Alien Skin is a company focused on producing very high end and useful software plugins.  Two of my favorites from Alien Skin have always been Exposure for the remarkable film emulation filters, and Bokeh for the focus control.  Now, Alien Skin has chosen to merge both of these into one super plugin in Exposure 6. I’ve been beta testing Exposure 6 for the last month or so and I must say, it is the fastest and most streamlined version of Exposure that I’ve used.  Of course, one would imagine and expect this to be the case with any new software release, but when considering the merging of two very powerful and RAM hungry programs in Exposure and Bokeh, I’ve been impressed how well my meager machine has handled the new version.

(click to see a full sized screen shot)

Not a whole lot of difference on the surface compared to Exposure 5, which in my opinion is just dandy as I’ve felt the last update made the whole program much more seamless and user friendly.  Any presets you’ve built over the years are quickly and easily transferred over automatically.  You still get hundreds of grouped film presets in color and black and white with full control of hue, saturation, luminance, tone, curves, grain, and embellishments like scratches, borders, infrared adjustments, light leaks and now bokeh. While similar, Alien Skin does list improvements for Exposure 6 as follows:

• Creative Focus Effects (see Bokeh, which used to be $199 on its own!)
• Instant Previews (fast refresh for previews as you hover over presets)
• Improved UI (slight tweaks, but similar to 5, which is really good in my opinion)
• Basic Control Panel (easy to understand, intuitive sliders, curves and the like)
• New Borders, Light Effects and Textures (borders, light leaks, dust and scratches)
• Retina Support (now supports Apple’s Retina displays)

If you’ve used Bokeh in the past, you’ll know how cool it is. You can apply out of focus rendering from a variety of famous, bokeh producing lenses, or modify your own.  You can apply this rendering to a selection or, as shown above, use the handy radial or planar region masks to quickly apply the blur to areas outside of your protected region. Regardless of how often the Bokeh portion is used, the fact that it now comes built in is pretty killer. What used to necessitate purchasing two plugins, now requires only one.  I’ve found Exposure 6 to be, by far, the best version of Exposure that Alien Skin has produced.  Kudos guys.   Exposure, like many other preset plugins, offers a quick, manipulatable and repeatable workflow tool which can be very useful for event, studio and fine art shooters.  I love it and it has been my go to for many color and black and white treatments over the years.  A great program that is now both more powerful and cheaper than it has ever been. You can find Exposure 6 on Alien Skin’s website HERE.  Available as an upgrade to Exposure users for $69, and the lowest full retail price I’ve seen for any exposure release at $149, you can also download a full free trial via the link above. Thanks for the read.  I’d love to see images you’ve run through Exposure over in the Flickr Group HERE, or find me on Facebook and Twitter. Happy shooting, Tyson