Not to make excuses for my folly, but like many people I learned the software through trial and error, and stuck with the features I like. There may be more things I don’t know about in Alien Skin Exposure X4. Alien Skin Exposure can render grain more realistically by altering its appearance in the shadows and the highlights. Many plug-ins can simulate grain, but most do it either randomly or equally in all density areas.
Render grain differently in shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. Exposure X4 adds your indicia automatically upon request, including information from image metadata if desired.ĥ. Adding a watermark protects your ownership and usage rights. I don’t do this often, but many people do. Watermark photos when exporting or printing. ASX4 can automatically populate folders into Smart Collections using data that you specify. Oh, I have a great system for filing files finding them again is where I break down. There are only a couple animals that are worse than I am at filing and retrieving images, and one of them is named Zippy the Chimp. Organize image files into Smart Collections. To indicate which effect is moveable, AS has overlaid the familiar hand icon (you can see it in the screen shot above if you squint).ģ. In X4 you can move the blotch around to meet your artistic needs. Reposition film fog and lighting effect overlays.Īdding that fogged-film look to your creation is sometimes fun, and even the older versions of Exposure did it well-but the fog and flare always appeared in the same absolute location. Exposure X4 can correct most distortion and includes handy tools that allow you to rescale the image before cropping.Ģ. When a large object like a building is photographed by a camera that is tilted off vertical access, the image is distorted. Okay, weak joke, but you immediately get the drift. Here is what I didn’t know Alien Skin Exposure X4 can do.īuildings everywhere have been falling over backwards for this feature. But when it comes to Exposure, Snap Art and other Alien Skin applications, I’ve never had a crash, lock-up, memory leak or laggard processing time.
In fact, there are a few out there that I never want to install on my sandbox PC again. Some can do cool things, but either crash or otherwise abuse system resources. Here’s the deal I play with many, many different pieces of software and many of them suck.
Exposure X4 from Alien Skin does everything you’d expect from a high-end editor, things like PSD support, Mac and 64-bit Win compatibility, integration as a PS plug-in, etc., and it does everything fast. And it provides an intuitive side-by-side image comparison view that lets you make choices easier than some other systems. If you have reasonable knowledge of-or curiosity about-past emulsions and want to recreate them, this is the place to go.
The strength of this non-destructive editor is its film emulation. Priced at $149 it’s not a casual purchase, but the cost is reasonable for what you get, and competitive in the marketplace.
It’s sold on a subscription-free basis and they have a free trial offer (it’s always a good idea to try before you buy). With significant emphasis on file classification and organization, X4 includes features like Smart Collections that help keep your image library orderly. I’ve been using Exposure in its progressive incarnations for a long time, so I was really surprised to learn that it has powers I never knew.Īlien Skin Exposure X4 is a powerful Raw editing platform that is replete with useful tools and more than 500 valuable presets. But I thought I had a pretty good handle on Exposure X4 from Alien Skin. What I don’t know would fill a 300TB hard drive, that’s for sure.