Longtime Photoshop plug-in maker Exposure Software (formerly Alien Skin) now offers Exposure X4, a full photo workflow application in the tradition of Lightroom.
In fact, the program bears a striking resemblance to Lightroom.
It's notable for a raft of interesting presets, layer support, a blur tool, and overlays including borders and light leaks.
However, it lacks Lightroom's auto-correct tools, chromatic aberration correction, and strong geometry tools.
That said, it also lacks Lightroom's subscription fees, which are anathema to many photo software users.
Pricing and Starting Up
You can get Exposure either as a standalone app for $149 or bundled with the company's Snap Art filters and Blow Up enlargement software for $199.
Upgrades cost $129 and $99, respectively.
No subscription is required or even offered.
For comparison, you pay $9.99 per month for Lightroom ($9.99/Month at Adobe) or Photoshop for as long as you want to use the software.
Capture One costs more, at $299, while Luminar is significantly cheaper, at $49.
CyberLink PhotoDirector sits in the middle, at $99.
Interface
At first glance, Exposure's interface resembles that of Lightroom, but there are some important differences.
First, there are no modes for different operations like organizing, developing, and sharing.
The program resembles Lightroom with its dark gray interface, however, featuring a panel on the left for the source and on the right for adjustments and metadata.
Exposure even uses the same exact triangle arrows for collapsing these panels.
Zooming is a simple matter of spinning the mouse wheel, which makes me happy.
Split views for before-and-after viewing are always an option.
A thorough set of keyboard shortcuts eases getting to many editing and viewing tasks.
The full-screen view omits the title bar and taskbar, and you can use a two-monitor setup, as well as customizing panel locations.
Import and Organize
The term import doesn't appear in the Exposure interface, but you can choose Copy Photos From Card from the File menu, or just navigate to a folder on your computer.
When I first opened the program, it already displayed a grid of images from my Photos folder, and you can have it watch folders for any added images.
Rating and editing images is possible before the whole import finishes.
One problem I ran into here was that only my main system drive's Photos, Desktop, and Pictures folders were accessible.
I couldn't get to a backup drive or my OneDrive cloud storage until I discovered that the unintuitively named Add Bookmark option was how you add folders.
Exposure doesn't put you through a separate raw conversion process when you open a raw camera file the way Serif Affinity Photo does—the images are just there, ready to be worked on.
The software supports raw files from most popular current camera models—over 400 in all.
My raw import quality looked more natural but less detailed than that of Adobe Lightroom.
You don't get Lightroom's choice of rendering profiles (Color, Portrait, Vivid, and so on), but there's a choice of process version (2017 or 2018) and a slider for intensity.
Changing either of these didn't affect my image, however, and there's nothing about it in the program's Support.
Longtime users may know the difference, but new users are likely to be puzzled here.
Exposure on the left, Lightroom on the right.
Click to zoom.
You can categorize your pictures with star ratings, color labels, and flags.
You can also search based on camera model, lens, and shot settings—something not found in all photo workflow software, including Lightroom CC.
Keywording is basic and is found down in the Metadata section of the right panel.
I am impressed the Exposure recognized my keywords and keyword sets from Lightroom.
The program lets you create Collections and can create Smart Collections for you, based on criteria such as ratings, camera, lens, f-stop—basically anything you can search for in the file.
You don't get any face-recognition or geo-tagging for organization, as you do in CyberLink PhotoDirector and Adobe Lightroom.
Adjusting Photos
Exposure's Basic adjustment panel is nearly identical to Lightroom's: sliders let you control exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks.
Clarity, Vibrance, and saturation adjustments are also available.
One big difference: There's no auto-correct.
Most photo software—including DxO PhotoLab, Capture One Pro, and Luminar—takes a stab at one-button picture perfection, with varying results.
Many pro photographers would say that that doesn't matter, but Adobe data has shown that far more photographers use automatic corrections than admit to it.
The Tone Curve tool lets you finely adjust each brightness level for each of the RGB color channels separately or all at once.
This lets you either correct an image's lighting very accurately or produce wacky, psychedelic color effects like that below.
Noise reduction works similarly to how it does in most other photo editors: You adjust a slider to reduce brightness and color noise.
