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Software review: Nik Silver Efex Pro 3 gives the look of black and white film without the fuss

18 Oct

Nik Silver Efex Pro 3
$ 149 as part of Nik Collection 4

A few months ago we found a lot to like in the latest iteration of the Nik Collection, a suite of eight image processing tools initially developed by Nik Software and these days owned by French software company DxO. At the time, we looked at the overall suite with a focus on what was new. For this review, though, we’d like to take a closer look at just one of the suite’s most useful components, Silver Efex Pro 3.



Introduction

Nik Silver Efex Pro 3 is a black-and-white conversion tool that goes far further than the grayscale or black-and-white tools built into Adobe Photoshop. It allows users to simulate the look of specific real-world film types, manually tuning their color sensitivity and grain with an incredible amount of flexibility and precision. For less experienced users, a generous selection of presets are provided to get you started with minimal effort.

Silver Efex allows you to make a wide range of adjustments to brightness, contrast, structure and tonality, either globally or locally using control points. You can also apply color filters, reduce haze and finish your creations with toning, vignetting, borders and more.

Even at its default ‘neutral’ setting, Silver Efex Pro’s rendering is noticeably different to that of a simple grayscale conversion in Photoshop.
Click here for the full-sized Silver Efex image, here for Photoshop grayscale or here for full color.

Available immediately as part of the Nik Collection 4 bundle, Silver Efex Pro 3 can function either standalone or as a plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom and other compatible apps on both Windows 8.1+ or macOS 10.14+. (And as of the recently-released Nik Collection 4 version 4.2, this includes support for Adobe Photoshop running natively on Apple M1 devices.)

The overall Nik Collection 4 is priced at $ 149 for new customers, with upgrades available to existing customers for $ 79. That actually makes it around $ 50 less for the full suite than Silver Efex Pro 1 or 2 used to cost standalone.


What’s New?

Let’s take a quick look at what’s new in Silver Efex Pro 3. The biggest change is to the user interface, which has been completely redesigned with a far more modern look. Gone are the busy 3D-effect buttons, bevels and drop shadows of the Silver Efex Pro 2 UI, with the new version aiming to reduce distraction with a flatter, cleaner and more modern interface.

Compared to that of version 2, Silver Efex Pro 3’s interface is much cleaner and more modern.

DxO has also updated its U-Point control point technology to reduce visual clutter, significantly increase versatility and in the latest v4.2 release, bring a modest boost to performance as well. Control points can be grouped or renamed, saved for reuse in presets, and in Lightroom Classic can also be copied and pasted between images. Their individual sliders now appear in the right panel rather than directly on the image, and the luminance/chrominance values to which they respond can be tuned.

The company has also borrowed two features from its other apps to further extend Silver Efex Pro. It now boasts both the haze-busting ClearView slider from DxO PhotoLab, as well as the ability to add one of 39 black and white film grain types from DxO FilmPack. Both of these additions can only be applied globally, rather than via U-Point controls.


User interface and controls

Just like the other apps in the Nik Collection, Silver Efex Pro 3 can be used completely standalone and without the need for third-party applications.

Works standalone but it’s best used as a plugin

As a standalone app, Silver Efex can only open images in JPEG or TIFF formats, which rather limits its utility. Since it doesn’t support Raw files standalone, many photographers will instead want to pair it with other apps.

Standalone mode is very similar to plugin mode but without the bottom-of-screen status bar you’d use to apply changes as a plugin. Instead, you must use save command in the file menu.

As well as DxO’s own PhotoLab series, it can officially be used only with Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements 2020+, Lightroom Classic 2019+, Affinity Photo 1.8+ or, as of its v4.2 release, Capture One 21. Other applications may work to varying degrees, but aren’t officially supported.

For example, Exposure X6 works even for Raw files, first converting them to TIFF format, but functions as if Silver Efex had been opened standalone. You aren’t shown the status bar at the bottom of the screen, and instead must use the file menu to save your results. And prior to v4.2, Capture One didn’t work at all, appearing fine but failing to apply its adjustments in the final step.

The good news is that a free 30-day unlimited trial is available, so if you’re using an application that’s not officially supported with the Nik Collection, you can try them together first to see if everything works before paying.

A fair few presets keep things simple for beginners

The quickest way to get results from Silver Efex Pro 3 is to use one of its presets, of which there are a reasonably generous 58 in all. They’re separated somewhat haphazardly into five groups with not-so-informative names: Classic, En Vogue, Modern, Vintage and 25th Anniversary. You can also view all five groups together, filtering them to show only your favorites or the ten most recently-used presets.

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The presets are all shown atop the left-hand pane, along with your editing history for the current image. For each preset you’re shown a small preview based upon the image you’re currently editing. These are rendered very quickly, making it easy to simply scroll through the list and find the look you’re after, or a preset that will make a good jumping off point for your own creation.

You can’t permanently modify the 58 base presets, but you can create new custom presets which can be exported and imported to allow sharing with other photographers or across multiple workstations. Your custom and imported presets are each grouped separately from the base presets, so there’s no way to quickly access favorites from all three categories or to see them all as one scrollable list.

A vast selection of controls to tune results to your tastes

Of course, while presets are great for beginners who want quick results, more experienced photographers will prefer to capture their own artistic vision, not simply borrow someone else’s.

Silver Efex Pro 3’s control list is so vast that, even with just one control point active and on a 1080p display, the right pane is still almost 3500 pixels tall. The cropped screenshots above link to the top and bottom halves of the right pane, respectively.

Thankfully, Silver Efex Pro 3 offers a huge amount of control over your images courtesy of a whopping 50+ controls in its right-hand pane. And that’s just counting the controls which affect the entire image globally. If you add one or more of DxO’s U-Point control points to the image, you’ll unlock another dozen-plus sliders per point or group of points.

Not only global adjustments, but local ones too

Each control point you add to the image is indicated with a small donut-shaped mark at its center, and while it is selected, an outer circle appears showing the extent beyond which the effect will gradually be feathered away to nothing. This outer limit can be resized to cover the portion of the image you need.

For each point, there are also both luminance and chrominance sliders, and these help you to target specific areas of the image based on their brightness and color before the black and white conversion. If you dial both sliders down to zero, the control point will effectively become a graduated radial selection, instead.

The ability to group and rename control points is very handy. In this mask view, I’ve selected the taxi’s body with one group of control points, and the road markings with another group.

Once placed, multiple control points can be grouped together. You can also rename both individual points and groups of them, and when saving new presets you can choose whether or not control points should be included. Of course, once the preset is subsequently applied to a different image, you can adjust the point positions if they don’t quite match what’s needed from shot to shot.

A closer look at the global controls

The bulk of Silver Efex Pro 3’s controls are grouped under its global adjustments header, with subgroups including brightness, contrast or structure adjustment headers, as well as tonality protection.

Click here for the full-sized Silver Efex image or here for the original color image.

Brightness can be adjusted globally, or for the highlights, midtones and shadows. There’s also a dynamic brightness slider which tries to hold onto local contrast in the highlights and shadows will brightening or darkening the image globally.

For contrast, you have a choice of either the basic contrast slider or a soft contrast slider which aims for a less harsh effect with more diffuse transitions. There are also sliders to amplify whites or blacks alone.

Under the structure header, you get both the basic structure control and one for fine structure, as well as individual controls for structure in the highlight, midtone and shadow areas. And finally, the tonality protection section contains sliders to recover lost detail in just the highlight and shadow areas of the image.

Local adjustments get a subset of these global controls

The selective colorization slider lets you bring back a specific color range to your otherwise-black and white image using U-Point selections. Image uses Full Dynamic (Smooth) preset.
Click here for the Silver Efex image or here for the original color image.

Each individual control point or group of them also offers a subset of the controls from the previous section. Confusingly, they’re grouped rather differently to those for global adjustments, though. All but the dynamic brightness, soft contrast, tonality protection and high/mid/shadow/black structure sliders have equivalents for control points.

There’s also one extra control which is specific to the control points – selective colorization. This allows you to bring some of the color back into specific parts of your otherwise black and white image, and since you can have multiple control points, you can also bring back multiple colors if you wish.

Vanquish haze with the ClearView slider

The ClearView filter in Silver Efex Pro is quite effective, but can’t be targeted only at specific areas of the image, so can cause overly-contrasty foregrounds if pushed too far.
Click here for the full-sized default image, here for the ClearView image or here for full color.

One of the new features in Silver Efex Pro 3, inherited from DxO’s flagship PhotoLab application, is its new ClearView slider. Just like its PhotoLab equivalent, it’s very effective at recovering detail and increasing contrast in hazy backgrounds and other lower-contrast areas of your image.

I sometimes found it hard to push far enough though, simply because the areas of moderate contrast in my images would start to show too much contrast before the hazy background was fully recovered. I’d really like to see DxO allow ClearView to be paired with U-Point or some other form of localized selection in a future release to help in these situations.

Color filtering without the physical filters

With traditional black and white film, if you wanted to tune the response to individual colors of light you’d do so with filters attached to the front of the lens. For example, you might attach a yellow, orange or perhaps even a red filter to make a blue sky more dramatic, or a green filter to lighten foliage.

With Silver Efex Pro, that’s all achieved post-capture with no need to fumble for physical filters, however. Red, orange, yellow, green and blue filter presets are all provided, but if you prefer you can also dial in a specific hue in one-degree increments, and you can also control the strength of the filter from 0 to 200%.

