My recent article, 3 Alternative Post-Processing Applications that Challenge the Adobe Throne, presented just three of the many post-processing software packages available (both free and paid) that provide excellent post-processing capabilities. In this article, I’ll give you a much longer list of post-processing software. To be impartial, I’ll list the titles in alphabetical order.

DXO Photolab 2

A few of the titles added by readers in the Comments section of the “3 Alternatives” article impressed me with their power and innovative design. I’ve been editing digital images with every software package available since late 1986, and I thought I’d seen most of them. However, it seems that the list of capable editing software grows weekly.

As you will notice, I do not mention ALL the software available for download or online use. Those that made the cut will be actual production titles with a minimum set of well-designed editing functions.

To be honest, I’ve looked at a significant number of offerings that are little more than public domain routines. They are not fully implemented or even adequately defined. These were considered but not listed.

Listed below is a wide variety of packages on both mobile and laptop/desktop platforms; a true variety pack that covers the field from hobbyist to professional users. No matter what your preference, you’ll find something here to tickle your fancy and meet your demands.

ACDSee Photo Studio Professional

As was welcomed in my first article, additional post-processing software titles should be added to this list by readers who have discovered (and used) them.

It is important to recognize all such products in a desire for fairness and sharing information. Because this list includes many more titles, I will not mention individual features of these titles, only a brief mention of the product’s most notable features.

This is where you can really contribute…

I’ll rely on you to describe your favorite features and benefits of your favorite titles. Let’s make this a very collaborative group effort BUT with one important request: please be brief and succinct with your comments. Limit your comments to one or two of the features that make your favorite app stand out from all others. That way, we learn from each other without monopolizing the mutual pulpit.

Skylum Luminar 3

List of photography post-processing software

ACDSee Photo Studio

Publisher: ACDSee Systems International

Website: https://www.acdsee.com/en/index/

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $60 Mac/Win/Mobile

Afterlight 2

Publisher: Afterlight Collective

Android Website: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fueled.afterlight&hl=en_US

Apple Website: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1293122457 

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $60 Mac/Win/Mobile

Affinity Photo

Publisher: Serif

Website: www.affinity.serif.com

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $50 Mac/Win/iPad

Capture One

Publisher: Phase One

Website: https://www.phaseone.com/en/

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $299 or $20/month Mac/Win

Darktable

Website: www.darktable.org

Price: Free

Exposure X4.5

Publisher: Alien Skin

Website: https://www.alienskin.com

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $119 Mac/Win Computer

Fotor

Publisher: Fotor

Android Website: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.everimaging.photoeffectstudio&hl=en_US

Apple Website: https://apps.apple.com/app/id440159265?referrer=click%3D8cd7ac09-77a3-42f6-9005-ed622bd3e17f

Price: Free

Gimp

Publisher: Gimp

Website: https://www.gimp.org

Price: Free Mac/Win Computers

Google Photos

Publisher: Google

Website: https://www.google.com/photos

Price: Free online

Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic

Publisher: Adobe Systems

Website: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $10/mo Mac/Win

Adobe Lightroom Tablet/Computer/Mobile

Online Photo Editor

Publisher: PicMonkey

Website: https://www.picmonkey.com/

Trial: Free/7 days

Price: Starts at $7.99/month

Photo RAW

Publisher: ON1

Website: https://www.on1.com/products

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $80

PhotoLab 2

Publisher: DxO

Website: https://shop.dxo.com

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $129 Mac/Win Mobile/Computer

Paint Shop Pro X9

Publisher: Corel

Website: https://www.paintshoppro.com/en/

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $80 Mac/Win

Anthropics Portrait Pro 2

Photoshop/Camera RAW

Publisher: Adobe Systems

Website: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $10/mo Mac/Win

Photoshop Elements

Publisher: Adobe Systems

Website: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $59.99 Mac/Win

Photoshop Express

Publisher: Adobe Systems

Android Website: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adobe.psmobile&hl=en

Apple Website: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photoshop-express-photo-editor/id331975235?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Price: Free

PhotoPad

Publisher: NCH Software

Website: https://www.nchsoftware.com

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $40

PicsArt

Publisher: PicsArt

Android Website: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.picsart.studio

Apple Website: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/picsart-photo-studio/id587366035

Price: Free

Pixlr Editor

Publisher: Pixlr

Android Website: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pixlr.express&hl=en_US

Apple Website: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixlr-photo-collages-effect/id526783584

Price: Free online

Pixlr Mobile Android/IOS

PortraitPro 18

Publisher: Anthropics

Website: https://www.anthropics.com

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $45 Mac/Win

RAW Therapee

Publisher: Softpedia

Website: https://www.softpedia.com

Price: Free (but only offered on Windows)

Skylum Luminar 3

Publisher: Skylum

Website: https://skylum.com/luminar

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $70 Mac/Win Computer

Smart Photo Editor

Publisher: Anthropics

Website: https://www.anthropics.com/smartphotoeditor/product/

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $30 Wind/Mac

Snapseed

Publisher: Google

Android Website: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.niksoftware.snapseed&hl=en_US

Apple Website: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snapseed/id439438619

Price: Free

Sumo Paint

Publisher: Sumo

Website: https://www.sumopaint.com

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: Free version, but Sumo Pro is $4/month

Topaz Studio 2

Publisher: Topaz Labs

Website: topazlabs.com

Trial: Free/30 days

Price: $100 Mac/Win

Anthropics Smart Photo Editor

Conclusion

Some titles didn’t make this list’s cut simply because they are only marginally useful. Needless to say, in today’s market, there is an innumerable slew of entertainment-level phone/tablet-based image “editing” apps also available. There are way too many even to mention, let alone keep current information on.

Many of these apps are made for the amusement of the younger social media crowd who appreciate more unicorns and stickers than serious editing power. Not to sound judgmental, there is an app for everything and everyone, but this listing is “focused” on actual photo editing capabilities more than the social media aspect.

The post Your Comprehensive Guide to Photography Post-Processing Software appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Herb Paynter.

Aurora HDR is one of the best and easiest photo editing programs available for quickly creating HDR images. With that said, it has a wide range of tools and filters to help you achieve your HDR goals. To help you sort through them all, this article will highlight seven tips for creating natural-looking HDR landscapes in Aurora HDR 2018.

1. Keep HDR editing of sunsets and sunrises to a minimum

Everyone knows that sunrise and sunset provide optimal landscape photography opportunities. Golden hour bathes everything in a beautiful, often colorful natural light. As a result, it’s best to take a more subdued editing approach to keep the scene as natural looking as possible, especially when dealing with HDR. Otherwise, you risk over-processing your image.

Original starting image (the middle exposure of a 5-image bracketed set). Image courtesy dPS Managing Editor, Darlene Hildebrandt.

NOTE: On that note, many of the tips below will include editing tools and sliders that have been pushed to their extremes. This is meant as a demonstration to show what you could do by using these tools at their maximum, but it’s not suggesting you should do this.

2. Intelligently bump contrast and color with HDR Enhance

One of the first tools you should utilize is called HDR Enhance. Found in the HDR Basic panel, it’s a newer feature available in Aurora HDR 2018 and it serves as a replacement for the clarity slider. When activated, HDR Enhance brings out the details and textures in your image while minimizing any residual artifacts such as image noise that might be introduced in the process.

In the example below, the HDR Enhance slider has been pulled to the extreme for demonstration purposes. Notice how the contrast in the foreground and the distant rocks have increased significantly, and the color in the sky really pops.

HDR Enhance at 100.

But adding too much HDR Enhance is like adding too much clarity. The rocks and sand in the foreground have so much contrast and clarity that they look unreal, and the rocks and hills in the background now have a halo effect (generally considered undesirable).

