Ashampoo Photo Commander

Ashampoo (which takes its name from its disk cleaning utility, said to be "a shampoo for your disk") makes a wide range of software, from antivirus and ZIP utilities to photo editing. The company's Photo Commander application provides a decent toolset of image corrections and enhancements, but it hasn't evolved much since our last review except in terms of performance, batch processing wizards, and support for more file types. Its interface remains less polished than those of competitors like our Editors' Choice winner for enthusiasts (as opposed to professionals), Adobe Photoshop Elements. Photo Commander also offers fewer advanced tools than you get in competing products such as Corel PaintShop Pro and ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate.

Pricing and Requirements

Photo Commander is available as a direct download from Ashampoo for $55. That's about half the price of the market-leading Adobe Photoshop Elements and most other full-featured photo programs. Photoshop, our Editors' Choice winner among photo apps for professionals, ends up costing hundreds or thousands of dollars over the course of a few years since it requires a subscription. Capture One costs just $299 one time. The closest in price is PaintShop Pro, which you can get for $69.99, though that's purely for image editing and not photo collection organizing. Ashampoo also sells the $33 Photo Optimizer, a program that promises to improve your pictures in one click.

The software runs on Windows 11 or Windows 10 (64-bit). The installer file is a 577MB download, reasonable as far as photo editing software goes. If you're willing to register your email address, you can try out the software with a free trial version that lasts 30 days.

You start by downloading and running Ashampoo Connect, the manager app for all the company's software, which then downloads and installs Photo Commander. During setup, the software asks if you want a light or dark interface. Most competitors just default to dark, which I recommend for photo editing. You also select your preferred language from 31 options.

A key choice at this point is whether you want to associate all image, audio, and video files with Photo Commander, which probably isn't advisable if you're just checking it out or have other apps for those file types. You can also choose to associate only image files or none, and when I chose the former, I got a bunch of error messages from Windows 11 Settings which reset the associations to the default Windows Photo app. Finally, you have the option to import content and settings from any previous Photo Commander installation you have.

You then get a welcome message explaining the interface sections, but it's not as thorough as the visual tutorials most photo applications provide.

Interface and Import

(Credit: Ashampoo/PCMag)

Photo Commander's interface is on the cluttered, cobbled-together side with buttons, text links, and menus everywhere. It's not hard to find what you need, however. You start out in a disk folder tree view. Here, the interface is divided into three areas, with a left-side Folder panel, Content in the middle, and Preview on the right. If you double-click an image in the center, it enlarges to take up most of the program window in Quick Fix mode. You can resize the three panels horizontally, and Folder can switch to When, Where, and Filing views. That last one lets you drag and drop to add or remove image files. Once you're viewing a photo, the program shows large mode selections below the small standard menu entries across the top left. It's not the slickest interface, and some elements look too small even on a 4K monitor.

The mode choices are Common, Quick-Fix, Objects, Create, and Organize. Most programs have that last one in the first position, since that's usually how you start. To get back to the folder view, you press the left-most button, Home. It's a strange arrangement. Most programs with modes have the mode buttons always showing. Undo and Redo arrows are joined by an Undo All Actions button for when you want to start over. To zoom in on and out of a photo you can simply spin the mouse wheel, which makes things easy. There's no 1:1 (or 100% viewing) button, but there's a menu choice and a right-click option for it. I like how file details are shown across the bottom, including filename, date, dimensions, and shooting settings like f-stop and shutter speed.

(Credit: Ashampoo/PCMag)

There's no Import button on the home screen or even on the Organize screen, but the File menu has an Import/Scan choice. The program supports raw camera files, though it didn't recognize some newer cameras' raw files. One nice thing is that you don't have to import to edit in Photo Commander. You can simply pick an image from the folder to start. That's especially helpful considering that the Import option doesn't let you select a subset of photos to import—it's all or nothing. It does, however, let you rename the files using a pattern and choose a destination folder for them.

In terms of performance, Ashampoo Photo Commander has improved somewhat in the last several years. It's reasonably responsive on a decently powered PC. But some operations still make you wait too long, like when navigating large folders of images, using the tilt-shift effect, and detecting duplicates.

The program is weak when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. It doesn't make much use of single-key shortcuts for common editing activities the way most competitors do. For example, the shortcut for crop is Ctrl-D, whereas more helpful programs use just the C key.

The full-screen view option is decent, letting you play a slideshow, rate (more on this option momentarily), or compare photos.

One final interface note is that Photo Commander doesn't use its own icon in its Taskbar entry, but rather a tiny thumbnail of the photo you're editing. Frankly, I think using a consistent program icon is more helpful, but this is hardly a deal-breaker.