Color filters can be simulated after the fact in Silver Efex Pro 3, so you can do things like darkening a blue sky with a yellow filter to help give the clouds more definition.
Click here for the full-sized unfiltered image, here for the filtered image or here for full color.

Simulate the look of real B&W film in two somewhat-contradictory ways

Silver Efex Pro 3 now offers two different tools to simulate the look of black and white film grain. The two can be used in concert together, but the division between the two tools is unnecessarily confusing.

Firstly, the film types tool lets you select one of 28 different film types and dial in your desired level of grain size and hardness. You can also control the film’s sensitivity in red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and violet channels, and adjust levels/curves. All of this is carried over from earlier version and is based on code from Nik Software, the original creator of the Nik Collection.

Through the new film grain tool, DxO now also lets you simulate the look of specific, real film grains based on the same algorithms it used to create its FilmPack plugin. In all, there are 38 film grain types on offer, including almost every black and white film type from FilmPack. For each you can adjust the intensity from 0 to 200%, and the grain size from 1.0 to 10.0.

The new film grain tool’s grain patterns have a very authentic feel, but unlike the earlier film types tool, it only handles grain simulation and forgoes any attempt to tune the film’s responsiveness to different wavelengths of light. You can, however, use both tools at once, in which case the new tool overrides only the grain pattern of the earlier one. (And you can, if you want, choose different film types in each section to, say, create a fictitious film with the light response of one film but the grain of another.)

Full-size, no-grain-added image.

A wide range of authentic-looking film grains are available in Silver Efex Pro 3. In order, these are 100% crops of the above image with no added grain, Fuji Neopan 1600, Kodak T-Max 3200, Ilford Delta 3200 and filtered Kodak HIE. All share the same Neutral profile and differ only in their grain selections.

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Finish your images with toning, vignetting, burnt edges and borders

Finally, Silver Efex provides four different categories of finishing adjustments: Toning, vignetting, burnt edges and borders. By default, these are one-click adjustments involving no more than making a selection from a list, but far more control is available if you want it.

For toning, you can not only select a color but also control strength, hue and toning for both silver and paper, and the balance between the two. For vignetting, you can adjust the strength of the vignette (which can either darken or lighten), as well as its size, roundness and center point.

For burnt edges, you control the size, transition softness and strength of the effect on all four edges individually. And finally, image borders allows you not only to choose one of 14 predefined border types, but also how thick the border is and how far it extends into the image. You can also adjust the roughness of the border, and provide a ‘seed’ number that the program should use when generating the random details in border textures.

The compare tools allow you to quickly toggle between before and after views, view the image with an adjustable side-by-side or under/over split, or see both before and after images together.

Before-and-after comparisons are quick and easy

View controls can be found at the top of the screen, and I found the comparison controls in particular to be rather handy. The leftmost of these toggles between the results of your current settings or the default black and white conversion, and holding the P key down achieves the same thing.

The central button splits the image in two either vertically or horizontally, and allows you to move the dividing line across the image to allow a careful before-and-after comparison anywhere within the image. And finally, the rightmost button gives you either side-by-side or under/over views of the full image.

The histogram tool allows you to highlight which image areas are within ten different luminance levels at your current settings, even in the loupe view. Note also the history panel at screen left.

The histogram tool is surprisingly handy, too

One last function I found to be particularly handy was Silver Efex Pro 3’s histogram tool, which sits beneath the loupe at the top of the right pane. It not only gives you access to RGB, red, green, blue or luminance graphs of your image, but also splits it into ten different luminance ranges.

For any of the ten, you can enable an overlaid pattern on the image, with the pattern color varying by the range selected. This makes it really easy to see which parts of the image share the same luminance, and I found it even more useful than the more-common technique of just highlighting the brightest and darkest image areas.

Click here for the full-sized Silver Efex image or here for the original color image.

Conclusion

It’s been more than a decade since Silver Efex Pro’s last major update and until just this year, it hadn’t been significantly changed since the suite’s original creator, Nik Software, was sold first to Google and then DxO.

A lot has changed in all that time, not only for Silver Efex itself but also in the imaging software market. Gone are the days when a plugin of its ilk could command the heady price of $ 200. These days you can purchase the entire eight-plugin Nik Collection for a much more reasonable $ 150, but sadly you can’t pick and choose which of those plugins you want to save even more.

Click here for the full-sized Silver Efex image or here for the original color image.

In its overhauled form Silver Efex Pro 3 is much easier on the eye than its predecessor, making it much easier to focus on your images. And while some of its new features sit a little awkwardly alongside earlier ones, once we got used to the differences between film types vs. film grain and global vs. local adjustment sliders, we found it to be pretty easy to use considering the level of control on offer.

Performance, while not mindblowing, is sufficient to prevent frustration. On my 2018-vintage Dell XPS 15 9570 laptop running Windows 10 version 20H2 and Nik Collection v4.2, most sliders update within a half-second or less of being tweaked, even those using U-Point controls to limit their effect to certain area of the image. Final renders can take perhaps 20-30 seconds, which again doesn’t feel unduly slow.

Click here for the full-sized Silver Efex image or here for the original color image.

And it’s hard to argue with Silver Efex Pro’s results. If you’re a fan of black and white photography and are willing to put in a bit more effort than simply clicking on a preset, you can get much more authentic-looking images than you would from the black and white tools in your camera or most all-in-one apps like Photoshop.

If you’re still using the previous release of Silver Efex Pro, its successor represents a no-brainer upgrade. As well as a nicer interface and more film grain types, you’ll also find the new ClearView tool and improved U-Point technology to be big improvements. And if you’re not already a Nik Collection user but want a solid plugin that can deliver realistically film-like black and white images, we’d definitely recommend giving the trial version a spin.

What we like:

  • Yields convincingly film-like results
  • Presets get beginners up and running quickly
  • Making and sharing custom presets is simple
  • Both global and local adjustments
  • Loads of controls to fine-tune the look you’re after
  • ClearView tool is quite effective at correcting haze
  • New user interface is cleaner and less distracting
  • More affordable as a suite component than its predecessors were sold separately

What we don’t:

  • Can no longer be purchased separately
  • No Raw support when used standalone
  • Presets feel rather disorganized
  • Film types vs. film grain tools are unnecessarily confusing
  • Ditto the differing global and local adjustment slider arrangements

Who’s it for:

More experienced photographers who want fine-grained control over their black and white creations, and who desire a convincingly film-like final result.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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List of Helpful Software For Photographers of Any Level

09 Jan

There is no doubting the fact that this year is going to be very competitive for photographers. This means that if you are not well-equipped with the proper software, there is a chance that your business may suffer. Many photographers don’t know how to remain competitive. They have yet to understand the fact that rendering top services requires some of Continue Reading
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Stellar Photo Recovery Software Review: An Easy Way to Reclaim Your Precious Photos

07 Dec

The post Stellar Photo Recovery Software Review: An Easy Way to Reclaim Your Precious Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Jaymes Dempsey.

Stellar photo recovery software review

Have you ever accidentally deleted photos or videos from your memory cards? Or, even worse, have you ever formatted your card, and only then realize it contained valuable photos or videos? 

It happens to the best of us. 

In fact, if you’ve never experienced either of the above situations, consider yourself lucky. Because while digital files are convenient, they’re all too easy to lose – and if you don’t have the right recovery software, those files will be gone forever. 

That’s where Stellar Photo Recovery comes in.

Stellar Photo Recovery software review

You see, Stellar Photo Recovery offers an impressive set of DIY recovery tools for photographers and videographers; according to the website, you can recover almost any file on almost any device. And you can purchase a package that lets you repair corrupted files, which is tremendously useful for situations where your photos or videos have been damaged. 

But how does Stellar Photo Recovery perform? Does it work as well as advertised? And how do you use it for file recovery? 

That’s what this article is all about. 

In it, I put Stellar Photo Recovery to the test, using some formatted memory cards of my own. 

And I share all my findings with you. 

So to find out whether Stellar Photo Recovery is a worthy purchase…

(Spoiler alert: The software works incredibly well!)

…keep reading.

Stellar Photo Recovery: Why might you need it?

Stellar Photo Recovery is a DIY recovery package, designed to help you find and recover lost photos, videos, and audio files.

But why, specifically, might you need Stellar Photo Recovery? 

Imagine you’re out taking pictures and fill up several cards. You go home, download all the photos to your storage drives, and then – as many photographers do – format every card in-camera. 

Moments later, you feel a dawning sense of horror, as you realize that you failed to transfer the photos from one of the now formatted cards.

At this point, your hard-earned photos are deleted, the card has been wiped, and your only real option is recovery software. 

That’s just one of the many ways you could accidentally delete photos and videos. You could also format a hard drive and realize it had photos you needed. Or you could stick a full memory card into your camera while out shooting, format it, then suddenly realize that you hadn’t transferred the previous photos over to your storage drives. Or you could clear a flash drive, then realize it had valuable media that you needed for a client. 

You could also end up with corrupted files thanks to faulty memory cards or old drives or viruses.

If you’ve been doing photography for a while, then you’re probably aware: 

This sort of thing happens all the time. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, then it will, because it’s just the nature of having lots of easy-to-wipe memory cards. You’ll make a mistake. 