To reduce these effects and thus make your landscape appear more realistic, tone down HDR Enhance significantly (or use the masking brush to apply or erase the effect wherever you choose). By having the slider at 36 as opposed to 100, there’s still a nice pop of details and color.

HDR Enhance scaled back to 36.

3. Bump up the contrast

To make your image appear less flat, bump up the contrast. Going to extremes results in lots of shadows, reducing details in any dark areas. It also saturates color in the sky and in the reflection on the water.

Contrast at 100.

By lessening contrast to about 20, shadows are still enhanced, but the details are better preserved. Note that the trees on the hill are still visible.

Contrast scaled back to 20.

4. Use Smart Tone to brighten up an image

Since increasing the contrast introduced more shadows to the image, brighten it up again by using the Smart Tone filter. Dragging the slider to the right brings more light to areas of the image that are dark, without dramatically affecting parts of your image that are already bright.

Below, you can see an extreme version of the Smart Tone slider in action. Notice how the shadowed areas are brightened, revealing lots of detail, particularly in the hill on the right. This is what you can do with Smart Tone, but it’s not necessarily what you should do since the image now appears very flat without any shadows or contrast, and the dreaded halo has appeared again.

Smart Tone at 100.

To appear more realistic, pull back Smart Tone to about 22. This gives a hint of detail to the trees in the right, similar to what a reflection on the water might cause. It also brightens that patch of sand to the right.

Smart Tone dialed back to 22.

5. Enhance Saturation, Vibrance, and Color Contrast

At this point, let’s turn our attention to the colors. Play with the Temperature slider in the HDR Basics panel to add some warmth to images like this sunset. Then scroll down to the Color panel and tweak the Saturation and the Vibrance sliders.

Depending on your image, you may need to bump these either up or down. Just avoid taking them to their extremes; generally, somewhere between 5-20 will be a good range. You can also bump up the Color Contrast slider, which controls the contrast between primary and secondary colors.

Saturation, Vibrance and Color Contrast boosted.

6. Use Image Radiance for an ethereal effect

Now we’re looking at a few finishing touches that you can add to your HDR landscape shots, and one option is Image Radiance. This adds a soft, dreamy glow to your photo, and it is best used on sunset or sunrise images. In this particular scenario, Image Radiance seems particularly important since it can contribute a soft, hazy effect typical of ocean shots.

Increase the Image Radiance slider to about 37. Doing this will introduce some shadows to your image, but that can easily be fixed with the Brightness and Shadows slider in the same panel. You can also adjust Vividness and Warmth here too if you see fit.

7. Add a subtle Vignette

The final edit that you might do to an HDR landscape image is to add a vignette. In the case of a sunrise or sunset, a vignette can be particularly helpful to add a subtle frame around the subject, drawing more attention to the focal part of the scene, the setting sun.

Within Aurora HDR, the Vignette panel is at the very bottom. You can control not only the size, amount, roundness, and feathering of the vignette, but also the inner brightness. As well you can adjust the placement of the vignette, meaning you can easily create a vignette that is not centered on the image – very handy if your subject is following the rule of thirds and is off-center.

When adding a vignette, note that the amount is a negative number for a dark (black) vignette and a positive number for a bright (white) one.

Final image with the vignette added.

Bonus tips

In addition, Aurora HDR also has tools for correcting Chromatic Aberration and Lens Distortion. It also comes loaded with several “Realistic HDR” presets that you can use to get started, and then just tweak the settings to your liking.

Over to you

There you have it, seven tips for processing landscape HDR photos in Skylum’s Aurora HDR. If you were inspired to create your own HDR landscapes, please share them in the comments below along with your post-processing tips and tricks.

Disclaimer: Skylum (formerly Macphun) is a dPS advertising partner.

The post 7 Tips for Creating Natural-Looking HDR Landscapes Using Aurora HDR appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Suzi Pratt.

Focusing on color can help you communicate style and emotion. This approach is often referred to as color grading.

Color grading versus color correction

You may have wondered how this differs from color correction, which is more of a technical adjustment. A tungsten bulb, for example, will produce a color shift in your images that’s warmer than what you’re accustomed to seeing with your eyes. Often you want to adjust that hue, cooling it off a bit so that it appears more natural. That’s a correction.

Color grading, on the other hand, leans toward the artistic. You may want to add or enhance orange tones and teals to create a mood similar to what one would experience in the movies. Exact reality isn’t the goal. It’s more about a creative look that elicits a feeling.

Here’s a simple example. Compare these two portraits. The first picture seems perfectly fine. The rendered colors are similar to what we would perceive if standing there during capture.

A reasonably color correct portrait.

The second image is color graded to communicate a style, a look. And even though it isn’t natural by everyday lighting standards, it’s interesting – and probably more engaging than the “correct” color version.

This version was color graded in Luminar 2018 using Chrono-Steel LUT by Lutify.me.

All image editors are equipped to correct color. But some are better than others at providing the means to manipulate it stylistically. Luminar 2018 is one of those creative applications.

The Power of LUTs

Lookup Tables (LUTs) sound like a technical adjustment. And indeed there is plenty of color science at work under the hood. They are used to precisely shift colors from one spot to another. But those shifts can be stored in a container, such as a “.cube” file, that can be used to color grade an image.

So even though LUTs are precise color science, their recipes can be wonderfully artistic.

A side by side comparison of this Las Vegas scene shows how color grading can breathe life into an image.

The original version of this Las Vegas scene was serviceable, but certainly not exciting. Nor did it convey the majesty of the building. By color grading with a teal and orange LUT, suddenly the scene comes to life.

Does it look exactly like that in reality? No. But does the image feel like Las Vegas? Definitely more than the original.

Applying LUTs in Luminar 2018

Your gateway to this type of color grading in Luminar 2018 is via the LUT Mapping Filter. You can add this adjustment to your workspace by clicking on the Filters button, and by choosing LUT Mapping from the Professional category.

LUT Mapping is available via the Filters menu in Luminar 2018.

Once the filter has been added to the workspace, click on the popup menu inside the panel to reveal the built-in LUTs (such as Tritone and Kodack chrome 3), or to access LUT files that you may have already added to your computer via Load Custom LUT File.

Luminar comes with built-in LUTs, or you can add your own.

Once you select a LUT, the image is color graded via the LUT’s recipe. You can fine-tune the recipe using the Amount, Contrast, and Saturation sliders. Also, a good companion filter for this color grading with LUTs is HSL, which provides color adjustments for hue, saturation, and luminance.

Tips for Effective Color Grading with LUTs

Creating a separate adjustment layer for your color grading provides lots of flexibility. The base layer is used for basic adjustments via the Develop filter and the other tools that you need to establish a good range of tones. The adjustment layer (Layers > Add New Adjustment Layer) contains the LUT Mapping, HSL, and other creative filters. You can then use the blend modes and the opacity slider for precise control over the grading.

Saving your LUT as a custom preset provides you with a preview thumbnail as well.

Another handy technique is to save your LUT color grading as a custom preset. Luminar makes this easy. Once you achieve a look that you want to use again, save it as a custom preset. Use the “Save Filters Preset” button in the lower right corner of Luminar. This provides the added benefit of a preview thumbnail for the LUT and its accompanying adjustments. You can create custom presets for all of your favorite LUTs. That’s a real time saver.

LUTs are also terrific for film emulation. There are LUTs for Kodachrome, Polaroid, and B&W film looks. This is a high-quality way to build your own Instagram-like filters, with a pinch of your own creativity added.

Downloading and Organizing More LUT Files

Skylum maintains a LUT downloads page that you can access through Luminar. Click on “Download New LUT Files” in the LUT Mapping popup menu. This will take you to the Skylum LUT catalog.

Once you download a new collection of LUTs, store them in a place that you will remember, such as a LUTs folder in Pictures or Documents. You’ll have to navigate there when you use the “Load Custom LUT File” command in Luminar. The application doesn’t store LUTs for you, so you have to remember where you are.

