RAW Conversion

9 Comments on Exposure X5 Update – Review

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  3. Craig Baron

    I’ve been using this software in past versions for three years. It certainly makes my workflow quick. It’s easy to load and manage images. Having never used LR except for trial periods I can’t honestly say how beneficial it is but the key advantage for me is that it simply uses your saved files and doesn’t copy etc. I also like that if you delete them they also come off your computers drive. Just paid £52 for upgrade. That per year is cheap as chips. Love it. I feel I missed the Adobe boat years ago and I am glad in a way. Just to add I shoot fuji raw. I’m thinking of moving over to canon eos r so any views on this software with canon raw from eos r would be much appreciated

    • AndyBell

      It process EOS RP RAW files very well, so should be good with the EOS R.

      I found it does better if you supply it with a set of custom camera profiles (built using something like X-Rite colour checker) – the colours are much richer if you do.

      Then again, Luminar 4 is better. But it is the best RAW converter imho. I’d rate Luminar, then DXO & Photo Ninja as equal second and then Exposure X5 when assessing RAW converters.

      All are better than Lightroom imho.

  4. Jim Lawrence

    You said it loads images fast. I have found that it takes forever to load the thumbnails and I am not sure why. Some possible reasons could be: some of my folders hold large amounts of images and thus take a while to load. I broke up some into smaller folders and that helped a little. Even when I upgraded to a new pc, it is faster but could be better. I find that if I employ an external image browser (FastStone) it helps speed things up but I would like to figure out how/why the load times take so long when using EXP5 as standalone. Any how, I gave up on Lightroom (version 5.7) because I was tired of being stuck with old un-updatable apps (I don’t like renting software, I’m old school) and I can’t begin to tell you how many times it would crash and I would have to re-load the library. Any ideas on the slowness problem here would be helpful. The folks at Exposure didn’t help much. I consider Exposure X5 my main go to tool. If I have to, I will live with it because it is a great piece of software.

    • AndyBell

      What image types are you browsing? RAW files should load rapidly because they have an embedded thumbnail in them.

      JPEGs should load fast for the same reason.

      If the image has no embedded preview image it will load more slowly…

      Probably the fastest browser is PhotoMechanic – it’s great for browsing, culling and assigning meta data. But then its usefulness declines – it is not a true image management tool.

      But then again, no tool I’ve tested is perfect at image management.

      It might be worth you downloading the trial of PhotoMechanic and see how fast it is over your images. If it’s slow then either the images don’t have embedded previews or there might be an issue with your PC/disk.

  5. Mike M

    I can’t find any instructions – all the tutorial videos and tolol tips presume you know what brushes are, what colour constraint means etc. It is impossible for a non-expert to even work out what the bits do. So it might be brilliant but it has left me – a potential buyer, behind

    • AndyBell

      Hi Mike

      Yes, there is a learning curve but I find the best way to learn a tool is to use it and, when all else fails, Google it 🙂

      For eacmple, I Googled ‘Exposure X5 brushes’ and got this page: https://exposure.software/blog/2018/building-custom-brush-presets/

      That page says: ‘Exposure’s brush tool enables you to brush an effect on your photo selectively’. Other pages explain color constraints and so forth.

      I would prefer a written guide – I would rather read than watch a video. But they are very helpful if you send a support request and the video tutorials are very decent.

      Andy

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