Now, this is not normally a thing that photographers want to do, but when I scan film for found-film, I quite often find I’ve scanned it the wrong way and want to flip the photo. However, as I was experimenting with setting this up I discovered the one small negative point of Exposure X4 – it’s not possible to apply a horizontal or vertical flip to the image. One particular use case I have for my photo editing package is the ability to set up export pre-sets which automatically add a watermark which I use for the images on .uk, and I was glad to find that Exposure X4 offers this. As a user of several different cameras I was particularly impressed with the ability to sort by camera type although I suspect many of these options are available in Lightroom, I just haven’t looked for a long time. The trouble is Lightroom needs to be running in order to do that and of course, my licence had now been cancelled.Īt the bottom of the browse panel is a drop down selector with lots of options for sorting the displayed images.
After a bit of research on the Alien Skin website it turns out that it’s possible to export the catalogues, keywords etc from Lightroom and import into Exposure. One thing which wasn’t copied from Lightroom was the numerous collections which I’d set up to organise my photos over the years. It also seems as if some of the images have retained the adjustments I made in Lightroom, and also seem to have kept the image adjustment history! There is a Directory tab in the left hand panel, and all the images I had in my Lightroom catalogue were available as soon as I opened the relevant directory on the Mac. I also like the fact that I didn’t seem to need to import the images to make them available in Exposure. Although Exposure X4 doesn’t have such sophisticated metadata editing facilities as Lightroom, they suit my usage and are much easier to access, being on one of the tabs in the right hand panel. One of the downsides for me of Lightroom was the switching between Library view and the Develop module to add metadata and do the basic editing. So with that concern out of the way I started my evaluation of the rest of Exposure.įor a start, I like the single workspace view of Exposure X4. I tried it on a number of photos with deep shadows and the performance seemed to match Lightroom to my eye.
The first plus was that the new version of Exposure seems to have fixed the noise problems with the shadow recovery.
So, with the software downloaded, installed and running on a 30 day trial, these are my initial impressions of Alien Skin Exposure X4. In Exposure X4 however, that was one of the listed improvements, so I downloaded a copy to evaluate and see what sort of improvements have been made. I remember looking at the previous version Exposure X3 earlier in the year and had been very impressed with it other than one problem When the shadow recovery slider was used I found the noise level pretty bad.
Once I had cancelled Lightroom I considered switching to ON1, but there were a few downsides which I wanted to avoid, so I looked at Exposure X4 instead.
I discovered in March that cancelling a subscription is not a free option and fortunately I was quick enough to avoid the charges I would have faced.
I was looking through my inbox when I found an email from Adobe stating that my Adobe Photographer’s subscription would be renewing automatically a couple of weeks ahead of the renewal date on October 30th, so I quickly logged in to my account and cancelled before the automatic renewal could take place. Although I had planned to cancel Lightroom in November, in the end I cancelled it on October 30th and in quite a hurry.