Bonus tip! Store your custom LUTs in Dropbox so you can access them from any computer.

Save Your Work

If you’re using Luminar 2018 as a standalone app (as opposed to a plug-in or editing extension), then save your favorite color gradings as a Luminar file. This allows you to return to the image and its settings at a future date to continue your work, or to change the color grading to another style.

Make it Look Easy

Your viewers may not realize the techniques that you used to create the enticing color schemes in your images. What they will notice are your style and creativity. Using LUTs can contribute greatly to that pursuit.

Disclaimer: Skylum (formerly Macphun) is a paid partner of dPS.

The post Easy Color Grading With LUTs and Luminar 2018 appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Derrick Story.

Over the past few months, I’ve been testing out the features of Luminar. I’ve looked at the time-saving features that can help reduce your editing headaches. I’ve also played around with the AI filter to see how it holds up in quickly editing holiday photos and now it’s time to check Luminar’s capabilities when it comes to creating a retro look for your photos.

I wanted to know if Luminar would be quick, easy to use and create a look that tastefully gave my photos the look and feel of shooting with film.

Retro Look #1

To embark on this experiment, I studied some famous older photographs. My goal was to shoot a few images that paid tribute to the look and feel of old-school Hollywood. I saw this first image of Sophia Loren from the 1960’s and knew it was perfect. I love the style of dress from past eras and thought this would be a suitable project.

Sophia Loren Image

The goal was to create an image with a similar look and feel. I borrowed my friend Nahleen, she has some similar features to Sophia Loren. Once she agreed we set out to capture an image and then process for that 1960’s film look. Here’s the original image we took.

This is the original unedited photo.

It was shot outdoors on a cold and frosty December afternoon. Nahleen has some similar features to Sophia Loren but is by no means a carbon copy. Instead, I was more interested in attaining a photo in which the fur hood framed her face.

So now that we had captured the image, it was time to bring it into Luminar. I tried to make to make the conversion as simple and quick to complete as possible. I will admit that I tried several times with different settings, etc. until I found a look that I felt was similar to the Sophia Loren image.

The AI Filter was used to bring out some contrast in the image. The photo of Sophia Loren was quite sharp and also had a fairly contrasty look, so my first goal was to pull out the dark tones and brighten my lighter tones to match more closely.

The Accent slider made adjustments quickly and easily.

The B&W Workspace

I then used the B&W Workspace to guide my editing of the photo. I adjusted several sliders. The intention was to increase the contrast and create some fairly strong blacks.

The B&W Workspace comes equipped with a variety of filters all designed to help with black and white conversions.

Here are the settings I used.

Adding Film Grain

My final step was to add film grain. At first, I cranked up the amount of film grain. In this screenshot, you can see how strongly I adjusted it. I always like to adjust a setting by purposely using too much. Then I back off the amount until I find a nice balance.

Here you can see that I’ve adjusted the grain to a fairly heavy amount. For the final image, I backed off a bit.

The whole process was pretty quick. Once I found the right settings it didn’t take too long to recreate this retro look. The final photograph is dark and contrasty but also a little different from the original Sophia Loren shot.

The final image is cropped in closer. My use of film grain is also heavier than in the original Sophia Loren shot.

Retro Look #2

In this second shot, I used a photo from a recent photo shoot in which I was working with a young lady to create a portfolio of modeling images. The 10-hour photo session was created using a very basic budget, but we made sure to utilize a retro outfit for this article.

The bell bottoms and the fur jacket were both found at the thrift store, as was the backdrop. We were working a tight space with limited materials.

Here’s the original unedited file. It was shot in my living room. We used a very basic DIY type of set up.

Free Presets

For this shot, I decided to take advantage of Luminar’s free presets. There are lots of free presets available for download, and I was lucky enough to find a set of free analog-film looks.

Here’s a look at all the free presets available on the Luminar website.

Quick Clicks and Some Cloning

The look of this image was very easy to create with just a few simple adjustments. I chose a cross-processing look and then tweaked it to my liking. The accompanying texture was applied pretty heavily. I found that it was overwhelming the image. So I chose to back off the strength of the texture.

I also cropped the image slightly and applied the Orton Effect filter. It quickly smoothed the model’s skin, and I didn’t need to go in and do any retouching on her face. This saved me quite a lot of time.

Finally, I took the image into Photoshop, where I cloned and added a layer to fill in the areas around the outside where you could see my living room in the original shot.

The preset applied without any adjustments to the original settings.

I started to make some minor adjustment to the original settings found in the preset which included adjusting the saturation in cross-processing.

Here’s the split screen of the before and after views. I completed some cropping and clone stamping.

Plug in for Photoshop

Luminar also has the capability to clone and add layers, but I’ll be honest there’s a part of me that will forever remain loyal to Photoshop for completing these parts of the editing process. This is partly why I really like Luminar  – it works as a plug-in for Photoshop as well. I can move back and forth between the two programs pretty seamlessly.

Here’s the final edited image.

Retro look #3

This is the original unedited file.

For this final shot, I decided to edit the image fully in Luminar. I started from scratch with a RAW file. The goal was to experiment with the full editing capabilities of Luminar. The intention was to create a sepia look image that felt like an older faded photograph.

To start, I opened the B&W Workspace. It contains all the tools I needed for this conversion. That means I didn’t have to search through the list of filters to find anything.

Next, I applied the orange filter, cropped the image and adjusted contrast. I also adjusted the black and white sliders and played around with the strength of this first filter. I did consider creating a color image with a faded look but decided to go with full black and white.

Here’s a look at the faded film style.

Split Toning

After making these adjustments, I started to experiment with the Split Toning sliders. I gave the image a more brownish tone. This step took some experimentation with saturation and various colors.

These are the sliders and colors I experimented with during editing.

After adding the split toning, it was time to add a vignette and film grain. Again I adjusted the grain so it was very heavy and then backed it off to a more suitable amount. The longest part of this whole process was finding a texture that I liked which I felt fit with the feel of the image I wanted to create. I tried several. Luminar comes with lots of free textures you can download. They all seemed to work quite nicely.

In the end, I chose a weathered-looking texture and used the brush tool to apply it to the image in varying amounts. I didn’t want a lot of heavy texture over her face. Here are the final results of my editing and experimentation. The image has a heavier texture application along with film grain and a stronger vignette. The B&W Workspace worked perfectly. It placed all the necessary tools right at my fingertips.

Experimenting with Different Textures

I tend to adjust the image quite strongly then slowly back off the effect until I find the treatment I like.

I played around with several different textures to create the old damaged photograph type of look.

Overlay option number two.

Overlay option number three.

The Finished Image

The final image includes the texture you see in the image above, but I backed it off quite a bit. Here are the results of the experiment. The application of the texture was reduced down to about 14. I didn’t want the effect to be as heavy-handed as in the image above.

In this final finished image, you can see the texture is most obvious around the edges. It’s a subtle texture called tattered that was available in the free downloads section of the Luminar webpage.

Your turn

Luminar comes equipped with a full array of filters that can help you to create a retro look for your images in both black and white and color. Give it a try, they have a 14-day free trial.

Disclaimer: Macphun, soon to be Skylum, is a dPS advertising partner.

The post How to Create a Retro Look for Your Images with Luminar appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Erin Fitzgibbon.

Luminar’s powerful, customizable approach to image editing is wrapped in a cloak of simplicity which is great for photographers who tend to feel intimidated by the hundreds of buttons, menu options, and sliders available in other post-processing programs. The more you use it the more you will likely realize that there is far more to Luminar 2018 than a handful of presets and filters. You will probably stumble across some neat hidden features that can do a lot to improve your editing and workflow.

