Those are not only import and develop presets, but also export presets for the various uses my images find themselves needed for. I tend to use a bunch of my own presets when editing through my images from any particular shoot in Lightroom. I import, flag, classify, keyword, rank and cull images, then I develop using presets and produce an output for anything ranging from websites to prints or even books using a wide range of built-in modules for Lightroom.
Having been a Lightroom user for a few years now I have come to appreciate the Lightroom way of working. The Alien Skin program is definitely one up on Lightroom on that score.Īn important factor in the usefulness of any photo editing program is the way it fits into your workflow. Unscientifically I’d say that on my machine it’s about twice the amount of time that Exposure X takes to show me any random image from a rather large archive. Also I find that rendering an image fully at 100% takes longer than I’d like in Lightroom with standard previews as my usual option. This slows things like rendering previews down a bit. A drawback to the catalog system is that it requires a fair bit of RAM which means that it has less available to process with. That said I did find that Exposure X was pretty nippy on loading images it found on my main external drive when pointed to look at what I have in there. Exposure X doesn’t have that kind of power. As much as it is reviled by many photographers, the Lightroom catalog is a very useful thing.
#Alien skin exposure x plus
Plus there’s the ability to move the catalog from one computer to another regardless of where the images it catalogs live, also with things like smart previews you actually don’t even need to have the original images present to make edits to them. Personally I’m not a huge fan of that method because with the Lr catalog you get much more centralised and powerful digital asset management tools, such as metadata presets, key wording and processing application presets at the point of importing. It also doesn’t use a massive catalog like Lightroom does, instead it uses a sidecar folder within the folder you point it to look at in the folders section, so there’s no importing process. Everything is done on one user interface that looks a lot like Lightroom. One of the unique selling propositions of Exposure X is that unlike Lightroom it doesn’t have different Library or Develop modules. But not quite, so don’t get too excited just yet. What you’ll find now with Exposure is a program that not only converts RAW images from numerous camera makers, but also does it in a completely non-destructive way. Since then it has grown up significantly as an image editing app, morphing closer and closer to Lightroom, not only in terms of its layout, but also in what you can do with it (apart from simulating film).Ī few days ago they released Exposure X which is not just a plug in for Adobe editing programs anymore, but is now also a stand-alone image editor that incorporates much more than the film simulations it started out offering years ago. I recall writing a review of one of the earliest versions of the film simulation plugin for Photoshop many years ago.
Alien Skin’s Exposure program has been around for quite a long time.