a fill light and dehazing. Separate tools are provided for white balance fine-tuning, along with the Light EQ and Colour EQ functions and a series of colour wheels in case further options are desired.
Like most image editors targeted at amateur users, Gemstone provides a range of special effects – also in the Filter dropdown menu. They’re part of the Add sub-menu, which also includes watermarking, vignetting, tilt-shift perspective adjustments and grain effects. We weren’t particularly impressed by any of the effects, although the other options could be useful at times – especially the watermarking tool for protecting images that will be posted online.
UPDATE 11 August, 2021.
A representative from ACD Systems has advised us ‘Gemstone will be released Late Fall/Early Winter. Pricing is not disclosed at this time.’ We assume this means it will be released in the 4th quarter of the year. We’ll keep you posted.
SPECS
Hardware: Intel or AMD processor with 64-bit support
Systems compatibility: Microsoft Windows 7 (SP1), Windows 8, Windows 8.1, & Windows 10 (64-bit editions only)
Display support: DirectX 10 compatible graphics adapter; 1024 x 768 display resolution (1920 x 1080 recommended)
Disk space requirement: 2 GB of available hard disk space
Minimum RAM: 4 GB RAM (8 GB RAM or more recommended); 512 MB Video RAM (VRAM)
Supported image formats: JPEG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, BMP, GIF, ACDC, PCX, PNG, PSD, Targa (TGA), Wireless Bitmap (WBMP), Google WebP Image (WEBP)
Raw formats not supported: Canon C-RAW, compressed Fujifilm X-trans RAW, DNG and some recently-released cameras
Computer interface: Internet connection and registration are necessary for required software activation and access to online services
Batch processing: No
Export to social media: Not directly
Mobile device support: No
Expiry date: 1 October 2021
Distributor: International Inc.