Here are 10 of my favorite features, in no particular order, that I found just by poking around and going about my usual business of editing photos with Luminar. Not all of these will change your life, but several might make you react like I did, by thinking “Hey now, that’s really useful!”

Luminar has a host of small but useful features up its sleeve to help novices and professionals alike.

#1 – Before/after preview slider

As a longtime user of Lightroom, the idea of having a before/after preview is nothing new. With one click you can see your image split in two, with one half as the original and the other half showing the edits. Luminar has this feature as well but it kicks things up one notch by allowing you to move the preview slider back and forth.

This lets you see your edits applied to any part of the image you want, and it updates instantaneously as you move the slider. It’s an incredibly useful feature that you might not notice at first, but once you do could seriously improve your editing.

#2 – Lasso tool for erasing

Sometimes you need the Spot Healing tool to remove unwanted blemishes and imperfections from an image, but sometimes that very same tool can drive you crazy due to its imprecise nature and circular application brush. When I first started using Luminar I was well aware of its healing tool that functioned much like similar tools in other applications, but I didn’t realize that it was also possible to use the same technology with a lasso-style implementation.

To erase oddly-shaped portions of an image select Tools>Erase, then select the lasso tool, and then click to outline the spot that you want to erase. When you are finished, click “done” and Luminar will eliminate it like it was never even there.

I liked this image but was not happy with the orange banner in the background.

The Lasso Erase tool let me select just the banner and then remove it from the photo with one click.

The final image is much improved, and it took very little effort to do so.

#3 – Single View Mode

As you add filters to an image it can get a little cumbersome having to deal with an ever-expanding vertical list of image adjustments. Thankfully there is an easy way to tame your filters. Just click on the Filters label at the top of the list and choose Single View Mode.

This collapses all of your filters and allows you to work with just one at a time, dynamically collapsing it when you click on another one. This single tip has saved me countless headaches as I scroll up and down my filters workspace to find the one I need, and I don’t think I could ever go back to any other way of editing.

#4 – Edit multiple images at one time

This one requires a bit of legwork but it can really come in handy depending on your editing needs. If you want to work with multiple images at one time, each on its own layer and with its own set of filters, click the + button in the Layers panel and add a new Image Layer. This new layer is added on top of your existing layer and can be combined with another layer with tools like masking and by changing the opacity.

However, you can also work on both images side-by-side by using the Free Transform option in the Tools menu. First select one of the layers, then click Tools > Free Transform, and re-size the image so it’s on one side of your screen. Do the same for the other layer, and you now have a workspace that allows you to edit multiple images at the same time.

#5 – Crop to Facebook cover

If you have ever uploaded a picture to your Facebook page as a Cover Photo you may have been disappointed to see your painstakingly-edited picture re-cropped and re-sized so the final result is a shadow of what you intended.

Luminar’s crop tool has a way to mitigate this issue entirely by including a Crop to Facebook Cover option in the crop tool. This will ensure that your resulting image will be just the right dimensions to fit perfectly on top of your Facebook profile page without any annoying automated edits from Mark Zuckerberg and his company.

#6 – Click the histogram to show color channels

It’s no secret that Luminar has a histogram view, and in fact, it would be kind of surprising if any image editor worth its salt didn’t have this tool. But what’s a little different here is that you can click the histogram to show individual color channels one by one.

This might not be something you use every single day but can really come in handy if you want to see the exposure level of the reds, blues, and greens.

#7 – Apply user presets during batch processing

Luminar’s workflow generally revolves around the idea of applying filters. You can also instantly apply many filters at once using a preset. What I find more useful, though, is that you can combine different filters to make your own presets, such as one that I use quite often called “Clarignette” that applies a bit of clarity while also adding a vignette.

It’s a simple but effective preset that I tend to use on many images, and Luminar’s batch processing tool makes this even easier. When you load a series of images for batch processing you can apply any of Luminar’s existing presets in addition to any custom presets you create yourself. This can dramatically speed up your editing if you find yourself doing the same types of editing operations on many of your photos.

#8 – Drag-and-drop layer reordering

Luminar’s layer-based workflow functions much like Photoshop and other editing applications. While this particular tip might not be especially groundbreaking it is something I found to be very handy. You can, of course, rename layers by double-clicking on their name and use blend modes by right-clicking on them (or control-clicking on a Mac).

But one thing I didn’t realize at first was how easy it was to reorder the layers in Luminar 2018. A simple drag-and-drop can be used to adjust which layer comes first. Since your edits are applied in a top-down fashion this can have a big impact on your overall image.

#9 – Change editing background color with one click

As a longtime user of Lightroom I have developed a pretty consistent set of editing preferences, and I have found that a light gray background helps me focus on editing my images without straining my eyes too much. However, sometimes I want to change the background color.

Luminar handles this with one click, which makes it a lot easier and more practical. Simply right-click (or control-click on a Mac) anywhere in the background area of your editing workspace to change the color.

#10 – One-Click Preset Updates

It’s not uncommon for me to create a preset and then change it over time as my editing evolves, but for a while I used a cumbersome process to do this. It involved clicking on a preset, changing its parameters, saving it as a new preset. Then I’d navigate to the Preset folder on my computer to delete the original preset and finally change the name of the revised preset.

It was a chore and often resulted in a Preset folder littered with old versions that I didn’t use anymore, but thankfully there is a much easier way to do this. Simply click the name of one of your Custom Presets in the tray at the bottom of the screen and choose “Update with current settings” and your preset will be updated without any other work on your part.

More to discover

While some of these tips might not be new to you at all, each was something I stumbled across by accident while using Luminar 2018. They served as a reminder to me of how I appreciate this program’s ability to surprise and delight.

I enjoy finding useful tips and tools by accident, and Luminar is full of these sorts of hidden, helpful features. What sorts of things have you come across while using Luminar? Do you have a favorite tip or trick to share? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Disclaimer: Macphun, soon to be Skylum, is a dPS advertising partner.

The post Top 10 Luminar 2018 Features That I Discovered by Accident appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Simon Ringsmuth.

Aurora HDR 2018 has plenty of tricks up its sleeve, and one of those is versatility. It’s not a one-trick pony when it comes to creating your HDR look. The range of different tools really allows you to create a huge variety of looks really easily. Part of that is knowing what your available tools do. The other part is just playing around and exploring your own creative side!

In this article, you’ll see five different looks in HDR and how you can recreate them – but on top of that, you’ll also get them in preset form to use yourself. You’ll also get to see some of the new Lens and Transform options inside Aurora HDR 2018.

Plug it in

Aurora HDR 2018 doesn’t have a way to manage files, but can easily be used from other applications including Lightroom. In fact, you’ll even be able to process the files using Aurora’s built-in HDR processor, so you’re not trying to combine three already rendered files. To run Aurora HDR 2018 from inside Lightroom, you’ll need to run the standalone version first. From the Edit menu on PC or the Aurora HDR Menu on Mac, choose the Install Plugins.. menu item.

From the dialog that appears, choose the host applications that you want to use.

Back in Lightroom, once you’ve selected the bracketed exposures you want to edit, go to the File menu and from the Plug-In Extras menu, choose Transfer to Aurora HDR 2018.

Getting Started in Aurora

Aurora HDR 2018 will load up with your selected bracketed sequence. I’ve chosen these photos specifically because they have lens distortion and a crooked horizon, which you’ll see how to correct shortly.

Once the files have loaded, you can set about working with alignment and ghosting settings. You’ll see the sequence and the bracketing interval in the photos. To align the photos if you’re not on a tripod, click Alignment. To access the other settings, click the cog you see on the bottom left (see below).

If you’ve got photos with moving objects in them, such as waves, trees in the wind or moving people, turn Ghost Reduction on. Choose your preferred reference image, and how strong you want the reduction to be. Color Denoise helps remove noise but increases the time your HDR takes to render. Finally, turn on Chromatic Aberration Removal to automatically get rid of color fringing on your photo.

