Seeing White PNGs in ACDSee

For those like me, who use ACDSee Photo Manager 9 for digital organisation (both photographs and digital scrapbooking elements), one frustration is that the background for transparent images (ie PNGs) is set to white. This means that if you have a white PNG, such as a chalk overlay or white wordart - you can’t see it against the white background.

ACDSee does allow the background colour to be changed. Here are the steps -

1. From the ACDSee Browser menu select Tools | Plug-ins | Plug-in settings.
2. In the ‘Plug-in Settings’ dialog, select the ‘Image Decode’ tab (this should be the first one already displaying)
   
3. From the plug-ins list scroll down to select ‘IDE_ACDStd.apl’ and click the ‘Properties’ button.
4. From the ‘About IDE_ACDStd’ dialog box change the background colour. Click on the colour itself to give you more colour selection choices - it will look like a rainbow.
5. ’OK’ this selection, once chosen.  Then ‘OK’ out of the Plug-in Settings dialog. Note this will change the background on all your images, so choose a colour which makes it easy to denote as the background such as bright pink or green. Else, once you’re previewed those pesky white pngs, change the colour back to white or perhaps a grey.
   

This works for PNGs with alpha channels - you will find that for some elements your background does not change at all.