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Today the CyberLink [URL="http://dpnow.com/8429.html"]public beta[/URL] programme for version 3 of its photography workflow and image management solution, PhotoDirector, ends and in a couple of weeks time the final product will become available.

If you haven't heard of PhotoDirector before, you will hear a lot more about it from now. I was given a demo of PhotoDirector 3 yesterday by CyberLink's Volker Maxisch and I have to say I was very impressed. The previous version of PhotoDirector is a very close imitation of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, for a fraction of the cost. For that reason alone PhotoDirector was a very interesting product, if not a headline one. But version 3 is packed with new features that build on the previous version and clearly differentiate it from Lightroom.

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CyberLink has not only improved the tools already present in version 2, but added many new ones, most notably the kind of tools that would previously have forced the user to use an external editor, like Photoshop, to complete projects.

PhotoDirector 3 has area selection facilities and object extraction tools, as well as enhanced smart cloning tools. You can also import and blend additional images. CyberLink doesn't claim that PhotoDirector 3 has layers control, but some of these tools could function in Photoshop and similar traditional editors using layers.

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[I]One feature I'm looking forward to using is the PhotoDirector 3 watermark tool that looks to be a massive improvement over Lightroom's, and let's you automatically show metadata fields like shooting information and copyright messages.[/I]

I'm not trying to review PhotoDirector here, but I was impressed enough to want to bring this software to people's attention as it genuinely looks like a photography workflow tools that Adobe will be eyeing cautiously.