Lens and Perspective Corrections

In the Filters header, you’ll see two icons. The first is for Perspective corrections or Transform (including rotation) and the second for Lens corrections.

The little odd looking shape is for Perspective and the round one is Lens Corrections.

You can fix rotation here (or using Crop as well) by clicking the Perspective icon. Rotation of 24 and Scale of 50 correct this image nicely.

Transform sliders correcting perspective.

Your penultimate step before going to the individual HDR looks is to fix the bow in the horizon caused by the wide-angle lens. A setting of 18 looks good for this photo. It also reveals that 24 was too much in the previous step, which you can always fix by going back to Perspective correction. 19 looked better zoomed in.

Lens Correction fixing distortion caused by wide lenses.

As the photo is a little underexposed, boosting the Exposure before going to create your looks is probably a good idea. While you may need to change this for each look, an additional stop is a good start here.

#1 Photo-Realistic

For your first look, something photo-realistic is the best approach. You’re not trying to get anything gritty, or super desaturated, or over saturated here. We’ll get to that later.

For this look, use HDR Basic, Color, and HDR Denoise. In HDR Basic, smooth out the dynamic range by reducing Highlights and increasing Shadows. Smart Tone of 44 also helps it along. HDR Enhance (formerly Clarity) brings up some nice detail, 50 is looking well here. Your aim is to get the best looking photo you can before tweaking the look – this will be true of all looks.

The color is a little flat so in the Color panel, you can boost both Saturation and Vibrance to +20. Color contrast, which controls the contrast between the primary and secondary colors looks good around 20 as well. You’re not aiming for extremes here, just to get a good looking photo.

You’ve probably noticed the noise in the clouds at this point. This is where HDR Noise comes in. Setting this to around 25 softens up the noise.

And that makes your first look, a photorealistic HDR photo.

#2 Gritty HDR

With the basic look out of the way, it’s time for the more surrealistic to take over.

Start by using the History Panel to reset everything to your original starting point AFTER increasing the Exposure +1 and applying your Perspective and Lens Corrections. The History Panel records every action you take in Aurora HDR in chronological order, so simply select the last action after the ones you’d like to save, then begin the next edits. The History Panel will begin recording any edits from there leading to your Gritty HDR look!

Now it’s pretty flat and bleak, so you’re going to take it even further in that direction.

Set your HDR Enhance to +100 to get the bleak and gritty ball rolling. Smart Tone of -50 darkens the photo as well, and a hint of Vibrance (+15) gives color to the sky, while leaving the rest of the photo muted.

To complete your gritty look, go to the HDR Structure panel. In the top section, set Amount to 25 to begin to increase detail in the photo. Increasing Softness (+80) makes the detail more realistic, while Boost accentuates it (+75). The latter two sliders might seem at odds, but a quick play shows they complement each other rather than compete.

HDR Microstructure boosts micro contrast, while Softness makes it more realistic. By increasing Amount to 71 and Softness to 28, you’ll get even more detail. You may even like the noise that this processing adds to the photo. I think it’s a big part of the look.

And now you have your classic gritty HDR look!

#3 Warm Ethereal

At the opposite end of the spectrum is a soft and ethereal look. There are two different variations you can have on this, and they depend on using Image Radiance or Glow (and combinations of each). So with a reset to your basic corrected photo, let’s begin again!

A good beginning would be for a warmer look, so set your Temperature in HDR Basic to 10. While Image Radiance does have a Warmth slider, Temperature is much more effective. This look is all about Image Radiance. Set your Amount to 75 to really give the image a glow. Smoothness affects the softness of the image, and in this case, you’ll probably agree, it’s a little too soft, so set it to -50.

Overall at this point, the photo is too bright, so a reduction in Brightness to -76 helps. Darkening Shadows also helps. Finally, for Image Radiance, an addition of +61 Vividness to boost the saturation, while Warmth just adds another hint of yellow tones in a more controllable way than with Temperature.

There’s a lot of warmth in the photo (in a good way), but you may want to add a little contrast of color into it. By using the Polarizing Filter, you can add more blue to sky, emulating a real circular polarizer.

The final thing for this look is for you to introduce a little global detail using HDR Detail Boost. As you can guess Small affects the fine detail, Large affects the global contours of the photo, while Medium controls the details between Small and Large.

To sharpen the global edges, you can push Large. This firms up the edges while retaining the softness that Image Radiance has created. Protection protects fine detail while Masking controls where the effect is applied with 30-70 being optimal.

So that’s your first ethereal look.

Warm Ethereal

#4 Soft Glow

Your second ethereal look uses Glow. Reset your photo again to the settings at the start of the looks. Because Glow works on the Highlights, it’s probably a good idea to reduce your Exposure down to 0.60. Now, go to Glow and set the Amount to 50. A fog settles over the photo. This would work better on a dark evening scene that a sunny day, but you get what it does.

Now that you know what Glow looks like, it’s time to get a little wacky. Start by setting your Smart Tone to -100, and HDR Enhance to 56. This reduces some of the Glow, so set that Amount to 94. You probably want to go a bit wilder with Color, so set Saturation at 50 and Vibrance much higher, at 70. A hint of Color Contrast gives even more of a boost at 30.

For the final part of this look, add +30 Amount from Image Radiance to enhance the glow.

And that’s look #4.

Soft Glow

#5 Nitty Gritty Black & White

And now for something completely different – a nice gritty Black & White. Again, begin with a reset. Now, in Color, turn the Saturation down to -100.

Before going for grit, you’ll need to get contrast right. A few tweaks will get it to a workable point. It’s not set in stone at this point though.

And now you get to go for grit! You can use all the tools from previous looks that gave more detail, so HDR Enhance, HDR Structure, and HDR Details Boost apply. Go wild. This is definitely one for your own taste. The settings used here were HDR Enhance 40, HDR Structure Amount 40, Softness 20 and Boost 50. HDR Microstructure is Amount 47 and Softness 50. HDR Details Boost has Small 31 and Large 50.

Here’s the final look.

Nitty Gritty Black & White

Presets

And here are the five presets for you to use:  HDR-5-Looks-Presets. Download the file and unzip it, then save it on your hard drive.

To install the Presets, open the standalone version of Aurora HDR 2018. From the File menu select Show Presets Folder. Drag the new presets folder (you must unzip it first) into that one. Restart the program to have the presets show up in Aurora HDR 2018 (look under User Presets).

Go out there and have a bit of fun with your HDR images, and post your results in the comments below.

Disclaimer: Macphun, soon to be Skylum, is a dPS advertising partner.

The post How to Make 5 Different Looks using Aurora HDR 2018 appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Sean McCormack.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, it’s that time of year again. It’s cold, windy, snowy and very, very white. Winter wonderlands are the ideal things to shoot this time of year. When everything around you is frosted with snow and ice, even everyday things take on a magical feel.

When you step outdoors to shoot this winter, however, an icy fairytale landscape might not be exactly what you get. Here in Chicago if it’s not white, it’s pretty darn grey. That doesn’t make for very pretty pictures. Grey weather days look really blah in 2-D. Actually, even an amazing landscape filled with sparkling snow can make a surprisingly flat image. Let’s break down a few ways that you can process your winter images in Luminar to really make them pop.

My final version of wild horses running through a white-out snowstorm in northern Nevada. I adjusted the black point to -20 by dragging the slider until the histogram just touched the left side. I also made a few more adjustments in Luminar, including boosting the Shadows, reducing the Highlights and enhancing Vibrance. Canon 7DII with 100-400mm II plus 1.4x III extender @ 560mm, f/8, 1/1000th, ISO 400.