And when you do, you’ll want to have software like Stellar Photo Recovery. 

Right off the bat, you’ll be impressed by the sheer volume of scenarios Stellar Photo Recovery can handle. You’ve got the option to recover: 

  • A whole host of image file formats, including Canon RAW files, Fujifilm RAW files, Sony RAW files, Nikon RAW files, Olympus RAW files, Pentax RAW files, Panasonic RAW files, JPEGs, TIFFs, GIFs, PNGs, and PSDs, plus quite a few others
  • Lots of video formats, including MP4, AVI, MPEG, AVI, 3GP, and so much more
  • Audio file formats, including MP3, WAV, MIDI, M4P, and AU

And you can do your recovery on a bevy of storage devices, including CF cards, SD cards of every kind, XQD cards, flash drives, HDD drives, and more (even if the drives are encrypted). 

Plus, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve deleted individual files or simply formatted the storage device, because Stellar Photo Recovery can deal with both.

Honestly, if you’ve lost any type of photo, video, or audio to deletion or corruption, Stellar Photo Recovery Software probably has you covered.

Using Stellar Photo Recovery: A simple, three-step process

Using Stellar Photo Recovery is incredibly easy. 

Once you have the software downloaded on your computer (you can grab your copy here), you’ll simply need to follow a three-step process:

Step 1: Select the drive in need of recovery, and hit “Scan”

When you first open Stellar Photo Recovery, you’ll see a list of all accessible drives:

Stellar Photo Recovery software review folders

By placing a checkmark next to the location you need to recover files from, you’re telling the software where to look. To save time on the scan, I’d recommend checking only the precise drive/memory card on which your files originally existed. 

Then hit Scan:

click on "Scan"

As soon as you’ve done this, the software will start checking your drive for any and all media. This might take a while, depending on the size of your drive; I used a 32 GB SD card for my test, and the scan lasted around 30 minutes. 

Waiting while the computer scans

You can minimize the window while you wait and leave it scanning in the background. 

By the way, if you’re in a hurry, you can always shorten the scan time by heading into the Advanced Settings menu:

click on the "Advanced Settings" icon

And clicking on File List:

Check the file type you're after

You’ll then see a list of all file types you can recover. By checking the files you’re after, you’re telling Stellar Photo Recovery where to focus its search.

Select the file types you'd like to see

 Neat, right?

Step 2: Go through your recoverable files and select the ones you’d like to restore

Once the scan is complete, the software will report the number and size of the files it found:

Stellar will show you what it found when scanning

Then you can go through the folders and preview files for recovery (not all file types will offer previews, but my Olympus RAW files showed up nice and clear). 

Stellar Photo Recovery software review RAW files

By putting a checkmark next to a file, you indicate that you’d like to recover it:

check off photos to recover

So make sure you do this with all relevant files.

Step 3: Hit “Recover” and watch as your images appear!

Once you’ve checked off all the files you want to recover, hit the Recover button:

Select "Recover" to get your photos

Then select the folder where you’d like to save the recovered files:

Choose where to save your recovered photos

Finally, click Start Saving

Click "Start Saving"

You can then watch (in the Saving Data window) as your files are recovered and saved. This isn’t a long process; each RAW image I recovered took about one second to save, which means that you can recover quite a few images in a minute or two.

Recovering images

Then, if you go to the folder where you’ve saved the files, you’ll see them completely intact and unharmed. 

Images I recovered

One nice additional feature here is the ability to go back and recover different photos, even once you’ve done one recovery sweep. So if you accidentally recovered the wrong files, you can just go back into the list of recoverable media and check off a different set of files – without having to scan the drive again.

What’s even nicer is that you can save your scan data when you exit Stellar Photo Recovery. So if you’re tired of recovering images and want to continue later, you can work from a previously-scanned drive without needing to go through the whole process again. 

Stellar Photo Recovery: Performance

Speaking as a longtime photographer, I’m always worried about losing my photos. 

Yet I’ve never managed to find any recovery software that I really, truly trust, especially because there’s all sorts of dodgy options out there that aren’t worth the money. 

But I am genuinely so impressed by Stellar Photo Recovery. It’s easy to set up, easy to use, and it works amazingly well. I tested it out on a 32 GB SD card that was full of Olympus RAW files. The card had been formatted twice in recent days – but Stellar Photo Recovery managed to bring back every photo from before the second wipe, and what appeared to be all 400+ photos from before the first wipe, all in perfect condition.

The most difficult thing about Stellar Photo Recovery is the waiting – as I explained above, the scan takes some time. But you don’t have to babysit the software, so you can easily get the scan started, go do something else, and come back in 30 minutes or so. 

Now, I do think it’s important to be up front, here:

I didn’t try to restore any corrupted files, and my sense is that Stellar Photo Recovery works here but won’t always do a perfect job. So it’s certainly worth using for that sort of thing, but while recognizing that repairing corrupt files is inherently difficult and might not happen.

Also recognize that the more you overwrite files, the more Stellar Photo Recovery will struggle to recover the originals. 

In other words:

Don’t take pictures, format the card, take more pictures, and only then try to recover the originals; instead, make sure any accidentally-formatted cards are immediately put aside for recovery. 

If you don’t do this, your results will vary, depending on the amount of new photos you took.

Make sense?

Ultimately, I’m now a huge fan of Stellar Photo Recovery. And I guarantee it’ll be the software I turn to the next time I lose images. 

Stellar Photo Recovery: Pricing

There are three Stellar Photo Recovery packages (all are available for both Mac and Windows): 

The Standard package, which costs $ 39.99 for a one-year subscription, and offers complete recovery capabilities, but cannot repair corrupted files. 

The Professional package, which costs $ 49.99 for a one-year subscription, and offers complete recovery capabilities plus the ability to repair corrupted photo files. 

And the Premium package, which costs $ 69.99 for a one-year subscription, and offers complete recovery capabilities, the ability to repair corrupted photo files, plus the ability to repair corrupted video files.

Stellar Photo Recovery software review pricing

Which should you get?

If you’re just looking to recover deleted files, the Standard package will work just fine. 

But if you have corrupted image files, then the Professional package is a must. 

And if you have corrupted video files, you’ll want to go for the Premium option. 

So make sure to grab your version of Stellar Photo Recovery software here.

Who should get Stellar Photo Recovery?

Stellar Photo Recovery is a fantastic option for photographers and videographers looking to recover files. 

It’s simple to use, its performance is impeccable, and I can’t recommend it enough. 

So the next time you find yourself needing to perform file recovery or repair…

…turn to Stellar Photo Recovery.

Stellar is a paid partner of dPS.

The post Stellar Photo Recovery Software Review: An Easy Way to Reclaim Your Precious Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Jaymes Dempsey.


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Photo software Exposure X6 brings 3x faster processing and a host of new auto adjustments

08 Oct

The Exposure photo editing software application, that was formerly Alien Skin, has been updated with enhanced GPU optimization that allows some oft-used functions to run at three times the speed. Exposure X6 also introduces a collection of new automated adjustments that aim to make image processing simpler and to save photographers time.

Available as a standalone application or a plug-in for Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom, Exposure X6 introduces Auto White Balance, Auto Exposure, Auto Haze Level, Auto Dynamic Contrast and Auto Tone for creating one-click fixes for common problems. Tonal and contrast adjustments are said to avoid shifts in color saturation and hue, and the Auto White Balance adjustment is based on camera metadata. The sensor used is also taken into account in the new noise reduction feature, along with information about the ISO setting and an estimate of likely electronic noise.

Before and after examples of the new Color Editor tool that allows colors to be selected and replaced. Changes can be saved as a preset to apply to further images

A new Color Editor allows users to select and replace specific selected colors, and to make multiple color changes within the same image. These changes can be mapped and saved as presets to be used in further images so sets of pictures can have consistent adjustments made.

Exposure X6 is available for download now, and costs $ 119. If you bought Exposure X5 on or after July 15th 2020 your upgrade will be free, and those who bought it before that, and users of previous versions, can upgrade for $ 89. For more information, and a free 30-day trial, visit the Exposure website.

Press release

Exposure Software Announces Exposure X6, Image Editing Software for Creative Photographers

Exposure X6 features dramatic speed improvement, one-click automatic adjustments, advanced color replacement, innovative shadow/highlight and noise reduction processing, and more

Exposure Software, formerly known as Alien Skin Software, today announced the release of Exposure X6, the newest version of their award-winning RAW photo editor for creative photographers. Exposure is a standalone image editor that handles a full photography workflow. It includes plug-in support that enables Exposure’s advanced editing and creative effects in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom.

New in Exposure X6 is advanced GPU optimization, which dramatically speeds up image processing. GPU support works in concert with Exposure’s existing multi-core optimization to enable Exposure to leverage the full power of modern computer hardware. Many frequently used editing operations have been sped up by a factor of three on typical GPU hardware. This improved performance enables editing at greatly improved speeds, reducing distraction so photographers can focus on creativity.

“The introduction of GPU support in Exposure X6 enabled us to achieve amazing speed and image processing quality improvements,” said Finley Lee, CEO of Exposure Software. “This further advances our goal of making Exposure the best available image editor for creative photography.”

New automatic adjustments select optimized values for the most frequently used controls in a single click, freeing time for creative editing. They can even be applied in batch to significantly ease the time spent editing large photoshoots. Exposure’s new automatic adjustments include the following:

  • Auto White Balance adjusts white balance based on camera metadata. Corrects for tungsten, artificial, shade, and sunlight illuminant scenes.
  • Auto Exposure sets image exposure for both under and overexposed images.
  • Auto Haze Level changes the level of atmospheric haze present in the image. This is particularly useful for backlit subjects and images shot into the sun.
  • Auto Dynamic Contrast lowers and raises the overall image contrast without changing saturation or hue.
  • Auto Tone sets values for Blacks, Shadows, Highlights, and Whites sliders that affect overall image tone.

Using an innovative tonal-zone approach, Exposure’s redesigned shadows and highlights controls are more reliable, consistent, and accurate. These intuitive controls are particularly adept at recovering lost details in the highlight and shadow areas. The adjustments are applied intelligently to prevent unwanted color casts or hue shifts. They are exceptionally well-suited in preserving high or low key scenes.

Exposure’s new profile guided noise reduction capability reduces noise based on camera sensor characteristics, ISO, and estimated electronic noise. Luminance and chrominance noise can be reduced independently. The smoothing option applies an adaptive noise-sensitive algorithm which preserves sharp edges while further reducing noise.

The new Advanced Color Editor builds on Exposure’s innovative 3D color masking to enable vastly greater control of color modifications. For example, a model’s blue dress can be changed to red in just a few clicks. Photographers can select source and target colors based on luminance, hue, and saturation attributes. It is even possible to select multiple color replacement mappings and save them as a preset to be reused.

  • Additional enhancements to Exposure include the following:
  • Updated user interface provides a refined, modern aesthetic
  • New haze level slider, for counteracting the decrease in contrast caused by atmospheric haze. It can also add haze as a creative effect.
  • Customization of the hue and opacity of the selection mask overlay.
  • Optional black background for the mask to view selected pixels without distraction.
  • Optional luminance or saturation background for the selection mask, which helps visualize the mask region when adjusting luminance or saturation constraints.
  • DNG converter integration enables conversion of RAW photos to DNG format using Adobe’s DNG Converter software. Conversion can be performed automatically when copying photos from a camera card, or manually invoked from a photo’s thumbnail view.

About Exposure
Exposure began in 2005 as a film simulation plug-in for Photoshop, and was immediately embraced by digital photographers of all genres seeking to recapture the organic look of film. Over the years, Exposure became a legend among plug-ins, and evolved into a standalone full-featured editing and organizing solution for creative photographers.

Pricing and Availability
Exposure X6 is available now from https://exposure.software for $ 119. Upgrade pricing is available to owners of previous versions of Exposure for $ 89. Additionally, anyone who purchased Exposure X5 on or after July 15, 2020 will automatically receive a free upgrade to Exposure X6.

Exposure X6 is also available in the Exposure X6 Bundle. This integrated collection combines Exposure with Exposure Software’s award-winning Blow Up and Snap Art tools to add high-quality upsizing and natural media special effects. It is available for $ 149. Owners of one or more of the current apps in the Exposure X6 Bundle can purchase for $ 99.

A 30-day fully-featured free trial of Exposure is available. Visit https://exposure.software to learn more and download the trial.

Host Requirements
Exposure X6 may be used as a standalone program or as a set of plug-ins. When used as a set of plug-ins, it requires one of the following host applications:
* Adobe Photoshop CS6 or Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 or newer
* Adobe Lightroom 6 or Adobe Lightroom CC 2015 or newer

System Requirements

Mac
* OS X 10.11 El Capitan or newer
* Intel Core 2 processor or newer
* Monitor with 1280 x 768 resolution or greater
* 8GB RAM minimum, 16GB recommended
* For GPU support, a recent (2015 or later) Metal compatible GPU with 2GB RAM is recommended

Windows
* Windows 10 64-bit or newer
* Intel Core 2 processor or newer
* Monitor with 1280 x 768 resolution or greater
* 8GB RAM minimum, 16GB recommended
* For GPU support, a recent (2015 or later) OpenCL compatible GPU with 2GB RAM is recommended

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Review of PhotoDiva by AMS Software: Can a Free Portrait Editor Be Any Good?

25 Sep

The post Review of PhotoDiva by AMS Software: Can a Free Portrait Editor Be Any Good? appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Carl Spring.

When I was asked if I wanted to review PhotoDiva, a completely free portrait editor, I was intrigued. I wanted to see if something that you can get for free would actually be worth using as part of your editing routine. 

Having now used the software, I can confidently say that (spoiler alert!)  Photodiva is an excellent editing tool for those who value their time and other resources.

A variety of looks from PhotoDiva photo editor

What can it do?

So what is the PhotoDiva portrait editor capable of? Well, whether you are looking to retouch a beauty shot or want to improve photos of your friends and family, this software will certainly do the job. 

Using AI technology combined with the ease of one-click retouching, this free portrait editor is perfect for those who are new to portrait photography. And PhotoDiva can certainly take a large burden off those who are constantly showered with tons of pictures to retouch; thanks to PhotoDiva’s technology, many of the editing processes are now a one-click thing.

Getting started 

The first thing to note is that PhotoDiva is currently Windows only. To download this portrait photo editor, you need to visit PhotoDiva’s website. One quick install later, and you will be ready to go. 

When you open the software for the first time, you are met with a tutorial video which guides you through all the features and functions of the software. This is a great introduction and shows you how powerful this software can be.

For those of you who like a good feature list (who doesn’t?), the key features of PhotoDiva are as follows:

  • Edit portraits automatically
  • Smooth the skin, remove oily glare
  • Erase unwanted objects
  • Change facial features
  • Apply digital makeup (Pro & Ultimate editions only)
  • Change or blur the background (Pro & Ultimate editions only)
  • Contour face & add dimension (Pro & Ultimate editions only)
  • 100+ photo filter effects (Ultimate edition only)

Importing your first image to the software is simple: just a click of the button in the middle of the screen. Once I’d done this, I began to work my way through the software, starting with the most common edit people do in portrait editing software: retouching the skin.

Photodiva review
This skin tone picker lets you experiment with the model’s complexion.

Automatic skin retouching

When it comes to retouching skin, you have several one-click options. I love the fact that these are quite restrained when compared to other skin smoothing presets I have used. The AI finds facial features effectively and the “Overall Enhancement” preset did a great job of smoothing out the skin without going over the top. 

For those who want a more natural approach, there is another preset called “Slight Enhancement” that is great for a lighter retouch that still enhances the skin. Going the other way: For those who prefer a glamour look, there is a “Glamour Portrait” preset that could be just what you are looking for.

When getting started, it is this type of simplicity that people look for in their portrait editing software. However, if you want to get more advanced, you can turn to custom skin retouching. 

Using PhotoDiva's skin retouching tool
One click instantly improves the skin and gives you a great starting point.

Custom skin retouching 

If you expect that custom retouching will be difficult, then PhotoDiva will subvert your expectations. Most of the custom editing is done with the use of intuitive sliders.

The way I found easiest when starting with the software was to turn each slider up to find out what portion of the image was being affected. I then reset the slider to zero and pushed it until I got my desired effect. Overall, it was simple and let me get exactly what I wanted from the retouch.

The ability to compare the before and after edit is great, as it allows you to easily check if you have pushed things a little far. 

Using custom skin retouching and a filter in PhotoDiva software
Applying a filter and adding a custom skin retouch gives you a great result incredibly quickly.

Other portrait beautifying features

 PhotoDiva doesn’t limit you to skin retouching, as it comes with a boatload of other prettifying tools. First off, there is the teeth whitening feature that works both as a preset and as a manually controlled instrument. There is also  an eye-circle remover, as well as other tools to highlight the model’s eyes, brows, and lips. 

Removing larger objects using the clone tool

In the free version of PhotoDiva, you have the ability to use a clone stamp tool to remove larger objects such as a facial piercing. Using this reminded me of more expensive editing software. When testing, I used it to get rid of a nose stud, and it worked perfectly.

using the clone tool in PhotoDiva to remove a nose stud
The Clone tool worked well for removing this model’s nose stud.

Face sculpting

The ability to reshape the face is a powerful tool in PhotoDiva. However, with great power comes great responsibility. 

The AI is great at finding facial features. You can sculpt not only the width of the face, but also the eyes, nose, lips, and chin. All worked really well in my testing, although I will say that you really need to keep these sliders low. Pushing them to the extremes leaves a really unnatural look and makes the images look fake pretty quickly. That said, you really can get a powerful result when working with restraint.

a before and after face sculpt retouch in PhotoDiva
A subtle use of the sculpting tool can give a great result. 

General editing

PhotoDiva calls this “common editing.” Basic correction works well and is simple to use. For those new to editing, the addition of these tools allows you to do the whole edit in one piece of software. The ability to tweak individual colors is great. The color tools are something that is more associated with high-end software, so it is nice to see them included. 

The ability to create black and white images using these advanced color controls is another great feature. There is also the option to create a negative which, while nice to see, is something that you may struggle to find a use for in day-to-day editing.

Adding vignettes is also easy. I know vignettes are a love-it-or-hate-it thing, but they are great for techniques such as bringing focus to the face. PhotoDiva has a variety of options for you to explore.

screenshot of editing features in PhotoDiva
There is a good range of general editing tools included in PhotoDiva. This allows you to edit from start to finish in the software.

