Longtime Photoshop plug-in maker Exposure Software (formerly Alien Skin) now offers Exposure X7, a full photo workflow and editing application in the tradition of Lightroom. In fact, the program bears a striking resemblance to Lightroom, though with some important differences. Exposure is notable for interesting presets, layer support, a blur tool, and overlays including borders and light leaks. The latest version includes auto-correct, chromatic aberration correction, improved masking, and geometry tools. Its interface, photo-organization features, and editing toolset can’t match Lightroom’s, but it saves you on subscription payments. Despite that, most photographers would be better served using Exposure as an addendum to Lightroom for its special effects.
How Much Does Exposure Cost?
You can get Exposure either as a standalone app for $129 or bundled with the company’s Snap Art filters and Blow Up enlargement software for $149. Upgrades cost $99 and $89, respectively. No subscription is required or even offered. You can try out the software free for 30 days with no credit card info, which is more generous than Adobe’s seven-day free trial.
For comparison, you pay $9.99 per month for Lightroom or Photoshop for as long as you want to use the software. Capture One costs more than Exposure at $299 (one-time fee), while Luminar is significantly cheaper at $49. CyberLink PhotoDirector sits in the middle at $99.
Setting Up Exposure
When you run the installer, you have the option to install the software as a plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom in addition to using it as a standalone. The program requires Windows 10 or 11, or macOS 10.13 or later. Regardless of platform, you need a 64-bit version and 8GB or more of system RAM. The program took up a reasonable 260MB right after installation on my Windows 10 PC with a 3.4GHz Core i7 CPU and 16GB RAM.
On first run, the program checks your GPU setup for using graphics acceleration. It then shows you a mostly empty interface with links for online video tutorials and ways to get images into the app.
The Exposure Interface
At first glance, Exposure resembles Lightroom, but there are some important differences. First, there are no modes for different operations like organizing, developing, and sharing. The organizing panel is always on the left, with editing tools and metadata on the right (unless you’re in full-screen photo view). 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. Adobe for some reason makes zooming less convenient than it needs to be. 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. A History panel shows you all your editing steps and lets you undo up to any point.
The full-screen view omits the title bar and taskbar, and you can use a two-monitor setup, as well as customize panel locations. You can choose preset workspace layouts for Culling, Editing, and Retouching or create your own custom workspace with the panels of your choice. These workspaces serve the same function as Lightroom’s modes, which are much easier to get to from buttons atop the window, where in Exposure you have to dig through menus to switch views.
The interface does not support high DPI displays well. Text and controls were tiny on my QHD BenQ monitor. Another interface peeve is that Ctrl-F doesn’t search as it does in most other programs (even Lightroom) but puts the program in full-screen mode. In fact, you only get a search bar in the Culling workspace.
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, more than 400 in all. It didn’t choke on newer formats such as .CR3 from a Canon EOS R, .NEF from a Nikon Z 7, and .RAF files from FujiFilm’s X-T4. It couldn’t yet handle images from the Z 9 or Sony’s a7 IV. Those formats are very new at the time of writing, but Lightroom can work with them.
Raw import quality looked more natural but less detailed than what you see in Adobe Lightroom. You don’t get Lightroom’s choice of rendering profiles (Color, Portrait, Vivid, and so on), but there’s a choice of the Standard raw profile or you can create a custom DCP file for your camera using color cards and Adobe’s DNG converter.
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. Keywording is basic and is found down in the Metadata section of the right panel. I’m impressed that Exposure recognized my keywords and keyword sets after importing a Lightroom catalog of images.
The program lets you create Collections, and the app can also 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. New since my last review is a Haze Level slider, which is effective at both removing and adding haze, though it tends to remove detail and darken or brighten areas too much. There’s also a LUT (see below) for haze that produces more pleasing results. You can copy settings to use them on other photos, but it’s not available in a right-click option; you need to go up and find it in the deep Edit menu, where it’s the 18th choice out of 29.
Like most photo software—including DxO PhotoLab, Capture One Pro, and Luminar—Exposure now offers an Auto correction tool. You can adjust the strength of its corrections, which tends to be subtler than what you get from similar tools—not a bad thing. I’m happy to see this helper added since my last review of the program, though the tool wasn’t very effective. This kind of feature requires the company to analyze a huge amount of sample images, something Adobe is more able to do.
