Exposure X is an all-in-one photo browsing, organising and editing tool that concentrates on replicating classic film and darkroom effects but is also a very effective everyday image-editor, with fully non-destructive editing tools and support for virtual copies.
This project turns a regular color RAW file into a strong black and white image in Exposure X5. It uses a number of different tools so it’s a good chance to see how these work and how they can be used together. It’s also a good example the kind of image which works well in…
White balance and color corrections are basic image adjustments you’d expect to find in any photo-editing application, so let’s see how they are applied in Exposure X. We’ll use this interior shot of a boutique hotel as an example because it has some very serious color issues caused my the mixed lighting. The strong blue/purple…
This shot of an Icelandic church looked nice enough in color but I thought it had a bit more potential as a black and white image – though there were a few issues I wanted to sort out first. For this project I used Exposure X. The same tools exist in other programs, but I…
Preset Picks: This time, Alien Skin’s Border – Negative (Kodalith) preset goes under the microscope. Using just three tools it transforms regular images into super-strong graphic black and white.
The new LUTs feature introduced in Exposure X4.5 supports one of the newest trends in photography. LUTs (lookup tables) started out in cinematography as a way to apply a specific ‘look’ to a movie or scene, but they’re now catching on in stills photography too. They are like a basic conversion profile, or film simulation…
Adjustment layers started out in Photoshop as a way of altering the look of an image without actually changing its pixels. It was the start of non-destructive editing. Now, adjustment layers are everywhere, not just in Photoshop, and for me they are the key to successful image enhancements. There’s a second factor, though – layer…
One of the reasons I rate image effects programs so highly compared to traditional image editors is the way they open your eyes to effects you wouldn’t have thought of. Like applying the Lith Border effect in Alien Skin Exposure X3 to this early morning shot of a country church. There’s already a lot of…