Effects 

There are over a hundred photo filters within the software. As with all filters, some you will like, some you won’t. There are a good variety to choose from, though, including vintage looks, film based looks, and some more creative ones. 

When using the photo filters, most feel heavy-handed when applied at 100%. However, it is really easy to tone down the effect to get a great result. My personal favorite effect was a film simulation called “Fuji FP 100C.” With the variety of styles available, there is sure to be something for everyone. 

A screenshot showing a filter being applied to a photograph in post processing software
There are tons of filters included. You are bound to find one you like. 

Export options 

The exporting process is streamlined and effective. You click the “Save” button and set the picture parameters according to your needs. You can choose the file format, file quality, and even the output type for printing, further processing, social media, or viewing on an HD screen. The ease of this (as with many things in this software) makes PhotoDiva perfect for beginners. You are consistently given just what you need, with none of the options that confuse those new to photo editing.

Pro version perks

While the free version of PhotoDiva is great to get you started, there are also two paid versions of the software that offer you more options: Pro and Ultimate.

Virtual makeup is among those paid features. This is the Achilles’ heel of some portrait editors, since this effect comes out quite gaudy, but PhotoDiva shows remarkable restraint with the makeup tools. These makeup tools include lipstick, eyeshadows, blusher, highlighter, and bronzer. Once again, they are applied with a single slider drag, eliminating any need for manual selection. 

photodiva makeup tool
The makeup effects are subtle but still fairly impressive.

If you’ve ever shot with poor lighting, then you might be familiar with the flat face effect. There is a way to get rid of it using the Add Dimension tool. Despite the cryptic name, this instrument is just a highlight and shadow adjuster that gives the model’s face the much-needed depth and contrast.

To go above and beyond simple portrait retouching, PhotoDiva also comes with a semi-automatic background-changing feature. It only took me a few brush strokes to completely remove the picture background and add my own. If that is too drastic of an approach for you, then the background-blurring tool might catch your interest instead.  

Lastly, when it comes to photo editing, the upgrade gives you the ability to edit RAW images from over 450 different cameras, as well as remove noise and add haze.

These additions make PhotoDiva an even more powerful piece of software for portrait editing.

a comparison of before and after editing using PhotoDiva
Upgrading to the Pro version of PhotoDiva gives you even more control over what this software can do.

Is it worth it? 

Obviously. It’s completely free! What I will say, though, is that this software is more for those entering into portrait editing. There will be some of you out there who will have scoffed at this software from the moment you started reading this review. That’s fine; it’s not made for you.

PhotoDiva is made for those who want a less time- and effort-consuming way to retouch portraits, and those new to photography who have spent their hard-earned savings buying a camera and want to push their editing without the immediate expense of having to buy some high-end software. It is a great tool that allows you to get professional-level results with a few clicks. For those people, I cannot recommend PhotoDiva highly enough. In fact, if you own a Windows computer and edit photos, I would suggest you try this software. 

The fact that PhotoDiva gives away such a powerful set of tools for free is amazing! For those who love it and want to do even more, the upgrade is available to you at a very reasonable price (under $ 30 USD at the time of writing). If the software gets you hooked then you are in luck, since the vendor is offering the upgrade at 55% off for Digital Photography School readers.

Rather than tell you how good PhotoDiva is, I will leave you with this: Try it for yourself. It is free, and if you edit portraits, you have no reason not to try it out. I am pretty sure you will be surprised by how good it is. 

Where do I get it?

To download PhotoDiva, simply head over to https://photodiva.net and hit the Download Free button. Enjoy!

AMS Software is a paid partner of dPS.

The post Review of PhotoDiva by AMS Software: Can a Free Portrait Editor Be Any Good? appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Carl Spring.


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Getting Started With Affinity Photo Editing Software

06 Sep

The post Getting Started With Affinity Photo Editing Software appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Kevin Landwer-Johan.

Affinity Photo is a powerful image editing software. It’s both affordable and enjoyable to use.

But, as with any program for custom manipulation of photos, there is a reasonably steep learning curve involved. If you’re used to editing your images with Adobe Photoshop, you’ll find the interface is different. This will take only a little getting used to.

I haven’t been using Affinity Photo for very long and have found it to be well designed, allowing for intuitive use. Switching image editing programs is not something I choose to do lightly. When you’ve been used to a particular workflow within a computer program, there must be a reasonable motivation to change.

My motivation was partly price. Affinity Photo is a product you can purchase outright without any monthly subscription fees. It’s also discounted from time to time, making it even more affordable. Even still, at full price, it is very reasonable for the quality of the product you receive.

Tone map persona in Affinity Photo
The Tone Mapping Persona interface in Affinity Photo

Opening files in Affinity Photo

The first step is to open a photo file you want to edit. This is pretty straightforward and there are a few options for making it happen.

For Windows users, you can right-click an image file in your file manager and choose Affinity Photo from the list. If Affinity Photo is not listed (and it probably won’t be the first time you use it), click Choose Another App. You’ll then need to locate Affinity Photo on your C:/ drive and select it. Here you can also check the box at the bottom of the panel to always use Affinity Photo to open the type of image file you have chosen.

Using a Mac, you can simply open Affinity Photo, navigate to File in the top menu, and click Open. This also works on a PC.

You can also drag and drop photos from your file manager onto Affinity Photo when it’s running.

Affinity Photo opens all standard image types, including RAW files. There is no need for two separate programs to open and edit RAW files. Affinity Photo combines functions that require both Lightroom and Photoshop. I am finding this makes for a great image editing workflow.

opening a RAW file in Affinity Photo
Opening a RAW file in Affinity Photo

Becoming familiar with the interface

Once you’ve opened your first photo, you have a massive number of options available to work with. Let’s walk through some of the most important features and where to locate them in the user interface.

Under the main menu at the top you have the Persona and Context toolbars. Here you’ll find buttons for various Personas such as:

  • Photo Persona (for photo editing)
  • Liquify Persona (for manipulating distortion)
  • Develop Persona (for developing RAW images)
  • Tone Mapping Persona (for mapping image tones)
  • Export Persona (for when you’re ready to export your image)

As you select a Persona, the Context toolbar changes to include only the tools you’ll need with that Persona.

With the Develop Persona selected, the Context menu shows a different set of tools.

Affinity Photo Develop persona tool bar

These tools allow you to control how you see your photo as you’re working on it. You can view a single instance of your image. There’s also a split-screen and a mirrored option. The mirrored option is shown below.

Split screen in Develop persona

Within this Persona, you have a set of adjustment tools in the right-hand panel. These allow you to make similar adjustments to your RAW files as you can in Lightroom.

Once you’ve finished making the adjustments to your RAW image, click the blue Develop button in the top left corner. The interface changes to the Photo Persona, where you can continue to refine the edits on your image.

Here is how the Context toolbar looks when you have the Photo Persona selected while you’re editing your photos:

Affinity photo personal tool bar

You have buttons for making auto adjustments to levels, contrast, color, and white balance.

When editing photos in the Photo Persona, you also have a specific set of relevant panels open. These panel sets make up your Studio of editing tools. They are also highly customizable. To show or hide various panels, go to View in the top menu, then select Studio.

Here I have the panels for Layers and Adjustments open:

photo editing persona in Affinity Photo

Getting a feel for Affinity Photo

As you can see, there are many similarities between Affinity Photo and other image editing software. I’ve found that working in the Photo Persona is very similar to my workflow in Photoshop.

The Develop Persona took a little more getting used to. But it offers a very well-designed interface and makes working on RAW images straightforward once you get used to how it functions.

Like anything new, getting used to Affinity Photo takes some commitment and practice. This is true whether you’re new to photo editing or have been using other software to manipulate your images.

Having everything you need to edit RAW images from start to finish, including the option to use multiple layers, has been very satisfying.

Not having an image organizer included means you need to work with your operating system’s file manager or use an additional program. There are many free and cheap digital asset management programs that you can use to organize your photos.

customizing panels in Affinity Photo

Conclusion

For any photographer with years of experience using a particular brand of editing software, changing is a big step. If you’re new to photo editing, learning to use any photo imaging software manually is a big step, too.

Affinity Photo provides an impressive set of photo editing tools all within one application. I find it to be well laid out and intuitive to use after using Adobe products for many years.

For people new to photo editing, take the time to learn Affinity Photo. You’ll be able to use it to edit your photos just as well as any other available software.

The post Getting Started With Affinity Photo Editing Software appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Kevin Landwer-Johan.


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Anthropics Portrait Pro Editing Software Review

25 Aug

The post Anthropics Portrait Pro Editing Software Review appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Carl Spring.

A model before and after using Anthropic Portrait Pro

Anthropics Portrait Pro 19 is the latest version of its incredibly popular retouching software. This piece of software allows users to create professional retouches without needing to spend hours learning several techniques. Instead, Portrait Pro uses a simple, user-friendly interface that allows advanced retouching in a simple to understand and time-saving manner.

What’s New in Portrait Pro 19

Anthropics Portrait Pro 19 brings a host of improvements that make this software better than ever before.

Clearskin 5

Athropics Portrait Pro skin texture compared
There is a big improvement in the skin detail over previous versions of Portrait Pro.

The first I must mention is the Clearskin 5 technology. Based on state-of-the-art A.I., Clearskin 5 intelligently maps the contours and features of the face and retouches skin accordingly. It also replicates the face’s natural skin texture, allowing users to subtly remove blemishes while maintaining the subject’s natural appearance. When combined with the improved Fix Lighting tool, this new technology makes it even easier for photographers to achieve amazing results.