It works, but, also as in most apps, the result loses detail, and sliding the Detail slider doesn't improve the situation.
No other noise reduction tool I've seen can come close to DxO PhotoLab's Prime noise reduction.
Like Lightroom, Exposure includes profile-based Lens corrections, and it had no trouble finding my popular Canon lenses, though it didn't correct a fisheye image from an 8mm Samyang lens very effectively.
A slider lets you adjust the geometry correction, but for the 8mm, even that was not effective.
A more important omission is the lack of any chromatic aberration or fringing correction.
Nor is there a dehaze tool, as offered by several competitors.
Finally, the profile corrections don't include vignette correction, though there is a separate Vignette tool group.
The Transform group of tools let you change a photo's vertical and horizontal axes, rotate (but not automatically), and adjust X and Y offsets.
But it doesn't have an equivalent of Lightroom's Upright tool, which automatically corrects skewed lines and even lets you draw a line that you want to make vertical or horizontal.
Effects and Layers
Exposure is loaded to the brim with effect Presets.
These can turn your image into a 1953 Kodachrome with scratches, a heart-shaped selective-focus shot, or a tooth-whitened and skin-softened portrait.
Some of the presets add multiple layers to your image, and you can go in and tinker with any of them.
You can also add layers to stack multiple presets.
Other things you can do with layers include selecting gradients, both circular and linear, and using brushes.
For the latter, you can choose from typically needed presets like burn, dodge, blur, clarity, and contrast.
Gradients let you use any of the program's adjustments for lighting, color, and details.
There's no luminosity (aka luminance) gradient tool that selects photo areas based on brightness, like those found in Lightroom and Skylum Luminar.
Along with the abundance of presets, however, there are a few sections on the editing panel that you won't find in Lightroom: Overlays, Focus, Grain, IR, and Bokeh.
Overlays applies borders and light effects such as light leaks, and textures in layers.
These will be welcomed by those who like to get artistic with their images.
The Focus controls let you apply blur, sharpening, and presets such as Glamour to entire images.
Lightroom has a Grain slider, but Exposure's offers more control and 16 presets.
IR is a single effect that can add halation and fog.
Performance and Help
Like Adobe, Exposure puts its help on the web, something I'm not crazy about, since you can't access it offline.
Even worse, there's no full help reference, and you may find yourself reading support articles for a product other than Exposure.
By contrast, CyberLink PhotoDirector and Corel PaintShop Pro include thorough help documentation.
During testing Exposure was reasonably responsive and completed most editing tasks without much delay.
For more measurable performance, I tested import speed with 175 raw images (a total of 5GB) from a Canon EOS 80D.
My test computer was an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card.
I imported from a Class 4 SD card to a fast SSD on the PC.
For this test, Exposure took 3:35 (minutes:seconds), very close to the field-leading Capture One, which took 3:30.
Lightroom Classic took 4:42, ACDSee Professional took 3:44 and CyberLink PhotoDirector took 3:49 for the same task.
Sharing and Output
I like Exposure's right-click Quick Export options for getting your images onto popular photo sites like 500px, Facebook, Instagram, and SmugMug.
For lots more control, the full Export dialog presents a full selection of file formats, renaming, resizing, and metadata options.
It also lets you add a watermark, choose a color space, and set output sharpening.
You can export to JPG, TIFF, and PSD.
Soft proofing is not an option in the program, but unlike Lightroom CC, Exposure provides printing, with controls for margins and PPI.
Also included are presets for contact sheet layouts as well as other commonly needed sizes—5 by 7, 4 by 6, and so on.
You can also create custom layouts and watermarks.
Down-to-Earth Photo Editing
Exposure X4's very familiar and attractive interface (which could easily be mistaken for Lightroom's), wealth of effects and adjustments, and lack of required subscription fee will appeal to some photographers.
But Lightroom Classic, the Daxdi Editors' Choice for professional photo workflow software beats it out with better organization tools, superior raw file conversion, and more effective lens-based geometry corrections.
Cons
No auto-correction tools.
Weak lens-profile corrections.
No chromatic aberration correction.
No face or geo-tagging.
View More
The Bottom Line
Photo-workflow application Exposure is similar to Adobe's Lightroom.
It boasts lots of filter effects, but it's missing some key capabilities, such as automatic image correction.
