© April Milani

April has won the monthly photo award plenty of times, so where we normally would share their profile, a quote from our correspondence reads:

I am honored to win Alien Skin’s Photo of the Month award. Thank you all for the supportive likes and sweet comments. The Exposure Users Group has been a fun, safe learning place for me.

While I’m here, I’d like to share my thoughts on Exposure X. I picked up a copy just as it came out and I totally love it. Here is why: I would have been totally happy with a small update, but the Aliens did so much more than that. Brushes!! O M G

Now it’s a tool I can use all of the time!

I no longer have to pop back and forth to add a little clarity to the eyes or dodge and burn, or other retouching tweaks. One of my favorite new abilities is layers, which lets me add multiple textures and gives me extra control to place effects to a specific area. This saves me a ton of valuable time. I use it as a standalone more than not because of how easy it is to drag and drop. Exposure X is life made easy.

I feel that I have barely scratched the surface of what X has to offer. It is totally worth the upgrade!

Prizes

Photo of the Month award winners receive a few clutch items from Alien Skin Software. They get one of our super soft American Apparel t-shirts, a laser-engraved 16gb thumb drive loaded with all of our photography software, and best of all they get are featured here on the blog.

Monthly Theme

We are kicking the new year off by paying tribute to what we created last year. From now until the 1st of February, the monthly photo-sharing theme is your best shot of 2015. Everyone is encouraged to dig back through the archives and post their absolute best shot shared between January and December of last year.

Runner Ups

There are plenty more top choice shots, some of them are listed below. Congratulations to everyone that submitted last month. These are beautiful!