The tools in Exposure’s Histogram panel provide you with helpful information about the tones in your images. These tools include clipping warnings, which highlight the areas where highlight and shadow detail is lost in your photos so you can adjust your edit to compensate. Exposure’s clipping thresholds can easily be customized to include more of the brightest or darkest tones in your images. And you can use Exposure’s display of the RGB values of a sampled area in your photo to scrutinize the colors carefully.
Watch this video and learn how to use the clipping warnings to guide your editing adjustments. You’ll see how you can modify the clipping thresholds, and how to closely-examine sampled tones in your photos with Exposure’s RGB display.
Try Exposure Today
I own Luminar 2008, but I find that Exposure is more elegant, and functions beautifully and powerfully. I really want to change software, but find I can complete the job much quicker in Luminar. There are some things about Luminar that makes the transformation of my photos a faster proposition. However, in some ways Luminar is like using a hammer and X5 is like using a surgical knife.
My workflow is this. I make basic adjustments to the original photo and then add new layers for selective adjustments to selective parts of the image. On the new layer I will bring attention to the portions of the photo I want to draw the eyes to. I can quickly do this and experiment at the same time. This is one area of operation where I find X5 frustrating because X5 starts by default with no mask (hence you cannot see the effect of your changes to this layer and it warns you about this) and Luminar by default starts with the mask over the whole layer without me having to do anything. As soon as the desired effect is found, I then either draw, circle or gradient on the mask in the appropriate places and Luminar automatically replaces the mask that completely covered the layer, with the selective drawn mask. This (always on) behaviour makes for a more efficient and faster way of working. X5 works quickly IF you are using one of the presets like burn or dodge, but if you want to use HSL (for instance), you can’t see your changes until you start brushing. Curiously, the X5 effects panel applies a complete mask to the layer by default which is the default Luminar behaviour!
The other superior behaviour of Luminar masks is that you can quickly brush, radius or gradient an area and choose whether it is on the whole layer or JUST on one of the effects applied to that layer. This is very powerful.
Hi, Wayne. Thanks for the comments.
The default behavior is different between the two applications. I can see how that’s frustrating to get accustomed to. You can get the full mask-on behavior like in Luminar by setting up the desired effect *before* opening the brushing panel. F5 toggles the brushing panel, or you can configure a custom keystroke. So a basic workflow might be: press cmd-L to add a layer; then apply an effect; then press F5 to mask; then brush, and then press F5 when complete.