One excellent new feature that comes with 365 is the ability to access a stock image library from Shutterstock, for free. This is where Adobe Lightroom still has an edge. Our main (admittedly minor) issue is that it’s easy to over-work an image too, and while there are some excellent guides in the app, the sliders can make drastic changes that are harder to balance out. Compare this to something like Affinity Photo, and it's night and day. When you’re purely enhancing images, PhotoDirector 12 really is one of the easiest programs on the market, and beginners will get a serious wow-factor in minutes, rather than hours. There are loads of masks and effects for adding additional texture and style to your images, and while many will be of limited use to most, you’ll find the light rays and lens flare features effective and simple to apply.

It also includes a skin smoother, a teeth whitener, a red-eye remover and a body shaper you can use to edit the subjects in your photos. The program offers tools for color management, background removal, and shapes. You can apply several standard edits to your photos, and if you’re just enhancing them, you’ll likely be working in the Adjustment and Guided tabs. Outside of these headline features, adjustments have been made to other areas of the editing experience. These effects feed more into any surreal or exaggerated images you may want to create, which is something CyberLink is keen to showcase with PhotoDirector 12. They’re great for things like making waves roll into a beach scene, but we struggled to make the animations look natural in many other circumstances. While it’s fun, we didn’t enjoy the animation effects as much. One example we created was making blossom float gently away from a cherry blossom tree, and while there isn’t a specific petal shape, we found that the oval or heart shapes worked well unless we increased the particle size dramatically. Dispersion is, for us, the standout - you can essentially add animated particle effects to your photos, to bring them to life. One definitely works more effectively than the other, although this very much depends on the starting image you’re working with.

The headline improvements for PhotoDirector 12's toolset are dispersion effects and image motion, along with powerful AI-driven cropping and background-swapping enhancements. CyberLink PhotoDirector 12 review: Features

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