Alien Skin prepares to ship Exposure 5, previews new features
posted Monday, April 29, 2013 at 12:45 AM EDT
The folks at Alien Skin Software announced a new release of Exposure, their film photography simulation app that also functions as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom. Briefly previewed on the Alien Skin Software blog, Exposure 5 is set to arrive this June, and brings with it a significant user interface overhaul.
New, Lightroom-esque darker theming and collapsible Preset and Editing panels help you to focus on the image you're editing, and a new visual preset browser lets you preview the effect of presets on your image before you apply them, saving you both the time of stepping through presets one at a time, and the hassle of remembering which presets work best for a given type of picture. You can also filter the presets to show only a limited selection: either Color, Black and White, your favorites, user-created presets, and those you've applied to an image recently.
The changes aren't all skin-deep, though. Exposure 5 also adds new textures not present in the previous release, and offers more fine-grained controls that let you adjust and apply borders, dust and scratch effects, and light leak effects separately. There's also a Randomize tool that gives you different results every time, a handy way to give yourself an interesting starting point for a unique result.
Pricing for Alien Skin Exposure 5 will be set at right around US$200, unchanged from that of the current release. Customers who've purchased /Exposure 4 from March 2013 onwards will be entitled to a free upgrade, while customers with older licenses will be able to upgrade at half the retail price. Unlike the previous release, which didn't officially support Aperture -- you had to manually configure it as an external editor -- the new release is also set to provide offficial support for Aperture 3, on top of the existing Photoshop CS5+, Photoshop Elements 10+, and Photoshop Lightroom 4+ support.
More details on the Alien Skin blog.
