Last week I wrote about using the Exposure 5 plug-in from Alien Skin to convert colour photos to black and white. This week, I’m going to show you how you can use Exposure 5 to enhance your colour images. For me, while Exposure 5 is great for monochrome conversions, the colour side is where it really excels.
If you need to, you can refer to my earlier article to learn the basics of Exposure 5. Today I will show some of the features and presets that I believe make Exposure 5 a wonderful plug-in for colour photographers.
Presets
The strength of Exposure 5 lies in the wide selection of available presets. There are so many colour presets it is nearly impossible to count them. When you see them in action it will open your eyes to the number of creative ways you can interpret a single image.
Just like black and white, you’ll get the best results when you start with a colour photo that you have already processed in Lightroom. You can then make further adjustments in Lightroom once you’ve finished with Exposure 5 if you need to.
Here’s the starting image for the following examples:
Here are some of my favourite colour preset categories from Exposure 5:
Recently used presets
Right at the bottom of the presets panel you’ll find a category named Recently Used. Every time you edit an image in Exposure 5 the plug-in remembers the settings and saves them here as new presets in case you want to use them again. This feature is automated, so you don’t have to remember to do it or even think about creating your own presets.
I’m not sure how many presets Exposure 5 remembers, but if you want to save one of these presets permanently just click on the Plus icon at the top of the presets panel. All you have to do is give the preset a name and Exposure 5 saves it as a preset you can access by clicking the User button. You can even export presets to give to other photographers – just right-click on a preset and select Export to do so.
Cinema presets
More than 20 colour presets loosely based around movie themes. They include a bleach bypass effect which is sometimes used in the movie industry as well as chemical photography. This is the Technicolor Process 2 – Faded preset:
Color fading presets
A group of 30 presets giving various faded effects, including simulation of old film types such as Agfacolour Neu and Kodachrome. This is the Colour Photo – Warm Skin preset:
Polaroid presets
This set of presets simulates the look of various colour polaroid films, including Polachrome and Fuji FP. This is a really sumptuous set of presets. Just looking at them gets me excited as I visualise how I can use them on my photos. The Polachrome preset is one of my favourites:
Color Films – Print presets
These presets imitate the look of colour negative films from Fujifilm and Kodak. Perfect if there is a specific film type, such as Fuji Reala (shown below), that you love the look of and would like to produce something similar from your digital images.
Colour Films – Vintage presets
Where would a plug-in be without a variety of vintage film presets? These 25 presets are perfect if you like the vintage look. This is the Autochrome – Vignette (soft) preset:
The right-hand panels
Once you’ve selected a preset you can use it as a starting point to make your own adjustments. This lets you adapt the preset to your own style and imagery, and you do this with the panels on the right-hand side of the screen. Most of these were covered in Part One, but there are some sliders in the Color panel that only work with colour images.
This is the Color panel:
It’s divided into two sections. Each one lets you adjust the colour of the image in a different way. While I wouldn’t say that you have more control over colour in Exposure 5 than Lightroom, you certainly have creative options in Exposure 5 that Lightroom lacks. If you’re a Photoshop user you’ll find the controls here a lot easier to use than Photoshop.
Color Filter
Here you can lay a coloured layer over the image, using the Density slider to control the strength of the effect. There are several presets to choose from, and you can control the overall warmth of the image using the Cool/Warm slider.
Color Saturation
Similar to the HSL and Color panels in Lightroom, except with more control. The main difference is that Lightroom applies Saturation adjustments evenly over the image, and Exposure 5 allows you to adjust saturation of the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights independently, as well as that of individual colours. Unlike Lightroom, you can’t adjust the Hue or Luminance of colours in Exposure 5.
Batch processing
Finally, there is one feature that separates Exposure 5 from the other plug-ins that I’ve tested – batch processing. Most plug-ins don’t allow batch processing, and of those that do none are as easy to use as Exposure 5.
To batch process, simply select two or more images in Lightroom and go to Photo > Edit In > Exposure 5. All the selected images open in Exposure 5. The first will open for editing, and the changes you make to it will be applied to all the photos in the batch.
While this may not be very useful if all your images are different, it comes in very handy if they are similar. For example, I recently created a series of over 70 portraits of Ashley, the model you see in the photos in this article. They were all taken in the same place, with the same lighting, and the same camera settings. They were perfect for batch processing. Here are four of my favourites:
Conclusion
Alien Skin’s Exposure 5 is both easy and fun to use. The wide range of presets, especially in colour, open up all sorts of possibilities for creative photographers. The plug-in has lots of power, but because of the lack of local adjustments needs to be used carefully in conjunction with Lightroom to get the most out of your images. Like all good plug-ins, it takes a little while to appreciate what you can do with it and learn how to get the best out of it. If you’re interested, go ahead and download the trial. It doesn’t cost anything and lets you try the software out to see if it’s for you.
Learn more about Alien Skin Exposure 5
You can learn more about Alien Skin Exposure 5 (plus their other products) by clicking on the link to go to their website. You can buy Exposure 5 for $US149, or you can download the free 15 day trial to try it out for yourself. Alien Skin also have an interesting blog, where you can see how other photographers use Exposure 5, plus an extensive tutorials sections. You’ll find them both at the same link. The blog is worth visiting for the inspirational content, even if you have no interest in the plug-in itself.
Exposure 6
Alien Skin have announced that the next version of the software, Exposure 6, is due to be released in June this year. It promises several improvements, including the incorporation of creative lens effects currently found in the Bokeh 2 plug-in, an improved basic control panel and new borders, textures and light leaks effects. The upgrade will be free for anyone who buys Exposure 5 from March 2014 onwards. You can learn more by clicking here and going to the Alien Skin blog.
Further reading
Learn more about Lightroom plug-ins with these articles:
An Introduction to Alien Skin’s Exposure 5: Part One – Black & White
DxO FilmPack 4
An Introduction to Silver Efex Pro 2
Mastering Lightroom ebook
Mastering Lightroom: Book Three – Black & White introduces you to the wonderful world of black and white photography in Lightroom. It’s a complete guide to working in monochrome that teaches you to see in black and white then convert your Raw files using Lightroom to create stunning monochrome images. Everything you need to know is covered, including the most popular black and white plug-ins and walkthroughs showing you step-by-step how I processed three of my favourite monochrome images.
The post An Introduction to Alien Skin’s Exposure 5 – Part II: Colour appeared first on The Andrew S Gibson photography blog.