When compared to previous versions (which themselves were very good) this is a subtle but noticeable difference. For me, this alone is enough to recommend this version, but there is a lot more under the hood.

Let’s look at what’s new in Portrait Pro 19.

Advance Hair Retouching

Hair detection has been improved and gives users more options than ever before. After choosing a base shade for the hair, you can tweak this to create a variety of styles, from a subtle improvement of natural color all the way through to more extremes of pink and blue hair.

Choice of hair when using Anthropics editing software
A subtle tweak or a radical change? Both are possible in Portrait Pro.

Expression Sliders

This tool offers a variety of ways to subtly change the expression of your model, letting you get the perfect smile every time.

a photo retouched to show different facial expressions
It’s easy to get your subjects smile just right when using this software.

Accurate Lens Correction

Utilizing 3D modeling, the software accurately corrects for lens distortions created by wide-angle lenses such as mobile phone cameras.

Optimized Plugin (Studio exclusive)

This plugin allows you to harness the power of Portrait Pro directly from Photoshop and start editing right away. By updating the technology, the plugin returns to Photoshop up to five times faster than previous versions, which means less time processing and more time creating great portraits.

Improved Automatic Batch Processing (Studio Max exclusive)

PortraitPro Studio Max 19 allows photographers to automatically process batches of images simultaneously. The software detects faces and features in the image, applies your chosen presets and automatically saves the result. Again, thanks to PortraitPro 19, the software handles images 2x faster than before, allowing you to retouch a batch of images quickly and easily yet achieving amazing, tailored results.

This tool (exclusive to the Studio Max edition of the software) is something that I can see being amazing for sending proofs from a headshot session. Imagine the ability to send all of the client images to select from, all retouched to your specific style. Not only will it wow your clients, but it is effortless for you to do this. 

Portrait pro applied to a model not looking at the camera
You do not need your subject to be looking directly at the camera. In this example, which was part of a batch, it still picked up the features quickly and easily saving me time.

Interactive Tutorials

These tutorials are some of the best I have seen for any software – allowing you to follow along and improve images with a guide to hold your hand.

The tutorials allow users to get to grips with the features of the software quickly and easily. By the time you get through the first couple of tutorials, you will be itching to use the software on your own images, but when you want to push your skills a little more (or just can’t quite figure something), there are more advanced tutorials to help you upgrade your skills.

There are various tutorials, from retouching skin and face shaping (which are the two tools you will probably use the most) through to a series of advanced tutorials that go into detail on things like applying makeup, hair, eyes, and many more. Thus, allowing you to take advantage of the massive feature set on offer with this software.

Portrait Pro Tutorial
The built-in tutorials make it really easy to get started in Portrait Pro 19.

In Use 

After going through the first two tutorials, I wanted to put some of my own images through the software. The feature detection on the tutorials was quick, simple, and incredibly accurate. I wanted to see if this was as good in real life as it was in the tutorials. I was amazed that my own images imported quickly and found the models’ features perfectly the first time.

Showing how Portrait Pro defines facial features
Putting in my first image, I was surprised how quickly it found all the features of the face.

Presets

I thought I’d start by trying the built-in presets. I clicked the Standard Preset and almost instantly the image was good enough to give to a client. After trying the other presets, I found the Maximum Lighting worked really well for the shot below.

Within two clicks, I had an image that was retouched to a high standard. As someone who has spent hours learning retouching techniques in Photoshop, it was impressive. To those who are new to retouching, it will give you a set of tools that would normally take hours to master individually at the click of a button.

I’ll be honest, some of the presets were a little too much for me. However, I tend to go for a more natural look in my retouching. Yet, I can see that for some, they will be perfect. I think the presets have been created to give every style of photographer a great starting point that can be tweaked until they get their own style.

Using presets in Anthropic Portrait Pro gives you a great look in seconds
With a few clicks, you can get results like these. From L-R: Original image, Standard Preset and Max Light Preset

Starting From Scratch

It would have been easy for me to leave the review here, as the presets do a great job, but I wanted to dive deeper and see how the tools would work individually. I started over with the same image and worked my way through the panels.

The panels are laid out in a very logical order, starting with Sculpting the Face, which allows you to tweak everything from eye size to the length of the model’s neck. Everything is simple and uses a slider-based system.

I then worked through the skin smoothing (which looks a lot more natural than previous versions of the software) before continuing to work my way down the menu system.

Anthropics Portrait Pro Editing Software Review
I created my own preset for this shoot. Once I had it how I liked it, I could then save my style as a preset and apply it to more images from the shoot.

A small word of caution, though. Portrait Pro allows you to push the retouching levels to the extreme. You can get caught up in pushing all sliders to the max. This will not give you a great result and like adding salt to a meal, a sprinkle is always better than a handful.

Make use of the before and after function to check you have not pushed your image too far. I have heard complaints that Portrait Pro makes everything “Doll Like” or “Just Not Natural.” That is not true. Just like Photoshop, users can get carried away and push things too far in their edits. 

It was amazing that only 30-minutes into using a brand new piece of software, I was able to fully retouch a portrait to this level without needing a YouTube tutorial. What’s even better is that with a couple of clicks, I now had my own preset that I could apply to other images. This is something that really does create a massive time-saving option. 

I put my newly created preset to the test with another image from the same shoot. It literally took me 10-seconds to import and apply the preset and it was ready to export. If you are working with large amounts of images per shoot, this might just be a game-changer.

Applying a personal preset in Portrait Pro to a new image
Within 10 seconds, I had created this edit, in my own style without needing to press more than one button.

By the time I had finished, I had added makeup, added lighting, and changed both hair and eye color quickly and easily. The feature that stood out for me was the advanced lighting tool. 

For those who are new to working with light or those who don’t currently have a lighting system, you can add lighting effects that really enhance the image and make it pop.

Who’s it for?

Anthropics Portrait Pro is an amazing tool for those who are new to retouching portraits. It is simple, yet incredibly powerful and gives you pleasing results within seconds. However, it offers much more and encourages you to go back to the software and personalize your retouching. 

For those who are more advanced photographers, it allows you to really speed up your workflow and create signature styles. The Photoshop Plugin (Studio Exclusive) means you can use Portrait Pro as part of a larger project.

For Pro’s, there is a real benefit from the batch processing options found in the Studio Max Edition. If you are shooting several images and want to send clients a selection, by using a preset (either one in-built or your own signature style), you can retouch all images with a few clicks. This saves you a lot of time and allows you to focus on your business.  

If you retouch portraits, you really need to try this software out. Also, DPS has managed to get a special offer just for you. 

How Do You Get Portrait Pro?

You can download your free trial at https://www.anthropics.com/portraitpro/download/

Currently there is a 50% OFF sale everything + DPS readers get an EXTRA 15% OFF when you use the coupon JW9682

I look forward to seeing what you create in the comments below.

The post Anthropics Portrait Pro Editing Software Review appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Carl Spring.


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Nikon to offer beta webcam utility software in August

22 Jul

Camera manufacturers were quick to recognize that a pandemic-induced rise in video conferencing would spark interest in higher-quality webcam footage. Soon, Nikon shooters will also be able to get in on the fun. The company will release its own free webcam utility software – in beta form – to Windows 10 users for starters. Nikon says the software will be compatible with ‘many’ of its Z-series cameras and DSLRs. Head to Nikon’s site for more details.

Press release

EMBARK ON THE FULL-FRAME MIRRORLESS JOURNEY: NIKON UNVEILS THE Z 5, AN INNOVATIVE AND FEATURE-RICH MIRRORLESS FX-FORMAT CAMERA FOR EMERGING CREATORS

Nikon Expands the NIKKOR Z Lens Lineup with the Addition of the Extremely Compact and Versatile NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3 as well as the new Z TELECONVERTER TC-2.0X and TC-1.4X; Nikon Also Announces Free Webcam Utility

MELVILLE, NY (July 21, 2020) – Today, Nikon Inc. announced the Z 5, the new full-frame (FX-format) entry-point into its award-winning lineup of Z series mirrorless cameras. The Nikon Z 5 combines sophisticated features inherited from the Z 7 and Z 6 with the benefits of Nikon’s next generation Z mount at an unprecedented value. For those new to mirrorless or creators looking to push the limits of their craft with the power of full-frame, the compact Z 5 will exceed expectations. With an incredibly robust feature set, including in-camera vibration reduction (VR) image stabilization (IBIS) and the perfect balance of seamless automation and full manual control, creators can effortlessly share their artistic passions, travel adventures and so much more.

Nikon also unveiled the new NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3, the shortest, lightest and most affordable full-frame zoom lens in the NIKKOR Z lineup. Designed for on-the-go creators, the 24-50mm lens is the ideal companion for Z series users who want to capture it all – from vast landscapes and cityscapes, to street photography and striking portraits.

“The Nikon Z 5 offers the next generation of creators a gateway into the full-frame Z series lineup, opening the door to the limitless possibilities of mirrorless photo and video capture, while providing the means to share their creativity with others,” said Jay Vannatter, Executive Vice President, Nikon Inc. “With the addition of the NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3, Nikon is introducing the smallest full-frame NIKKOR Z lens to date, providing an extremely lightweight, versatile option to help users pursue all creative endeavors, regardless of which Z series camera they use.”

Nikon Z 5: The Full-Frame Journey Starts Here
As the new entry point to Nikon’s full-frame mirrorless lineup, the Nikon Z 5 offers a lot of power and capabilities at an attractive price, empowering the next generation to begin their journey with the confidence to learn and grow as creators.

  • Incredible Image Quality: Featuring a powerful FX-format 24.3-megapixel CMOS sensor, the Z 5 is the gateway to the benefits of full-frame, helping creators to capture intensely detailed images, ultra-shallow depth of field and clean low-light shots with unrivaled consistency. From portraits that flatter, nighttime landscapes that astound and street shots that impress, the gorgeous tones, faithful colors, minimal noise, and revered Nikon color science all play a part to help users capture images that are true to their vision.
  • High Speed Performance and Processing: Engineered with the EXPEED 6, Nikon’s fastest image processor to date, the Z 5 is a dependable, high-performance tool designed for content creation. EXPEED 6 allows for a boost in processing power and energy efficiency while rendering subtle textures and small details with amazing results.
  • Stellar Low-Light Performance: With an ISO range up to 51,200 (expandable to 102,400), the camera effectively reduces noise, maintaining both high sensitivity and resolution to excel in low-light situations, making it ideal for shooting everything from low-light events to an all-nighter under the Milky Way.
  • Capture with Speed: With shutter speeds up to 1/8000, the Z 5 can capture fast-moving subjects with clarity including fast-action sports and wildlife. This higher maximum shutter speed enables photographers to better tame even the brightest mid-day light to unleash the potential of fast-aperture NIKKOR glass. When the moment strikes, the camera can also capture full resolution bursts at 4.5 fps with full AF/AE.
  • Silent and Smooth: The combination of the camera’s silent photography mode and In-Body 5-Axis VR stabilization provides quiet, stable shooting to document sensitive moments without distractions.
  • Vast Lens Selection: Whether shooting glamorous portraits from a studio on the sidewalk, long-distance wildlife, epic wide landscapes in the field or street photography, the growing lineup of NIKKOR Z lenses provides Z 5 users the versatility to capture incredible shots with sharpness across the frame and superior light gathering in any situation. For even more flexibility, the vast array of traditional F-mount NIKKOR lenses can be used via the Mount Adapter FTZ to enhance images with a unique focal length or beautiful bokeh, while gaining the benefits of in-body stabilization.
  • Dual UHS-II SD Card Slots: Equipped with two UHS-II card slots for overflow, backup or separating RAW and JPEG photos, the Z 5 enables photographers to shoot with extreme confidence when using widely available consumer SD cards.

Simple Yet Sophisticated for Expanding Creativity
A great option for emerging creators getting started, the Nikon Z 5 is packed with powerful tools and user-friendly controls to help users explore and capture their artistry with ease.

  • Focus Anywhere: The Z 5 boasts 273[1] on-sensor AF points, to quickly and accurately track subjects throughout the frame, while Eye-Detection AF capabilities help precisely capture the eyes of humans and animals. The wide array of AF points covers nearly the entire frame, and multiple AF modes allows the user to have pinpoint control or fully automatic assurance to easily lock onto a subject.
  • Easily Shift Gears: The Nikon Z 5 offers the ability to effortlessly switch between manual mode for the ultimate in control, as well as a large variety of automatic creative modes to help mirrorless users capture truly distinct images and video.
  • Creativity Built-in: Equipped with 20 Creative Picture Controls, and advanced features like Focus Shift Shooting and multiple exposure mode, users can compose unique images, produce extraordinary depth of field, or combine several shots and layer images on top of each other with the in-camera image overlay function.
  • Advanced Video Capture: The Z 5 makes it easy to document any creative vision in 4K UHD/30p[2] or in 1080/60p (full-frame). When recording video, the PDAF system is rapid to react, allowing users to quickly lock critical focus on subjects, and is fully customizable to fit any production style. In-camera VR image stabilization and electronic VR reliably eliminate the shake when shooting video, plus users get the added benefit of focus peaking and the ability to capture stills while recording.
  • Flexible Recording Modes: In addition to the traditional interval timer and in-camera time-lapse modes, the Nikon Z 5 is equipped with a new Time-Lapse Movie mode that gives users the best of both worlds for more streamlined movie making – the ability to use images from interval timer mode and create a time-lapse in-camera.
  • Unique Lighting Options: For enhanced creative control, the camera features a hot shoe, and is fully compatible with the Nikon Speedlight wireless lighting system.
  • Get Connected: The Nikon SnapBridge[3] app makes it easy to remotely control the Z 5 or seamlessly transfer and share content to a smartphone, tablet, Mac, or PC thanks to built-in Wi-Fi[4] and Bluetooth[5] connectivity.

Rugged Reliability and Engineered for Versatility
In addition to providing high-quality imaging capabilities, the Nikon Z 5 is compact and comfortable in-hand while promising the rugged reliability as well as innovative features and controls that Nikon is known for.

  • Legendary Nikon Build: Designed with a durable, weather-sealed exterior for worry-free use, the Z 5 employs the same magnesium alloy shell and robustness as the Z 6 and Z 7. Both the camera and NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3 lens are built with consideration for dust and drip resistance and are ready to tackle the next adventure.
  • Functional Operability: The camera sports a powerful, high-resolution 3.2-inch LCD monitor with the capabilities to tilt, touch, tap, swipe, and pinch for an intuitive and flexible user-experience. Meanwhile, the 3.6M-dot Quad-VGA EVF ensures users can see exposure, ISO, white balance and creative picture controls in real time, making the transition from optical viewfinders seamless for new mirrorless shooters.
  • Packed with Power: Powered by the new EN-EL15c battery, the Z 5 offers significant advancements in the number of shots per charge and is the first Nikon camera to enable constant power through the USB port, even with select portable USB power banks[6]. For added power and grip, the camera is also compatible with the MB-N10 hot-swappable battery pack.
  • Webcam Ready: When connected via the USB-C cord, the Z 5 can be used as a webcam, making the camera a great option for modern vloggers, influencers and gamers looking to improve their livestreaming capabilities.

NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3: Portable, Yet Powerful
The NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3 is the latest addition to the rapidly expanding lineup of NIKKOR Z lenses and is the smallest FX-format NIKKOR Z lens yet. Optically designed to take advantage of the advancements of the wide Z mount, this lens delivers sharpness across the entire frame and a versatile zoom range for everyday use. The 24-50mm is less than three inches long when retracted, making it the perfect lens for shooters seeking a versatile yet compact option for lightweight travel and street photography. When used together, the Z 5 and 24-50mm lens are the ideal discrete travel kit that can easily be packed and carried for all-day adventures. This compact NIKKOR Z lens is also an enticing option for Z 6 and Z 7 users who want a small all-around lens for portraits, landscapes, and street photography.

New Z Teleconverters Take NIKKOR Z Lenses to New Lengths
Designed for photographers and videographers who need more telephoto reach in their kit, the new Z TELECONVERTER TC-1.4X and Z TELECONVERTER TC-2.0X bring added versatility with 1.4x and 2.0x magnification to select NIKKOR Z lenses. These lightweight teleconverters are great tools for those photographing sports, wildlife and aviation, reducing the need to crop images and allowing for tighter compositions with maximum resolution.

The new TC-1.4X and TC-2.0X teleconverters maintain superior rendering performance and minimize various lens aberrations, while retaining focusing speed, VR functionality and minimum focusing distance. As an added benefit, the new teleconverters allow Nikon Z series cameras to retain functionality on all focus points up to f/11, making it easy to focus on and track subjects throughout the entire frame. Featuring the same robust construction as NIKKOR Z lenses, the teleconverters are designed with a fluorine coating on the front and rear elements to resist dirt and smudges, and offer a durable, weather-sealed body to protect against the elements.

When the teleconverters are used with the NIKKOR Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S (availability scheduled for late August), the focal length on the telephoto end is extended to 280mm (1.4x) or 400mm (2.0x) producing a significant expansion of this telephoto lens’ shooting range. These new teleconverters will also be compatible with applicable interchangeable lenses for Nikon Z mount mirrorless cameras that Nikon will release in the future.

New Webcam Utility Software for Nikon Cameras
In August, Nikon will release a beta version of the Webcam Utility software for many Nikon DSLR and Z series mirrorless cameras, including the new Z 5. Initially available for Windows 10, the free software will allow compatible Nikon cameras to be used as webcams. When connected via USB, this free software will provide users with incredible sharpness, clarity and flattering depth of field for all of their livestreaming needs including teleconferencing and gaming.

For more information on how to use your Nikon camera as a webcam, please visit https://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-explore/live-streaming-with-nikon-cameras.page

Pricing and Availability
The Nikon Z 5 will be available in August in several configurations, including body-only for a suggested retail price (SRP) of $ 1,399.95*, a one-lens kit with the new NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3 for an SRP of $ 1,699.95* and a one-lens kit with the NIKKOR Z 24-200mm f/4-6.3 VR lens for an SRP of $ 2,199.95* for those seeking extra reach when photographing wildlife or travel adventures. Also available in August, the NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3 lens can be purchased separately for an SRP of $ 399.95*. The new Z TELECONVERTER TC-1.4X and TC-2.0X will have an SRP of $ 549.95 and $ 599.95 respectively and will be available in late August.

