The Photographer's Guide to Luminar 4. Jeff Carlson
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2-17: Import new photos from a memory card in Luminar for Windows (left) and macOS (right).
1 4. Under Action, choose Copy Images. The alternative is to choose Move Images, which deletes the files from the card, but it’s better to format the card in the camera later. Move Images is a good option if you’re importing photos from another folder or drive and want to consolidate them into one of your source folders.
2 5. From the Organize pop-up menu, decide which folder structure to store the imported images in. Although Luminar breaks out capture dates (see “Use Library Shortcuts” in Chapter 10), I find it’s helpful to have a folder structure in place on disk in case I need to access the images outside of Luminar. Choose from the following options:Into One Folder, which drops all the images into a single folder.Keep Existing Folder Structure, which mimics what’s on the card. This option is fine when importing from an existing folder, but not as ideal with memory cards, which often have a cumbersome naming structure (such as, using one of my cards as an example, Untitled/DCIM/158_FUJI/).Year/Month/Day, which separates the images into separate nested subfolders based on the date, such as /Pictures/2020/01/12/ for photos captured on January 12, 2020.Year/Month, which groups photos into nested folders based on the month they were captured in, such as /Pictures/2020/01/ for photos captured in January 2020.
3 6. Select the Include Subfolders checkbox to read nested folders on the card. If this option is not selected, Luminar sees only images in the folder you specified in step 2.
4 7. Click the Import (Windows) or Import to Folder (macOS) button to add the images to your library.
3 Landscape Walkthrough
Most of this book covers how to use Luminar’s tools to improve your photos. Before we get into the specifcs, though, I want to walk through a few images to help you get a sense of how to edit from start to finish. That involves making a realistic appraisal of what a photo needs and choosing which tools to use. Sometimes it can be just a few slider adjustments, while other situations call for adjustment layers, masks, and creative choices.
If you’re new to Luminar or photo editing in general, some of what I discuss may be unfamiliar. Don’t worry: everything is discussed in more detail throughout the rest of the book. If you’re an experienced editor, this chapter may reveal more about Luminar’s workflows.
I’ve chosen a landscape photo for this section because editing landscapes includes a lot of the techniques that are useful for editing any type of photo: working with tone, color, composition, and occasional effects.
Keep in mind that these steps are how I approached the editing process. With a couple of exceptions, you can work on different aspects of the image in any order (such as color before tone), depending on what the photo needs.
Evaluate the Photo
The first step, after the image is in Luminar, is to figure out what needs improvement. The photo may have obvious shortcomings, such as being underexposed or having an uneven horizon. Or, you may have a vision of the end result and need to work your way to that result. Identifying these issues leads you on the editing path.
In the case of this photo (Figure 3-1), several things need work:
•The image is underexposed. Not only does it appear dark overall, I can see the tones in the histogram are weighted toward the left edge. What little there is at the right side doesn’t reach the far edge, indicating that none of the tones are close to full brightness.
•The photo has a blue color cast due to the rainy, overcast day during which it was shot. This is actually a little surprising because I set my camera’s White Balance setting to cloudy (revealed in the Info panel), which is designed to warm up cool scenes. However, I’d also attached a neutral-density filter to the lens to darken the overall scene and let me take a long exposure that makes the waterfall look smooth; the filter has made the image more blue.
•I shot the image in September, and although it was too early for the explosion of fall color, you can see that some of the leaves have begun to change from green to orange. I want to bring more attention to the foliage.
•Compositionally, I like how the image is framed, but the cliff rocks at the bottom of the photo pull my eyes away from the bridge. Cropping them out removes some of the lovely water, so I’ll minimize those areas in other ways.
•To me, the person standing on the bridge makes this photo more interesting. It conveys the sense of scale of the waterfalls and draws the viewer’s eye. However, I can also picture a version with no person, so we’ll try to erase them from the scene.
FIGURE 3-1: The original, unedited raw image.
That sounds like a lot! Let’s see how to tackle these steps.
Get Luminar’s Opinion
Nearly every photo I bring into Luminar starts with a generous helping of the AI Accent slider in the AI Enhance tool. Sometimes the results are exactly what I want and I’m done with that image. More often it gives me an idea of how to proceed.
Although the AI Enhance controls affect things like exposure and color, those controls (in the Light and Color tools) are not affected. I’ll sometimes use AI Accent at around 50 to start, and then make further adjustments to the image in other tools.
In this case, AI Accent has improved the overall exposure, but the color is still off and the orange leaves are still drab (Figure 3-2). Therefore, I’ll click the tool’s Reset button (
FIGURE 3-2: Pushing the AI Accent slider almost to its maximum setting addressed only a few of my issues.
Adjust Exposure
To overcome the darkness, run to the Light. I want to increase the exposure overall, but simply blasting the image with the Exposure control can often be heavy-handed. There’s also a danger in blowing out the white highlights in the waterfalls, so I’ll take a more measured approach that yields better results.
First, in the histogram, I click the top-right triangle that appears when I move my pointer over it to turn on the white clipping indicator; that will tell me when areas are overexposed.
Next, I’ll push the Exposure slider to bring up the overall exposure. Some of the whites get clipped (marked in red), but that’s OK for now (Figure 3-3).
FIGURE 3-3: Increasing the Exposure value brightens everything, which is often too much.
The image is brighter,