Alien Skin Exposure X3 review

This review is based on use of Exposure X3 and a beta version of Exposure X3 Complete Workflow Update for Mac.

Introduction

We’ve reached the point with image editing software that most basic features are covered. Correcting for exposure, saturation, and other settings are the expected baseline, which means applications need something more to differentiate themselves.

Some, like Skylum’s Luminar or Serif’s Affinity Photo (see Review: Affinity Photo 1.5.2 for desktop), are competing on price, along with the fact that they don’t require subscription plans.

Add to the mix Alien Skin Software’s Exposure X3. It’s competitive on price—$149 on its own, or $199 for a bundle that includes a couple of the company’s utilities, with no subscription—but it also includes several unique features that demonstrate the company is willing to tailor the software experience to how its customers use the product.

Differentiation in organizing

Like Adobe’s Lightroom family of products, Exposure X3 is both an image editor and an organizer for managing your photo library. You can preview thumbnails, rate and flag photos, assign keywords, and fill in basic IPTC metadata such as Title, Caption, Copyright, and contact information.

People who capture many images at a time and need fast turnaround will appreciate Exposure X3’s ability to import from multiple connected memory cards at once. You can rename files at import, specify custom destinations (and create presets for folder structures), and apply keywords and metadata during the ingest process. What it doesn’t do, surprisingly, is let you preview thumbnails of what’s coming in to cull shots before they’re copied to disk. It also doesn’t let you specify how to treat Raw + JPEG image pairs; you get both shots as separate images.

 

Reviewing photos is aided by Exposure X3’s Quad and Six layout views, especially when you have several photos from the same capture burst where the subject is similar in each one. Four or six adjacent images in your library are displayed in a grid so you can compare differences between them, such as the expression on a person’s face. (There are also options to compare two or three images at a time.) If one stands out, you can pin it to the screen and compare it to others. The views are synchronized, so zooming in on one zooms them all at the same location in the image 

An important distinction about Exposure X3’s asset management features is that they’re directory-based, not catalog based. Applications such as Lightroom and Apple’s Photos keep track of where your photos are located on disk—sometimes all within the same library file or folder, set up by the software—and store metadata and edits about the images in a central catalog.

The advantage to this approach is that, as long as you continue to use that application to manage everything, all that data is more easily accessed by the software. You don’t need to worry about managing files, because the application does it for you. On the other hand, it means the metadata and edits don’t live with the image files. If you move an original Raw file on disk to a new location, for example, any edits you made would not go along with it. And in the case of Lightroom, moving the file in the Finder or Windows Explorer confuses Lightroom because it’s lost track of the image.