Longtime Photoshop plug-in maker Exposure Software (formerly Alien Skin) now offers Exposure X4, a full photo workflow application in the tradition of Lightroom.
In fact, the program bears a striking resemblance to Lightroom.
It's notable for a raft of interesting presets, layer support, a blur tool, and overlays including borders and light leaks.
However, it lacks Lightroom's auto-correct tools, chromatic aberration correction, and strong geometry tools.
That said, it also lacks Lightroom's subscription fees, which are anathema to many photo software users.
Pricing and Starting Up
You can get Exposure either as a standalone app for $149 or bundled with the company's Snap Art filters and Blow Up enlargement software for $199.
Upgrades cost $129 and $99, respectively.
No subscription is required or even offered.
For comparison, you pay $9.99 per month for Lightroom ($9.99/Month at Adobe) or Photoshop for as long as you want to use the software.
Capture One costs more, at $299, while Luminar is significantly cheaper, at $49.
CyberLink PhotoDirector sits in the middle, at $99.
Interface
At first glance, Exposure's interface resembles that of Lightroom, but there are some important differences.
First, there are no modes for different operations like organizing, developing, and sharing.
The program resembles Lightroom with its dark gray interface, however, featuring a panel on the left for the source and on the right for adjustments and metadata.
Exposure even uses the same exact triangle arrows for collapsing these panels.
Zooming is a simple matter of spinning the mouse wheel, which makes me happy.
Split views for before-and-after viewing are always an option.
A thorough set of keyboard shortcuts eases getting to many editing and viewing tasks.
The full-screen view omits the title bar and taskbar, and you can use a two-monitor setup, as well as customizing panel locations.
Import and Organize
The term import doesn't appear in the Exposure interface, but you can choose Copy Photos From Card from the File menu, or just navigate to a folder on your computer.
When I first opened the program, it already displayed a grid of images from my Photos folder, and you can have it watch folders for any added images.
Rating and editing images is possible before the whole import finishes.
One problem I ran into here was that only my main system drive's Photos, Desktop, and Pictures folders were accessible.
I couldn't get to a backup drive or my OneDrive cloud storage until I discovered that the unintuitively named Add Bookmark option was how you add folders.
Exposure doesn't put you through a separate raw conversion process when you open a raw camera file the way Serif Affinity Photo does—the images are just there, ready to be worked on.
The software supports raw files from most popular current camera models—over 400 in all.
My raw import quality looked more natural but less detailed than that of Adobe Lightroom.
You don't get Lightroom's choice of rendering profiles (Color, Portrait, Vivid, and so on), but there's a choice of process version (2017 or 2018) and a slider for intensity.
Changing either of these didn't affect my image, however, and there's nothing about it in the program's Support.
Longtime users may know the difference, but new users are likely to be puzzled here.
Exposure on the left, Lightroom on the right.
Click to zoom.
You can categorize your pictures with star ratings, color labels, and flags.
You can also search based on camera model, lens, and shot settings—something not found in all photo workflow software, including Lightroom CC.
Keywording is basic and is found down in the Metadata section of the right panel.
I am impressed the Exposure recognized my keywords and keyword sets from Lightroom.
The program lets you create Collections and can create Smart Collections for you, based on criteria such as ratings, camera, lens, f-stop—basically anything you can search for in the file.
You don't get any face-recognition or geo-tagging for organization, as you do in CyberLink PhotoDirector and Adobe Lightroom.
Adjusting Photos
Exposure's Basic adjustment panel is nearly identical to Lightroom's: sliders let you control exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks.
Clarity, Vibrance, and saturation adjustments are also available.
One big difference: There's no auto-correct.
Most photo software—including DxO PhotoLab, Capture One Pro, and Luminar—takes a stab at one-button picture perfection, with varying results.
Many pro photographers would say that that doesn't matter, but Adobe data has shown that far more photographers use automatic corrections than admit to it.
The Tone Curve tool lets you finely adjust each brightness level for each of the RGB color channels separately or all at once.
This lets you either correct an image's lighting very accurately or produce wacky, psychedelic color effects like that below.
Noise reduction works similarly to how it does in most other photo editors: You adjust a slider to reduce brightness and color noise.