For more information on the latest Nikon products, including the new Z 5 and NIKKOR Z 24-50mm f/4-6.3 lens, as well as the full Nikon Z mount system, please visit?www.nikonusa.com.

Specifications, equipment, and release dates are subject to change without any notice or obligation on the part of the manufacturer.

*SRP (Suggested Retail Price) listed only as a suggestion. Actual prices are set by dealers and are subject to change at any time.

1. With recording of still images using the FX-format image area and single-point AF. 231 focus points with movie recording.

2. When using this mode, the frame is cropped approx. ×1.7.

3. Using the SnapBridge App System Requirements:

a. Android 5.0 or later or 6.0.1 or later
b. A device with Bluetooth 4.0 or later (i.e., a device that supports Bluetooth Smart Ready/Low Energy) is required.
c. The SnapBridge app is available for compatible iPhone®, iPad® and/or iPod touch®, and for smart devices running the AndroidTM operating system. The app can be downloaded free of charge from Apple’s App Store® and GooglePlayTM. SnapBridge can be used only with compatible cameras.

4. This camera’s built-in Wi-Fi® capability can only be used with a compatible iPhone®, iPad®, and/or iPod touch® or smart devices running on the Android™ operating system. The Nikon SnapBridge application must be installed on the device before it can be used with this camera.

5. The camera’s built-in Bluetooth® capability can only be used to connect the camera to a compatible smart device running the SnapBridge app, and to take advantage of SnapBridge features.

6. Anker PowerCore+ 26800 PD 45W is the recommended portable charger. Use a USB cable with two Type-C connectors supplied with the portable charger. For more information about the portable charger, please visit the manufacturer’s website: Anker.com/support

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Canon’s new software will turn select EOS, PowerShot cameras into webcams for Windows 10 PCs

29 Apr

As more and more people desire higher-quality video communication over internet while working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for webcams has increased dramatically, triggering incredibly high prices, sometimes three to four times over MSRP. And that’s if you can find one at all.

To help bridge a growing gap, Canon has announced the release of the EOS Webcam Utility Beta, a program for that will, with a single USB cable, turn compatible Canon EOS interchangeable lens cameras (ILCs) and PowerShot cameras into dedicated webcams on PCs running the 64-bit version of Windows 10.

‘In unprecedented times, it’s imperative for Canon to provide our customers with useful, simple and accessible solutions to assist them in whatever imaging needs they have,’ says Tatsuro ‘Tony’ Kano, executive vice president of the Canon U.S.A., Inc. Imaging Technologies & Communications Group in the press release. ‘Our goal is that the EOS Webcam Utility Beta software can help reduce some of the remote workday stress for employees who are tasked with video conferencing and virtual meetings.’

A list of the EOS and PowerShot cameras currently supported.

Downloading the EOS Webcam Utility Beta must be done from the downloads page of your supported camera’s product page on Canon’s website. Thankfully, Canon has created a library on its dedicated EOS Webcam Utility Beta page linking out to the appropriate page for each supported camera. Once to the camera’s download page, simply click the download button to start downloading the installation file.

Being it’s a beta program, Canon is asking for feedback pertaining to the application, which can be left on Canon’s dedicated forum.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Exposure X5 software review: blazing fast and subscription-free

26 Apr

Exposure Software Exposure X5
$ 119-149 | exposure.software

Although we’ve reviewed both of its immediate predecessors – Alien Skin Exposure X3 and X4 – here at DPReview, I’m personally a newcomer to the long-running and retroactively-eponymous Exposure series. Since the last release, Alien Skin has changed its name to match that of its most popular and best-known app, and now goes by Exposure Software.

Exposure’s roots can be traced all the way back to a 2006-vintage film simulation plugin for Photoshop. And while it’s grown vastly across the 14 major updates launched since then, its interface should still prove fairly familiar to anyone who’s used it in at least the past five or six years since the basic UI was defined by the sixth and seventh versions.

Blazing-fast browsing and editing that won’t vanish into the ether if you don’t upgrade every year

An alternative to the likes of Adobe’s category-dominating Lightroom or Phase One’s popular Capture One, Exposure X5 stands out from its rivals thanks to its blazing-fast image browsing and editing. It also boasts a treasure trove of manual adjustments plus a vast library of quick yet professional-looking presets.

Key takeaways:

  • Very competitively priced, no subscription
  • Blistering performance in comparison to Lightroom
  • Interface is a bit rough around the edges
  • Tons of controls and presets at your fingertips
  • Good high-DPI monitor support, not-so-good touch support
  • Fewer profiles for automatic corrections than competitors

Not much more than a Benjamin, with no subscriptions in sight

And yet despite its depth and swiftness, it’s also extremely affordable. Without adding on any of Exposure Software’s other tools, you can get the full Exposure X5 experience for just $ 119, almost two-thirds less than a perpetual Capture One License at $ 299. And even if you add both the Snap Art and Blow Up plugins for artistic effects and easier enlargements, the pricetag still comes in below $ 150.

Adobe, meanwhile, charges you $ 120 every year for an ongoing Creative Cloud photography plan subscription. In fairness to the company, that gets you not just the Exposure X5-rivaling Lightroom but also Adobe Photoshop. But then, Exposure X5’s perpetual license doesn’t vanish into the ether if you decide not to pay for an upgrade in a year’s time.

Results of the new Complementary – Orange and Teal filter.

Great upgrades to masking and lens correction

The step from the Alien Skin-developed X4 to the Exposure Software-produced X5 is very much an evolutionary one, with many features carried over unchanged. But that’s not to say there aren’t any significant changes; on the contrary, there are several upgrades that are well worth having.

The most significant changes are to be found in two main areas: Masking and lens correction. On the masking front there’s a new 3D Color Masking tool which allows you to quickly make complex layer masks based on subject hue, saturation and luminance ranges, allowing other adjustments to precisely target your intended subject.

You can profile your own cameras for better color out of the box

Exposure Software has also added tools to correct chromatic aberrations and vignetting, and extended the distortion correction tool to allow for manual corrections. You can keep aberrations on an even tighter leash with a new Defringe tool, and you can profile your own cameras for better color out of the box.

Also new to your toolbox are more presets than ever before, as well as support for more camera and lens profiles. Exposure X5 also gains greyscale TIFF and JPEG support, new horizontal / vertical flip controls and an undockable, resizeable tone curve editor.

Take a look at all 500+ presets at your disposal over at Exposure’s site.

Browsing images in Exposure X5 in the default view. Click through for the full version.

A bit rough around the edges compared to Lightroom

There’s really no escaping the fact that right out of the box, Exposure X5 looks a whole lot like its dominant arch-rival, Adobe Lightroom Classic. Your chosen image or folder of images sit front and center between two columns of informational displays and controls.

If viewing a single image, thumbnails of others from its folder or collection sit beneath. And all panels but the centermost area can be hidden, individually or as a group, to help you focus on the images themselves.

But there are also some important differences for the Lightroom user to consider. Firstly, Adobe’s app has a modal interface, with sections appearing or disappearing from the sidebars as you switch from, say, the Library to Develop modules.

Exposure X5, though, has a non-modal design which means there’s a lot more to fit in those sidebars. Most of what Lightroom fits into both its Library and Develop modules is crammed into the sole interface for Exposure Software’s app, plus a truly mind-boggling number of fun and useful presets.

A selection of some of the new presets in Exposure X5. Clockwise from top left, we start with the original image on which the other looks are based. Next is the Light and Airy – High Contrast filter, then Kodak Recording 2475, and finally Ilford PanF Plus 50 at bottom left.

The sidebars are jam-packed full of controls

Each sidebar is split in two vertically, with each panel in the sidebar being scrollable if needed, and a handle in the center of the divider allowing you to choose how much of the screen height to devote to each panel.

There’s less handholding in Exposure X5 than in Lightroom

I found that with so much stuff in there, I was constantly resizing panels to fit the controls I wanted on-screen, and scrolling up and down within them in search of individual controls I wanted to tweak. Right-clicking on any section header and switching to “Solo” mode helps a lot, though, simply by minimizing all but controls in any section but the one you’re currently browsing.

One other point to note is that there’s less handholding in Exposure X5 than in Lightroom. Adobe’s app can, for example, adjust white balance, most basic exposure settings and even perspective transformations automatically. Exposure, though, offers only presets whose actions are predetermined, and don’t vary significantly based upon image content.

Clockwise from top left, the same image processed with the new Seasons – Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter presets.

The lack of a catalog has pros and cons

The other major difference to consider is where your adjustments are stored. Adobe’s Lightroom is based around managing a library of images, storing its processing information in a single monolithic database. Exposure X5 instead stores its processing information in sidecar files which, in the interest of tidiness, are deposited in a subfolder of that in which the processed image was found. (And if you just browse images without editing them, no sidecar is created at all.)

I was honestly a little gobsmacked by how much faster Exposure feels

One upside of this is that the sidecars – and therefore the processing information – reside in the folder right alongside the images, and so if you share a folder of images, you also share the processing information. But while backing up your Lightroom catalogs is just a matter of backing up a single folder’s contents, if you want to do the same in Exposure X5 you’re faced with tens or hundreds of thousands of files scattered in folders among your photos.

Let’s now take a closer look at Exposure’s performance, as well as some more of its more powerful features on the next page.

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