Organizing

Along the bottom of the photo preview window are options that let you five-star-rate (yes, that's the only amount of stars you can choose, and there's no Reject option for bad photos), keyword-tag, and title your photo. After doing so, you can search based on that text in the center Home view panel. Photo Commander can identify a photo's location from embedded GPS data, which most smartphones include in a photo's metadata. But there's no integrated map view. You don't get a face recognition or people tagging option, either.

A beneficial kind of tool in Organize mode is Find Duplicates. You specify a folder and wait for a progress bar in the tool's dialog box to complete. It took longer than I expected when I tested it, though my folder contains some large raw camera files. This feature for finding duplicates tells you how similar photos are with a percentage, so it's actually analyzing the images.

Adjusting Photos

The Quick Fix mode has buttons for many of the commonly needed corrections and effects. I always like to try a program's automatic image correction first. Photo Commander gives you sub-options for just fixing color, contrast, skin, or noise. It didn't help much on a shot with a shadowed subject and bright background, and in general it tended to increase the contrast too much and make the tone too cool. But for cityscapes and shots with only slightly poor lighting, it did a nice job. One snow scene yielded an overly contrasted result after auto-optimization in my testing, however.

(Credit: Ashampoo/PCMag)

Tapping the Contrast/Colors option shows side-by-side before-and-after views of your photo, with sliders for both color and exposure along the bottom. I do like the Gamma control, which lets you change exposure in a realistic way because it bumps up brightness in a non-linear fashion (see the tutorial on Understanding Gamma). It's similar to what other programs call Exposure.

The big adjustments that are missing from Photo Commander are shadow and highlights. You can simulate them somewhat by working with Gamma and Brightness, but nearly every photo app I've used, even consumer products like Google Photos, has those adjustments now.

The half-sun button lets you set a white point with a cross-hairs cursor, a useful and effective tool.

The Effects dropdown shows thumbnails of your photo with Photoshop-style effects, such as blur, sharpen, and oil paint. There are some pleasing options in here, such as Radial Blur, Motion Blur, and six Vintage styles.

(Credit: Ashampoo/PCMag)

The program lets you alter a photo's geometry, but there are no lens-profile-based corrections for it. It corrects red pupils resulting from flash photography fairly well. And the clone-and-stamp tool removed blemishes as well as most photo software does now. There is, however, no chromatic aberration correction.

Ashampoo Photo Commander offers three levels of de-noising: fast, slow, and very slow. These last two really live up to their names! The de-noising results are decent, but not quite on par with what you get from higher-end apps like DxO Optics Pro and Topaz DeNoise AI.

The comparison image below shows Topaz DeNoise's result on the left, Ashampoo in the middle, and DxO PureRAW 4 on the right. The other two clearly preserve more detail than Ashampoo. I used its slowest and most thorough setting for this test.

(Credit: PCMag)

Special Effects and Drawing

Moving from photo-centric fixes and filter effects, the program also includes effects like tilt-shift and selective focus, and it lets you add text and object overlays. The tilt-shift tool, though, is slow and difficult to use effectively.

Text is well done, with a good choice of fonts, but you can't tilt text. This and objects, which include shapes, clip art, and drawing, are layer effects, but the program hides the complexity of layer editing. The limitation will be welcome to some, while others will want more control over layer editing, as you get in ACDSee Ultimate. Ashampoo does include the popular color-splash effect, where only one color is enabled in an otherwise black-and-white photo.

Create Mode, Sharing, and Output

In the Create mode, you can produce video slideshows of selected photos, HTML albums, calendars, collages, panoramas, cards, contact sheets, and Photo Mixes. Photo Mixes are overlays of photos that can take on an eerie, ghostlike effect. The program also has tools for creating GIF animations and multipage PDFs. These output options are ones you won't find in all photo software, and Ashampoo actually makes them easier to use than they are in Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Somewhat illogically, sharing functions are split between the Common and Organize modes. In the former, you can print, export PDFs, and send shots to Facebook, Twitter, and Ashampoo's own web host. In truth, when you share to one of the social networks, a link to Ashampoo-hosted images appears, rather than the photos being uploaded to the actual social network. I expect that most people would prefer a simple shared image, though Meta's policies make that difficult for software developers. In Organize you get options for email, disc, and HTML albums. Batch editing and renaming, as well as JPEG optimization, are offered in this mode, too.

Not Quite on Par With the Competition

Ashampoo gives you a good number of editing tools, but it lacks the polished interface and many of the more advanced tools offered by Adobe products. Photo Commander is intended as a lightweight Photoshop replacement, and it may well do everything you need, including simple drawing and text overlays. But professionals will want the full-power Photoshop tools. And even competitors like Corel PaintShop Pro and CyberLink PhotoDirector are more compelling and have better interfaces and tools like face tagging and lens-profile-based corrections. Our Editors' Choice winners among image-editing applications are Adobe Photoshop for professionals and Adobe Photoshop Elements for photography enthusiasts.