Adjust Your Whites and Blacks

In Luminar, you adjust the White and Black points in the RAW Develop Filter (if you’re adjusting a JPG it’s just called “Develop”), or in the dedicated Whites/Blacks Filter. These adjustments are an important first step for images with snow. By shifting the Blacks and Whites, you maximize the range of light and dark tones in your image. That helps give white snow texture and depth.

The unprocessed RAW file of the above image. Compare it to the lead image and look at the difference just a few adjustments made.

Adjust your Whites so that your snow isn’t “blown out” (which means it won’t show any detail). Usually, you’ll need to drag the Whites slider to the left. The histogram should just be touching the right side. Now grab your Blacks and drag it so that the histogram just touches the left side.

Fine-Tune Your White Balance

The White Balance setting is also in the Develop Filter. To help add pop to your winter images, adjust the Temperature of your image to be either warmer (more yellow) or cooler (more blue). You can also make a separate adjustment to the Tint, adjusting it to reflect more green or magenta. Be forewarned though, Temperature and Tint adjustments get tricky when dealing with white snow.

In this image of one of the paint pots at Yellowstone National Park, just after a light snow, I’ve adjusted the White Balance to a cooler/more blue Temperature of -5, and a more magenta Tint of +2. These very slight shifts, along with Contrast, Clarity and Vibrance adjustments make a big difference in this image’s feel. Canon 5DIV with 24-105mm II lens @ 24mm, f/10, 1/320th, ISO 1250.

Often, if you look at your favorite landscape and wildlife images, they have a warm, yellow glow to them. Warm colors tend to make us happy so we gravitate to them when we post-process. However, snow that is too yellow often looks wrong because we rarely have a full-on snowy landscape in bright, golden sun.

Be careful adjusting Tint too. Pink snow isn’t any more appealing or realistic than yellow snow. Ultimately though, these adjustments are up to you. Experiment to find a wintery look that’s right for your photography style.

Here’s the original RAW file of that same paint pot at Yellowstone National Park. You can see the original White Balance and the huge difference that simple change made to make the image above feel colder.

Boost Saturation for Eye-Catching Color

One exception to having vibrantly-colored snow is when an image has colored light reflecting from the sky. In the paint pots image above, you can see that the snow has a bit of a grey-blue cast. That looks natural to me because the snow would reflect the cast of the grey-blue sky.

Old Faithful steaming away at dawn one very cold morning. In this final image, I’ve boosted the colors quite a bit. Saturation +30, Vibrance +20 and Contrast +20. Canon 5DIV with 24-105mm II lens @ 56mm, f/13, 1/125th, ISO 800.

Sometimes, cold wintery images aren’t as much about the snow, either. In this Old Faithful landscape, the story is the drama of the winter sky. My instinct was to amp up the blues in this image, and also the golden grass, to create a striking, complementary color scheme.

When you try this, play around with the color sliders a bit (Vibrance and Saturation are great starting points) and see what works best. Strong color can be gorgeous but doesn’t work for every winter image.

Here’s the RAW, unprocessed file of Old Faithful. The original image is composed well and exposed properly, but very flat. Luminar does an excellent job bringing it to life.

Convert to Monochrome for Stark Drama

Sometimes winter scenes don’t lend themselves well to color images at all. This wild horse running on the snowy ridge in front of the mountain was spectacular in real life. The RAW file wasn’t much to look at though. See for yourself.

Wild horse running along the snowy ridge in northern Nevada. Canon 5DIII with 100-400mm II lens @ 255mm, f/5.6, 1/1000th, ISO 1000.

What is nice about the image is that the bay-colored horse makes an incredible silhouette against all that white snow. Monochrome tends to work well with silhouettes, especially when you boost the contrast.

With their cool grey and white tones, monochrome images can make bland winter images spectacular. Remember to give it a try if experimenting with the color options we discussed above doesn’t work for your image.

Isn’t that an amazing change for the better? Look how that silhouette just pops out of the snowy mountain backdrop now.

Share your Winter Image Post-Processing Tips

These are my four favorite ways to make my winter images pop using Luminar. Bundle up, head on out to the great wintry outdoors, shoot a few frames and give them a try yourself.

And hey, share with the dPS community too. What are your favorite post-processing tips for editing gorgeous winter images?

Disclaimer: Macphun, soon to be Skylum, is a dPS advertising partner.

The post How to Make your Winter Images Pop with Luminar appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Lara Joy Brynildssen.

Grunge. It’s a great look for gritty, edgy, photos, and you couldn’t have it simpler than doing it in Luminar 2018. In this article, you’ll see how to examine Presets and use elements from those Presets to create your own custom Grunge look. Presets are fantastic, but the best way to improve your processing is through your own creative process. So let’s get started.

Grunge look.

Find the right image for a grunge look

Open the photo you want to process. I have a winter woods scene here. It’s already moody, and you’ll find that using a photo that will benefit from a grunge look is a good place to start. No point starting with happy sunny day shots as it really doesn’t fit the style.

Presets

As Luminar has a huge number of Presets, you should begin there. If you don’t see the Presets at the bottom, click the Presets panel icon, it’s the third one in from the right on the top toolbar. From the Categories, choose Dramatic. Two of these look appealing for a grunge look; Dramatic Grungy and Dramatic Look.

Dramatic Grungy opens a custom Workspace with three filters: Dramatic, Clarity and Structure.

You’ll notice that Dramatic Look also uses three Filters. Dramatic is there, but the others are Raw Develop and Vignette.

The Dramatic Filter is common to both presets, and there are other filters that are in one and not the other, so perhaps a good start is to combine the five filters from both presets into your own custom workspace.

Custom Workspace

You can reset the image by going to Filters panel, clicking on “Custom Workspace” and choosing “Clear Workspace”. This gives you a fresh start to create your own grunge workspace.

Click Add Filters. You can find some of the filters immediately. Raw Develop, Structure and Vignette are in the Essentials section, Clarity is in Issue Fixers and Dramatic is in Creative. If you don’t see a filter immediately, just type a few letters in the Search box at the top of Filters Catalog to restrict the view to match.

You’ve probably noticed that there’s a Clarity slider in Raw Develop, so you could choose to leave out the Clarity filter. But you might want even more Clarity and this allows you to double up the effect, and mask it to only apply to certain parts of the image.

Finally, add one more filter to this set; Cross Processing. This will allow you to color tone the final look.

Raw Develop

The Raw Develop filter is where you use Luminar’s processing to bring out the most from your Raw file. This Raw file (as per most) is a bit flat to start, so needs some tweaking. Reducing Highlights and increasing Shadows will open up the photo a bit more, while decreasing Blacks and increasing Whites will add to the contrast of your photo. At some point, you may want to decrease the saturation of the photo, but for now, use Raw Develop to get the most out of your photo.

The Photo is still a little cool toned so a bump in Temperature to 6000k will fix that and sit better with the tones in the photo.

You can leave Clarity at zero here and come back later if you want to add more.

Structure

What makes a photo grungy? Think of the things and feelings grunge evokes; dark, moody, edgy, and gritty. The Structure filter can definitely do the Edgy bit. Your Amount slider can go from really soft at -100, to really nasty at +100. 60 seems to look good for this photo.

Softness changes your internal contrast in the photo. A setting of 30 keeps the skin from getting too blown out. Of course, if you want more of the effect in the background you could erase the effect a little on the subject using the masking tools.

The final slider is Boost, which does indeed boost the effect. 60 looks great here. We’re already well on the way to making a grungy photo.

Vignette

Vignette darkens or lightens the corners of the photo via the Amount slider. To draw attention to the center of your photo, you should darken the edges. Your first step should do is click Place Center, then click on your subject. That will target the area for the middle of the vignette to keep lighter.

To see your Vignette edge easier, set the Feather to 0, with Amount turned way down.

Using Size and Place Center, get the best position and radius for your vignette. Use Roundness to get the best shape; to the left, it’s more rectangular, to the right it’s rounder.

Don’t worry if it looks too obvious, this is just for getting the placement and size right as it’s easier to see this way.

Finally, set the Feather to soften the edge of the vignette, and set Amount to the final darkness you want.

Edge vignette applied.

Clarity

Contrast darkens shadows and lightens highlights. Clarity tends to work away from these areas and work more in the mid tones. It’s a grit filter, so add your grit here. 100 is way too much, and 40 looks better here.

Dramatic

You’ve already gotten quite a bit of drama to the image, so only a hint of this contrast-based filter is needed. The Dramatic Filter is one to play with for this.

If you want to retain color, set Saturation up to full. Adding Contrast and Local Contrast will increase both the darker and lighter aspects of the photo, so Brightness is there to compensate for whichever is stronger. In this photo, you’ll find reducing it is necessary.

Cross Processing

While this was originally a way of changing colors by processing film in the wrong chemicals, Cross Processing is now more associated with color toning a photo. Luminar uses city names to define their various toning options.

You should try each one with the Amount slider up high to find one you like. After looking at all the cities, I came back to Tokyo, which I’d found pleasing immediately. Then you can dial the effect back using the Amount slider until you find the look you want.

Reprocess

The image is now suitably dark and gritty, but probably a little too dark. A quick trip back to Raw Develop to bump the Exposure slider will fix this.

Saving Presets or Workspaces

Now is the time to save what you’ve set up. If you like your work, you should consider creating either a Preset to repeat the exact look you have here or set up a Workspace to have all the filters open for you to begin working from scratch (or both).

To save your Preset, click Save Filters Preset at the very bottom right corner of the screen. A dialog appears allowing you to name and create your new preset. This will allow you to apply all the same filters and settings to any image with one click. Of course, you can always adjust any of them to suit the image or dial it back using the amount slider on the preset.

To save your new Workspace, go to the top of Filters, then click on Custom Workspace. From the drop-down menu and choose “Save as New Workspace”.

Name the Workspace and create it.

The new Workspace will now appear in the Workspaces list and will be selected (check mark next to it). Now it is available for you to use with any image. Clicking it will open those same five filters but not apply any of the settings.

Other options

Here is the before and after to show the full grunge effect.

Before.

Grunge look.

With the look solidified, you could potentially add a texture to add even more grit to your photo. So, check out how to do this in our article How to Apply Creativity to Your Images with Texture Overlays Using Luminar.

As you’ve seen, Luminar 2018 has great tools that you can use to achieve your processing goals quickly and repeatedly. Now, go out and grunge!

Disclaimer: Macphun, soon to be Skylum, is a dPS advertising partner.

The post How to Create a Grunge Look with Luminar 2018 appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Sean McCormack.

With Macphun (soon to be Skylum) keen to promote Luminar 2018 as a replacement for Lightroom, there’s no doubt that there are many photographers who are interested in trying it. Unfortunately, that’s where the confusion may start as the Luminar interface is completely different from both Lightroom and Photoshop.

If you’re new to Macphun software then it can take time to find your way around the new interface. But if you’ve already used some of their other programs you’ll find that Luminar is very familiar, as Macphun tends to use the same layout in most of its software.

Note: The screenshots in this article are taken from the Mac version of Luminar 2018.

Luminar Dashboard Layout

When you open a photo in the program for the first time, you see something like this.

The photo you’re working on is displayed in the center. Presets are shown along the bottom (red). The side panel on the right is where you apply filters and create workspaces (green). There are more tools along the top (yellow). See the image below.

Let’s take a look at each of these in more detail.

Luminar Presets

One of the benefits of using Luminar is that it comes with lots of presets that you can use. If you don’t like presets, that’s okay – presets are optional and you can ignore them, or hide the panel if you do not use them.

Luminar presets are intelligent and each one comes with an amount slider. If you like a preset but the effect is too strong you can reduce the intensity. That means Luminar presets are adaptable and you can use them in a subtle way if that’s what you prefer.

Click on any preset to apply it to your photo (marked below). In this example, I selected a preset called Center of Attention. Afterwards, you’ll see an amount slider which you can set anywhere on a scale from zero to 100. You can also click on the star icon to add the preset to your list of favorites so you can find the ones you like quickly.

Click on the Categories button (marked below with the big red arrow) to reveal a list of preset categories available in your version of Luminar. Click on any of the categories to display the presets underneath.

Luminar displays Basic presets by default, but you can choose from categories such as Street, Dramatic and Portrait. You can also click on Favorites to show any presets you have marked as a favorite. Clicking on “Get More Presets” takes you to a page on the website where you can get additional sets of preset (some which are paid, and some that are free).

Workspaces, Layers, and Filters

If you’re a Lightroom user then Luminar’s right-hand panel will look familiar as they are similar to the panels in Lightroom’s Develop module. There’s a histogram at the top, layers underneath that (yes, Luminar has layers!) and then filters below.

This area might look a little bare at first, but that’s only because the workspace is clear. In Luminar, a workspace is a selection of filters displayed which are ready for you to use.

Filters are Luminar’s equivalent of the right-hand panels in Lightroom, or the various Layer adjustments available in Photoshop. The reason Luminar doesn’t display all the available filters is that there are so many of them (50 in total). Instead of showing all the filters, Luminar arranges them into workspaces. You can use one of Luminar’s built-in workspaces or you can create your own.

Click on the Clear workspace button (below) to choose one of Luminar’s built-in workspaces. Here, I chose the Portrait workspace. It has nine filters which, as you might expect, are useful for developing portraits.

Click on the gray arrow (marked below) to open up a filter and reveal its settings and sliders. The screenshot below shows the Develop filter, which is similar to Lightroom’s Basic panel.

Note: When working with RAW files this filter is called RAW Develop, and when working with JPGs is simply called Develop.

Another benefit of using workspaces is that you can customize them to display only the filters that you want to use. You can start by removing and adding filters to one of Luminar’s built-in workspaces.

To remove a filter click on the white arrow next to the filter name (marked below) and select Delete from the pull-down menu.

To add a filter, click the Add filters button (marked below). Luminar opens the Filters Catalog to the left, and they are displayed in helpful categories as you can see below like; Issue Fixers, Creative, etc. Here, you can select a filter to add it to your workspace.

When you hover over the name of a filter in the filters Catalog Luminar displays an information panel to tell you what the filter does.

To save the workspace, click on Custom workspace (marked below) and select Save As New Workspace. Now, your new workspace will appear in the list and you can select it any time you want.

The Luminar Toolbar

Finally, the Toolbar at the top of Luminar contains some extra commands and tools that you will find useful. Most of these are self-explanatory. When you hover the mouse over an icon Luminar displays a strip of text to explain what it does. In the screenshot below, you can see that the mouse pointer is over the Compare icon.

As you can see, the Luminar interface is simple and easy to use. The biggest obstacle to using Luminar is understanding how presets, workspaces, and filters work. Once you understand how to use these tools then you can start exploring the potential of Luminar to create beautiful photos.

Disclaimer: Macphun, soon to be Skylum, is a dPS advertising partner.

The post Your Guide to Understanding the Luminar 2018 Dashboard appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Andrew S. Gibson.

One of the main strengths of Luminar by Macphun, soon to be Skylum, is how it makes a suite of professional-style editing tools available to even the most casual of photographers. It does it all with a user interface that is clean, simple, and easy to understand. In contrast to some other editing programs on the market, Luminar’s full suite of powerful tools is available through a simple approach based on applying Filters and Presets, along with more advanced options such as layers and masking.

Instead of hiding these under myriad menus and obscure tiny buttons, Luminar presents you with easy-to-understand options when choosing your edits and includes real-time previews of what your edits will look like. And much of this starts with the simple act of selecting a Preset.

Presets versus Filters

Before getting too deep into how to use and share one-click Presets, it’s important to understand some basic terminology related to Luminar’s use of Presets and Filters.

When you load an image into Luminar’s editing interface you are presented with two main options to edit your images: Add Filter or Apply Preset.

Filters

Filters are individual editing tools that let you perform basic adjustments such as color temperature, exposure, and white/black levels. Luminar also contains more advanced filters like color balance, texture overlay, HSL, and the Accent AI filter that uses artificial intelligence to adjust a range of parameters all with a single slider. Filters can be applied across an entire image, brushed in selectively, and used in combination with layers in a manner similar to Adobe Photoshop’s editing workflow.

Click Add Filters, then select a filter such as Saturation / Vibrance, and you will be shown a description of the Filter as well as a preview of how it would look applied to a sample image.

Presets

Due to the sheer number of filters available the options can seem overwhelming even to seasoned editors. This is where Presets come in handy, and where the brilliant simplicity of Luminar really starts to shine.

A Preset is a collection of filters specifically chosen by the developers of Luminar to produce a certain type of effect on the whole image when combined. At the bottom of the Luminar interface, you will see a row of Presets with names like Soft & Airy, Sky Enhancer, and Vivid which are good starting points when editing a variety of image types. Click the Categories button to see the filters organized as specific collections that can be useful depending on the specific types of images you are editing.

Presets are organized into specific categories, and you can also access your favorites and any custom Presets with the click of a button.

If all this talk of Presets has you feeling overwhelmed before you even start, just take a breath and know that it’s a lot simpler than it might seem especially when you actually open Luminar and start to use it. You don’t even have to use Presets at all but I have found them to be a great starting point when editing my images. It’s a nice compromise between me performing all manner of meticulous edits by hand and having Luminar do all the work for me.

Presets occupy a comfortable middle ground that allows you to have one-click access to a set of edits that will enhance your images in a heartbeat. At the same time, they still allow you to retain as much control over the individual editing parameters as you would like.

Preset walkthrough

To show how Presets work I’m going to walk you through an example step by step beginning with this image of some autumn leaves. This is the RAW file straight out of my camera with no edits applied.

Original boring unedited image. Cue sad trombone sound effect…wop wop woooop.

When you load an image into Luminar you will see it take up most of the screen except for a portion at the bottom and the right. The former is where you can select a Preset and the latter is used for applying and editing Filters.

Add Filters on the right, Presets are at the bottom.

Forget about Filters for now and just focus on the Preset options at the bottom of the screen. Each one has a name that describes the type of effect it will have on your photo. Best of all, each Preset has a mini preview of what it will actually do if you apply it to your image.

Preset previews rock!

This is one of my favorite features of Luminar, and it’s almost worth the price of the program all by itself because you can quickly scan through the many options available and choose one to instantly transform your photo with the click of a button.

The Preset panel gives you real-time previews of what each one will look like when applied to your image.

As an added bonus you can even adjust the degree to which Luminar applies a Preset by clicking on one and then dragging the slider to the left. That way if you like the effect that a Preset has on your image but find it to be a bit overdone, just lower the value a bit with the slider. You also have the option of clicking the star icon in the corner of any Preset which saves it to a list of favorites.

Use the slider to adjust the degree to which a Preset is applied.

The following image is an example of what one click on the “Warm Sunset” Preset did to transform the original picture of some dull green and yellow leaves.

The finished version, all done with a couple of clicks thanks to the Presets in Luminar.

Not too shabby, right? As a comparison, I loaded the same RAW file into Lightroom and was able to get similar results but it took a lot more time and required changing values on a dozen different sliders.

Such is the beauty of Luminar’s approach. The developers have done much of the heavy lifting so that you don’t have to, while still giving you full access to all the editing options within each of the Presets. So if you really want to do a dive deep and adjust your images on a granular level, you can.

Note: You can also add a texture overlay and save that in a custom preset as well.

Editing the Presets

If all the screenshots and arrows in this article have your head spinning, here’s a refresher of the basic Luminar workflow:

• Step 1: Import an image into Luminar
• Step 2: Click on a Preset
• Step 3: You’re done. There is no Step Three.

However, if you would like to dive into some of the finer details of using Presets, Luminar lets you see exactly what each one does and also tweak the parameters to your liking. You can save your edits as new Presets, and even create your own Presets from scratch.

For example, the Warm Sunset Preset that I applied to the image of the leaves is really just a collection of Filters with specific adjustment values already applied. The following screenshot shows the specific filters that Warm Sunset uses, as well as the numerical values that have been dialed in by the Luminar developers.

The Warm Sunset Preset consists of three Filters, each with pre-determined values dialed in that you can change at any time if you like.

When you click on a Preset you will see all of its Filters show up on the right side of your screen, and you are free to change any of the values you want or even add new Filters to the mix. It’s an endlessly customizable editing solution that can go a long way towards giving you the professional results you have always wanted without the hassle and steep learning curve inherent in some other photo editing programs.

Creating and Sharing Presets

Even though there are dozens of Presets already built-in to Luminar, you can create your own by choosing any combination of filters, editing them to the values you want, and choosing “Save Filter Preset…” from the Filters menu.

I often find myself adding a little clarity along with some post-crop vignetting to my images (and for nature shots a bit of vividness too) so I pulled those Filters, dialed in the values for each one, and then saved it as a Preset called “Clarignette” (my attempt at making a new word).

A custom Preset I created called Clarignette, which uses the Clarity, Brilliance/Warmth, and Vignette Filters.

Custom Presets can be accessed by clicking the Categories button just above the row of Presets and choosing “User Presets.” Any Presets that you create or customize can also be shared with other users which makes this a great way to use custom Presets on multiple computers or in any type of collaborative editing environment. Choose “File > Show Presets Folder…” to see the folder on your computer where your custom Presets reside. Each one is saved as an “.lmp” file that you can copy to the Custom Preset folder on another computer or send to a friend.

Stacking Presets with Layers

One final ace up Luminar’s sleeve is its ability to let you combine filters using layers, in precisely the same way Photoshop and other image editing programs handle a layer-based non-destructive workflow.

Instead of applying a Preset directly to the image you are working with, you can click the “+ Overlay Preset” button in the lower-right corner of the Luminar workspace which adds a layer onto which your Preset edits are applied. This is exactly the same as an Adjustment Layer in Photoshop. Your Preset edits can now be applied, controlled, and adjusted independently of the image itself. Masking tools can then be used on each layer to control which parts of the image are affected by the Preset.

Note: You can also apply a mask to any of the Filters applied directly to your image as well.

I started with an image of some leaves, and created an Overlay with the Vivid Preset. Then I added a second Overlay with the B&W Preset and applied that with a radial mask so it is only affecting the outer edges of the image leaving all the color in the center.

This layer-based Preset implementation is another illustration of how Luminar takes a powerful-but-simple approach to editing. It’s not that Luminar is quantifiably better or worse than other editing programs because such an evaluation depends greatly on the individual needs, workflow, and style of the photographer. However, for users who are relatively new to photo editing and want a program that offers a simple, clean, intuitive approach with a feature-set deep enough to grow with them over time, it’s hard to beat Luminar.

Anyone who has used Instagram or other social media apps to apply image edits with the click of a Filter or Preset button will feel right at home with Luminar. As those individuals demand greater control and flexibility as they improve their skills, Luminar is right there beside them ready to meet the challenge. I really do like Luminar’s approach to editing with Presets and Filters and I think it’s a nice way to bridge the gap between amateur and professional photo editing. It’s simple enough for casual users but has a deep feature-set to cater to more demanding photographers too.

Disclaimer: Macphun, soon to be Skylum, is a dPS advertising partner.

The post Mastering and Sharing One-Click Presets in Luminar appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Simon Ringsmuth.