Ashampoo Photo Commander 15.1

Creating pro-looking slideshows out of your photo collection is probably the best way of sharing and enjoying your best memories. Ashampoo Photo Commander offers you all the tools you need to edit, enhance, and put together in a stunning video – complete with transitions, creative effects, and your favorite soundtrack – all your best shots.

In terms of functionality and outcome this slideshow creation tool is probably one of the best of its category. When it comes to usability, though, the program’s interface and workflow design offer ample room for improvement. Intuitiveness is not one of its strongest assets, which may deter potential new users from choosing Photo Commander against some of its competitors. Its somehow cluttered and counterintuitive interface reflects, however, the program’s extensive functionality, which allows you not only to produce stunning slideshows, but also calendars, greeting cards, web albums, and collages, among other products. You can also take screenshots of your desktop, extract images from PDF files and MP4 videos, and add them to your projects easily. Maybe to compensate its usability issues, the app comes with a series of wizards that will help you perform some of its editing and creation tasks in a simpler and more straightforward way.

Unlike much simpler slideshow creation tools, Ashampoo Photo Commander offers an extensive range of editing functions and enhancing features that will help you produce stunning images and videos. Thus, together with all the image correction tools you would expect to find in a professional image editor, you can now also remove unwanted objects from your photos, adjust their perspective, add a color accent effect to them, turn 3D images into 2D, create miniature-like photos and panoramas, straighten the horizon line, clone selected areas, merge photos, and make use of its wide variety of effects to help you show your creativity. Note, however, that excellence comes at a price, not only in terms of dollars and cents, but also in processing time. The slideshow creation process may take a while to finish, and I mean a while, especially if you have applied a variety of edits and effects to a long list of images.

Photo Commander also includes tools to help you organize your collections. It supports EXIF and XMP metadata, custom tags to catalog your images using your own keywords, and even a duplicate finder to clean up your albums. It supports all the most common image file formats, RAW images included. It comes with an excellent preview window to play back your slideshows and with a dual-view mode to compare the original images with their edited counterparts easily. You can export your images in various ways, from PDF documents to multiple-page TIFF files, and from Photoshop documents to HTML web albums. You can also upload your works to the most popular social sites or e-mail them to friends and family without leaving the program.

Once you discover and try only a fraction of its many editing, enhancing, and image management tools, you will surely start wondering if Ashampoo Photo Commander’s main function is to create slideshows or if that’s just one more of its many features. Be patient with its unavoidable learning curve and its long processing times and you’ll be compensated with high-end professional results.