This is an in-depth review of the Alien Skin Exposure X3 software for culling, managing and post-processing images. A couple of weeks ago, Spencer wrote the first article of our “Lightroom Classic vs. Other Software” series. In his article, he compared Lightroom to Alien Skin’s Exposure X3. I’m following his article up with a more detailed take on Exposure X3. Here I will dive a little bit deeper into the user experience I have had with the program while using it…
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Lightroom Classic vs Alien Skin Exposure X3
In the coming weeks, we are planning to review many Lightroom alternatives at Photography Life and figure out which ones are potential replacements. The first on our list is Alien Skin Exposure X3. This software, originally a film simulation plugin for Lightroom and Photoshop, has grown to a standalone software that mimics Lightroom’s post-processing and organization options in many ways. This article covers the differences and similarities between Adobe Lightroom CC Classic and Alien Skin Exposure X3, including which one…
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Lightroom 6.14 vs CC 7.1 vs 7.2 Performance Comparison
Adobe Lightroom is known to be a disappointingly slow post-processing tool, especially when it comes to basic operations such as importing, preview generation and image culling, as well as more advanced operations that involve using features such as spot healing. Adobe’s development team is aware of these issues and the company says that it is committed in delivering updates that will make Lightroom faster. The latest version of Lightroom Classic CC 7.2 has been delivered a couple of days ago…
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What is GPU Accelerated in Lightroom?
A while ago, Adobe finally added Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Acceleration to its Lightroom post-processing software. It was exciting news, as many photographers could not wait to take advantage of their fast GPU cards in order to speed up Lightroom, which was getting painfully slower with each new release. Unfortunately, GPU acceleration turned out to be a painful feature for many Lightroom users overtime, because they either saw no benefit at all, or saw very few improvements of it in…
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Switching From Lightroom to Capture One Pro
It seems only a short while ago when I was undecided on the RAW processing software that would replace Lightroom. I shortlisted several potential alternatives – Capture One Pro, RawTherapee, DxO Optics and Darktable among others – but was able to try out only Capture One Pro properly. A demo version 10 of Capture One gave me 30 days to test it, after which I was able to continue evaluation by signing up for a beta copy of version 11.…
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Why Capture One Cannot Replace Adobe Lightroom
Many photographers, including our team at PL, have been frustrated with Adobe’s latest move to discontinue the standalone version of Lightroom, something Adobe said it would not do in the past. As a result, a number of us (including myself) have been looking for alternative post-processing tools that can replace Lightroom completely. For the past few years, I have owned Phase One’s Capture One Pro software, which I found to be very capable when it comes to post-processing images. Some…
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Adobe Makes It Difficult to Get Lightroom 6
A friend of mine texted me with a question on how he can upgrade from his Lightroom 5 copy to Lightroom 6 this weekend. He told me that he was frustrated with his online Adobe experience, since he could not find the standalone version – every search lead him to the Creative Cloud (CC) subscription model, which he did not want to buy. I immediately thought that he was simply overlooking something, so I decided to give it a quick…
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Five Easy Steps to Improve Your Photos via Post-Processing
One of the most frequently asked questions I often get at Photography Life, is related to post-processing images. Specifically, our readers want to find out how they can make their images look good without spending too much time post-processing them. After-all, not everyone has the skills or the patience to learn how to use the many different tools in different software packages like Lightroom and Photoshop. I thought of things that I normally do to my images when I want…
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Lightroom Before and After
When editing a photograph in Lightroom, it is often useful to compare what the image looked like when you started out (the “Before”), to the changes you have made so far (the “After”). This way, you can keep track of your edits and understand how the different sliders and check marks within Lightroom affect your image. Thankfully, Adobe made it easy to switch between the Before and After screens and provided a number of different ways to view both vertical…
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Snapshot vs Virtual Copy in Lightroom
Have you ever wondered what the difference is between a snapshot and a virtual copy in Lightroom? They are both options that you can use to preserve image settings, but they work in very different ways. A while back I posted an article and video titled how to create a Lightroom snapshot that briefly explained what a snapshot is. We’ve also posted an article about virtual copies before. In this article, I want to explain the differences between a virtual…
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