It works, but, also as in most apps, the result loses detail, and sliding the Detail slider doesn't improve the situation.
No other noise reduction tool I've seen can come close to DxO PhotoLab's Prime noise reduction.
Like Lightroom, Exposure includes profile-based Lens corrections, and it had no trouble finding my popular Canon lenses, though it didn't correct a fisheye image from an 8mm Samyang lens very effectively.
A slider lets you adjust the geometry correction, but for the 8mm, even that was not effective.
A more important omission is the lack of any chromatic aberration or fringing correction.
Nor is there a dehaze tool, as offered by several competitors.
Finally, the profile corrections don't include vignette correction, though there is a separate Vignette tool group.
The Transform group of tools let you change a photo's vertical and horizontal axes, rotate (but not automatically), and adjust X and Y offsets.
But it doesn't have an equivalent of Lightroom's Upright tool, which automatically corrects skewed lines and even lets you draw a line that you want to make vertical or horizontal.
Effects and Layers
Exposure is loaded to the brim with effect Presets.
These can turn your image into a 1953 Kodachrome with scratches, a heart-shaped selective-focus shot, or a tooth-whitened and skin-softened portrait.
Some of the presets add multiple layers to your image, and you can go in and tinker with any of them.
You can also add layers to stack multiple presets.
Other things you can do with layers include selecting gradients, both circular and linear, and using brushes.
For the latter, you can choose from typically needed presets like burn, dodge, blur, clarity, and contrast.
Gradients let you use any of the program's adjustments for lighting, color, and details.
There's no luminosity (aka luminance) gradient tool that selects photo areas based on brightness, like those found in Lightroom and Skylum Luminar.
Along with the abundance of presets, however, there are a few sections on the editing panel that you won't find in Lightroom: Overlays, Focus, Grain, IR, and Bokeh.
Overlays applies borders and light effects such as light leaks, and textures in layers.
These will be welcomed by those who like to get artistic with their images.
The Focus controls let you apply blur, sharpening, and presets such as Glamour to entire images.
Lightroom has a Grain slider, but Exposure's offers more control and 16 presets.
IR is a single effect that can add halation and fog.
Performance and Help
Like Adobe, Exposure puts its help on the web, something I'm not crazy about, since you can't access it offline.
Even worse, there's no full help reference, and you may find yourself reading support articles for a product other than Exposure.
By contrast, CyberLink PhotoDirector and Corel PaintShop Pro include thorough help documentation.
During testing Exposure was reasonably responsive and completed most editing tasks without much delay.
For more measurable performance, I tested import speed with 175 raw images (a total of 5GB) from a Canon EOS 80D.
My test computer was an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card.
I imported from a Class 4 SD card to a fast SSD on the PC.
For this test, Exposure took 3:35 (minutes:seconds), very close to the field-leading Capture One, which took 3:30.
Lightroom Classic took 4:42, ACDSee Professional took 3:44 and CyberLink PhotoDirector took 3:49 for the same task.
Sharing and Output
I like Exposure's right-click Quick Export options for getting your images onto popular photo sites like 500px, Facebook, Instagram, and SmugMug.
For lots more control, the full Export dialog presents a full selection of file formats, renaming, resizing, and metadata options.
It also lets you add a watermark, choose a color space, and set output sharpening.
You can export to JPG, TIFF, and PSD.
Soft proofing is not an option in the program, but unlike Lightroom CC, Exposure provides printing, with controls for margins and PPI.
Also included are presets for contact sheet layouts as well as other commonly needed sizes—5 by 7, 4 by 6, and so on.
You can also create custom layouts and watermarks.
Down-to-Earth Photo Editing
Exposure X4's very familiar and attractive interface (which could easily be mistaken for Lightroom's), wealth of effects and adjustments, and lack of required subscription fee will appeal to some photographers.
But Lightroom Classic, the Daxdi Editors' Choice for professional photo workflow software beats it out with better organization tools, superior raw file conversion, and more effective lens-based geometry corrections.
Cons
No auto-correction tools.
Weak lens-profile corrections.
No chromatic aberration correction.
No face or geo-tagging.
View More
The Bottom Line
Photo-workflow application Exposure is similar to Adobe's Lightroom.
It boasts lots of filter effects, but it's missing some key capabilities, such as automatic image correction.