Alien Skin Exposure 2 Photography Plug-In

The Bottom Line

Alien Skin Exposure is a plug-in designed to accurately simulate the look and feel of film in your digital photos. Exposure comes with a number of presets to imitate the appearance of Velvia, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, GAF 500, TRI-X, Ilford, and many other film types. It also offers controls for tweaking the color, tone, focus and grain of your photos. Through these settings, you can develop your own signature style and reproduce traditional darkroom effects. Being a plug-in, it runs inside a host program such as Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, or Fireworks.

Pros

• Simulates the look of popular film stocks, including many that are no longer available.
• Provides extraordinarily realistic film grain simulation.
• Users can easily save their own custom presets to use on another computer, or to share with others.
• Hybrid CD includes Macintosh and Windows versions, plus a 50-page manual. Now Universal for Mac.
• There's an online forum where you can share presets or get help from other users and the developers.

Cons

• Price increase and stricter host requirements from Exposure version 1.
• Note: All 'cons' from Exposure 1 have been addressed in Exposure 2.

Description

• Exposure simulates the look of traditional color and black and white film stock, including many discontinued films.
• Offers more than 200 presets for Fuji Velvia, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, GAF 500, TRI-X, Ilford Delta, Polaroid, and many more.
• Includes special presets for recreating darkroom effects, push processing and cross-processing techniques.
• Custom controls for color, tone, focus, and grain let you make sophisticated adjustments.
• Grain can be larger than one pixel, irregularly shaped, and randomly spaced to mimic the subtle features of real grain.
• Grain can be adjusted independently for different strengths in the highlights, midtones, and shadows.
• Option to create output in a new layer allows for non-destructive editing. Compatible with Photoshop CS3 Smart Filters.
• Preview can be toggled on or off for comparison, or you can view before and after results side-by-side in split preview.
• Scriptable through Photoshop Actions, unlimited undo/redo, save and share custom settings, keyboard shortcuts.
• Requires Photoshop CS2 or later, Photoshop Elements 4 or later, Fireworks CS3 or later, or Paint Shop Pro Photo XI or later.

Guide Review - Alien Skin Exposure 2 Photography Plug-In

Alien Skin Exposure was designed for professional photographers who have used film for years and are now going digital. I am not a professional photographer, so I'm not familiar with the film types that Exposure is trying to simulate. However, I do know that Alien Skin has a long history of making excellent plug-ins, and if they say they did detailed microscope analysis of real world film stocks to accurately simulate them in Exposure, I believe them. But I didn't just take their word for it; I have done a lot of research and Exposure comes highly recommended by pro photographers.

Exposure comes with presets to imitate the appearance of real world film stocks. It also offers controls for tweaking the color, tone, focus and grain of your photos. Using these, you can develop your own signature style and reproduce traditional darkroom effects such as Lomo, Daguerreotype, glamour shot softening, and so on. Custom settings can be saved as a preset and shared with others.

The adjustments you can make in Exposure were developed for a photography workflow. For instance, color saturation can be adjusted independently for the red, green, and blue channels, and toning can be manipulated separately for contrast, shadow, midtone, and highlight. With Exposure you can do advanced black and white conversions, digital toning, color filtering, and advanced sharpening and softening.

Exposure 2 brings user interface enhancements and many new film stock simulations, including the much-desired Fuji Velvia 50. Other new film stock presets include Kodak Ultra Color 100UC, Fuji Superia Reala, Polaroid, and the now-extinct Agfa Scala, and Polaroid Polapan.

Whether you're an old school photographer nostalgic for the look of film or someone who's only known digital, Exposure can bring a unique quality and new variety to your digital photography.