The Tone curve tool lets you finely adjust the brightness level for each of the RGB color channels separately or all at once. The result is you either correct an image’s lighting very accurately or produce wacky, psychedelic color effects.
Noise reduction works similarly to how it does in most other photo editors: You adjust a slider to reduce luminance and color noise. It works well, but as in most apps, the result loses detail, especially if you use the Smoothing slider. No other noise reduction tool I’ve seen can come close to DxO PhotoLab’s DeepPrime noise reduction. In the same control group, there’s now an Add Fine Texture setting, which mostly seemed to just add new noise to my test photos.
Like Lightroom, Exposure includes profile-based Lens corrections, and it had no trouble finding my Canon 80D and popular lenses. For a fisheye image from an 8mm Samyang lens, it didn’t find the profile automatically, but it had one, though that didn’t correct the perspective warp very effectively. A slider lets you adjust the geometry correction, but for the 8mm, even that was not effective.
The program now includes corrections for chromatic aberration or color fringing. You find these in the Lens correction section, and you can either use the camera-and-lens profile to apply corrections automatically or choose manual sliders for blue and red. The Defringe tool gives you even more color options to remove from edge distortion.
In my test shot, the profile corrections’ vignette correction was disabled, though there is a separate Vignette tool group.
The Crop interface now includes Transform tools that let you change a photo’s vertical and horizontal axes, rotate (but not automatically), and adjust X and Y offsets. It doesn’t have an equivalent of Lightroom’s Upright tool, which automatically corrects skewed lines. Nor does it have auto-leveling, though you can use a guide rule to make a horizon level.
Effects and Layers
Exposure is loaded to the brim with effect Presets. These presets 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. The program also has LUT support, with some useful included LUT filters for things like day-for-night and golden hour.
You can do more with layers, too, such as select gradients, both circular and linear, and use 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. You can use a luminosity (aka luminance) gradient tool that selects photo areas based on brightness, like those found in Lightroom and Skylum Luminar.
New mask selection tools arrived in the X7 version, but they’re far from as easy to use as Adobe’s Select Object and Select Subject tools in Photoshop and Lightroom. Selecting a subject involves opening the Draw Mask section in the right-side panel, choosing Polygon Include, and then tapping some points around the edges of the object you want to select. Adobe’s tools, by contrast, simply find subjects or objects without you having to do anything. In my tests with Exposure (I chose blur for the test layer type), the selection wasn’t perfect, but you can move the dots to improve the selection, or limit them based on hue, saturation, or luminance.
Alternatively, you can select using markers, which are somewhat more automatic. With markers, you tap spots within the area you want selected and the program finds edges of the object to form the selection. This method, too, resulted in a less-than-perfect selection in my tests. You can either select a mask type (blur, dodge, clarity, etc.) or make adjustments that only take effect in your selection mask once you’re happy with it. The large library of Presets are fair game for your selection as well as the adjustment sliders. For some reason, however, anything that converted to black and white wasn’t restricted to the selection but took over the whole image, though you can use the Saturation slider to get black and white on just the selected areas.
Along with the abundance of presets, you get a few sections on the editing panel that you won’t find in Lightroom: Overlays, Focus, IR, and Bokeh. Overlays applies borders and light effects such as light leaks and textures in layers. These effects 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 similar slider offers more control and 16 presets. IR is a single effect that can add halation and fog.
Sharing and Output
I like Exposure’s right-click Quick Export options for getting your images onto popular photo sites like 500px, Facebook, Instagram, SmugMug, and Twitter. For 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, Exposure provides printing, with controls for margins and pixels per inch. 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 X7’s busy interface includes a wealth of effects and adjustments, and the lack of required subscription fee will appeal to some photographers. Exposure has added several useful capabilities since our last review, too. But Lightroom Classic, the PCMag Editors’ Choice winner for professional photo workflow software beats it out with better usability, more organization tools, superior raw file conversion, and more effective lens-based geometry corrections.
