Exposure 7

Only a few weeks ago I had the chance to review Alien Skin Exposure 6 and now, Alien Skien Exposure 7 is available. Good new for all who bought Exposure 6, they will get a free upgrade to Exposure 7. If you have not recieved a mail right now, you can get your new SN here. The major difference is, that Exposure 7 is able to work with the RAW files now. That should be an advantage with focus on the image quality. 

My first test is about a nice film setting for a Portrait shot. For my last Portrait session I used the VSCO Polraoid, VSCO 03, settings, the Fuji FP100c, to get very nice and natural colors and a decent contrast without huge adjustments.

That will be my refference to compare the results I get with Exposure 7.

First I will test the color film print settings with the same raw file. On the left you can see how the raw file looks in Lightroom without any adjustments, on the right is the VSCO reference picture.

In this case the Kodak Ektar gave me the best result. Nice natural colors and the grain is not so strong, in most of the settings I think the grain is too strong for most of the film types.

One big adantage over VSCO is, that you can add light leaks and light effects, frames and others effect pretty easy to the image and it most cases it does not look so faked like I have seen from other tools.

Lets have a look what the slides can give me for my portrait:

I have to say I like the slide results more than the prints results. Nice natural color and sharpness, there is no oversharpening out of the box that you can see with some tools. But also here I have to say that the grain in some cases is IMHO to strong. My film days are over and the last processed film is 8 years ago, but I would say the grain out of the box is not realistic. My fav one from the slide section is the Fuji Velvia 100. 

There is one thing, I don't understand. You can use Exposure 7 stand alone on the Raw file, but I can't find the whitebalance button. That means no adjustments in this case. Very negative point so far. Also the perfomance of the shadow and highlight recovery is not on the niveau that you know from your lightroom or capture one pro. 

A few more images developped in Exposure 7: