Complete Guide to Luminar AI's Color Harmony Tool

i'll be honest i wasn't 100 sure but i think you're ready that's right i think you're ready for the professional section in luminar ai and i'll be taking this one quite seriously so i hope you've brought your pro hat with you here's mine courtesy of my dad no not really this is my professional hat no this one is that not really this one is well at least it's the right country now right no this actually is my professional hat wait uh this is my workout hat sweat marks gross forget the professional hat let's just get into it so i was well aware that i probably didn't have a photograph to demonstrate on that had the full spectrum of colors in it so because we've got a beautiful blue sky today i asked my daughter to dress in something red something yellow grab the orange basketball and let's get down to the local greenery at the park so apart from showing to my daughter that i'm really not very good at basketball i managed to get a nice photograph of her that got her seal of approval and that's this shot and that's what we're going to work on today so to access the color harmony section just come to edit and then we want to scroll all the way to the bottom in tools until we get to the professional section i told you it was serious professional section and now we're going to open up color harmony and now within color harmony we have access to nine sliders and why have we even got this section because if we were to scroll all the way up to the top in the light section we've already got options to change the temperature and the tint we've also got a whole panel here dedicated to color and working with the hue saturation and luminance and those options might be enough for some mere mortal photo editors but for you guys using luminar ai we've got access to more color options but to utilize them properly we need to understand them so that's what we're going to do in this video i've got a few examples and i'll walk you through and by the end of this video you should understand exactly what those sliders are doing and then be able to start implementing them in your own work as well so let's get into that thankfully the first two sliders are nice and easy to understand so if i grab the brilliant slider and start pushing that to the right it's basically just another saturation and mount slider just by a different name let's double click it to reset it and now the warmth slider if i push that to the right we're going to warm the photo up push it to the left we're cooling it down pretty self-explanatory but obviously yellows oranges and reds are associated with warmth whereas like blues purples and greens are considered colder colors that's why we have this called a warmth slider push it to the right warm things up push to the left cool things down so far so good okay now things start to get interesting as we look at color contrast this one does take a little bit more to get your head around but it's worth it because once you understand this you can start implementing it and just get a little bit more out of working with color in your photos so what we can see on the hue slider is the full range of colors that we have access to and this tool allows us to select one of those colors and what it can do is brighten up that color and darken down the opposite color so if you're familiar with the additive rgb color wheel you'll know that the opposite of red is cyan the opposite of blue is yellow and the opposite of green is magenta so if we take the line with the colors represented along it and wrapped it up into a circle whatever color you choose around that circle it's the color that is directly opposite 180 degrees which will be affected by this tool in this illustration here the top line represents what we have here in the hue line and in the band directly below it we can see what's considered the contrasting color or for those of you that understand color theory that's just the complementary color in terms of an additive color model let's take a look at it in action and as i crank this up towards 100 you'll see that the brightest area of this is now what was the reds i'll bring that back down the reds are fully saturated i take it to the right and then they push towards white and that is because we've targeted the reds conversely as i push this up the opposite color the blues and the cyans push much darker let's bump this up to around 50 percent and let's grab the hue slider and as i move that to the right you'll see that as we move through the colors that the color we're targeting on this slider line is now becoming much brighter and the opposite color the one directly beneath it in the color line is getting darker i'll double click to reset that and we'll come back to the photo of my daughter for a real example so let's grab the amount slider and start pushing that to the right and i'm going to go to 100 there's a couple of things we can notice straight away one is we've completely destroyed the photo as with so many of the sliders inside of luminar ai pushing it to 100 getting too aggressive with it it's just going to destroy your photo so by all means crank any tool to the max just so you get feel for it and you understand exactly what it's doing to your photo and then come back and use it with much more subtlety okay i said we're going to put our pro hats on today so this is really good take away part of getting an aesthetically pleasing image is just treating your images with a bit of subtlety bit of care less is more if you're undecided with a tool should i crank this up a little bit or ease it back chances are you should probably ease it back and the second thing is what the tool is supposed to do and that's take the color that we've targeted in this case the reds push that up and that will bring the surrounding colors like the oranges and yellows up with it as well and then the opposite color the cyans and surrep and then the opposite color the science and the surrounding colors they will come down so in this case we only really have the blues in that color vicinity so it's just brought those blues down as well so now let's grab the hue slider which is just another word for color and we're going to move that through the range of colors and you can see that as i move towards the yellows the opposite the blue gets much darker the yellows and greens get much brighter we'll keep pushing on and we're brightening the greens now we're brightening the blue so the blues are pushed towards white and then you can see her skin and dress that exist in the oranges the basketball too they've got much darker so of course you'd never want this at 100 but let's say you just wanted to push in a little bit tan into her and brighten the sky we can absolutely do that let's push this back to 100 to see what else we're doing so as we move this through towards into the blues purples and now we're pushing in towards those reds and we're now back to where we started and unlike other tools that go up to around 100 this one goes up to 360. and the reason that the hue slider goes all the way up to 360 rather than 100 like so many of the other sliders is because the line actually represents a circle of color so if we start at the top at red and we work our way all the way around and back to red again we've done a full 360 degrees spread that out on the line zero to 360. zero to 360. does that make sense to you made sense to me let's bring this amount slider all the way down and then just start to ease that in just a little bit if i wiggle this left and right which is one of the techniques i like to do just to get a feel for exactly what it's doing and let's say we settle on 20 we can now grab the slider and we're getting a much more natural look as we make adjustments to the colors by bringing it through the range of hues so we could absolutely go for a brighter sky with a more tan look to my daughter but what i think works better in this instance is to just set our hue slider somewhere between the yellow and green and now if i toggle this off and toggle it on and looking at the photo with the before and the after we're able to increase the saturation but do it in a way that we're in control of if you're watching this and you're thinking of getting luminar ai i've got a link in the description below and a discount code at sky10 and you can help yourself to that and save yourself some money at the checkout and you'd also be helping me out support this little one because i get very small commission from skylum when you do use that link so win-win for everybody okay let's take a look at the split color warmth and the main difference between that slider and the actual warmth slider is the warmth slider affects the whole picture regardless of what color it's talking into whereas the split color warmth sliders are basically separating your image before you move them into the warm tones and the cool tones so let's take a look at how that works i'll grab the warm slider and start moving that to the right and you can see that we've introduced a lot of warm orange tones but we haven't introduced them into the sky but we've only introduced that coloration into the colors that were already warm and now if i take that slider to the left we're cooling things down but we're only affecting the colors that were already warm so if i grab the cool slider now and start taking that to the left we're taking the already cool colors and making them more cool and now if i take this to the right we're going to be warming up the cool colors in the image so we've got some deep purples in the houses in the background we've got the blue sky and the blue of my daughter's eyes so as we move this slider we're pretty much talking just into those areas of the photo just like with the color contrast slider you want to be careful of how aggressive you are with these sliders you can see quite an unsightly piece of fringing going on around the bush here and this is occurring because we've got the two extremes of the cool tones of the sky and then they're meeting the warmer tones of the tree and luminar doesn't really know what to do with these transition pixels that happen in between the warm and the cool so what's a good practical use for this let's take a look if i double click them just to reset them we go back to our original and now let's suppose we want to create an orange cyan split tone what we can do is create a more unifying orange hue through the warm colors we can take the cool colors and just push them a little further to the left and that's going to enrich the blues and the purples and give us a nice warm cool split tone but another useful application is to take things the other way if you feel that things are getting a little too warm in your image and the cools are getting a little too cool you can actually bring the two closer together basically we just want to take the warm colors this time and cool them down and we can take the cool colors and just warm them up and we can just settle on a happy place in between here so now if we look at our before and after you should be able to see that as well as adding some contrast here we've also been able to neutralize the colors in that image but for this one i'm going to keep trending towards that warmer look and i'm just going to tickle a little bit of this in okay on to the color balance and this one's pretty cool as well because it actually allows you to force colors into the highlights the mid-tones and the shadows so to better demonstrate how that tool applies to the shadows mid-tones and highlights let's take a black and white photo and send it into the computer okay we can clearly see the full range of tones we have available here and you can see from the drop down box in the color balance section that we can talk into the shadows mid-tones and the highlights so if we select the highlights and i was to grab the cyan and red slider and start moving that you can see how we can push some of this color directly into those highlights and by playing with different amounts of these sliders you can really fine-tune these colors let's jump into the mid-tones and just change those slightly there's warm things up there in the mid-tones and now let's come into the shadows and let's suppose we want to put some blues into the shadows maybe even a little cyan as well what about make it more purple and push in a little bit of magenta okay i've got to say again a little goes a long way you don't want to push these sliders too far because if you start cranking them all around all over the place things are going to get pretty crazy pretty quickly okay let's sit and practice on that photo of my daughter when i'm using the color balance tool i like to start with the mid tones just so that i can make any adjustments and give the overall photo a general color wash so the skin tones in my daughter's face they are just a little bit all over the place at the moment so i'm just going to bring a bit of cyan in and just see if we can't correct that just a little bit now look if i push the cyan all the way to minus 100 you can see that you can really get a strong color cast really quickly really easily and while it might be fun to play around with that for a while it's not really a look that's going to do much for your photos push this towards the yellow side just so that we're adding a little more yellow into our cheeks as well and then we can move on once we're happy let's say into the highlights and while there are no hard and fast rules here what i do tend to like to do is just add a little bit more of red and yellow into my highlights and just help warm those up and oftentimes i'm doing my color grading here and i'm not using this or vice versa but in this case we're demonstrating the tool so we're using both if after watching this tutorial and you like the look of the tool and you'd like to see me demonstrate it on a landscape edit just write landscape in the comments below and i'll put another video together showing you a real life walkthrough in luminar ai with the color harmony tool now if we jump into the highlights let's have a look at the shadows and i'm going to aggressively push these to 100 throw some cyan in there and you can see unless you're going for a particularly graphic look you can very quickly destroy your photo so i'm just going to ease these all the way back let's double click these just to reset them quickly and i may just put a hint of blue into the shadow maybe a little bit of purple should we keep it warm should we go towards the reds let's do that and let's have a quick toggle of our before and after okay we certainly have a much warmer image now and that plays into that nice warm evening light that i experienced when i was there taking these photos but just my personal preference i'm not a big fan of overly saturated photos which is certainly what we have right here so i'm going to jump back into the brilliant slider and i'm just going to ease that back so we still have the warmth but we've muted some of that vibrancy that we created before and we could now probably boost the overall warmth of the photo up just with this slider here look if i went all the way to 100 again it's completely crazy you wouldn't want to do that but maybe let's tease in a little bit 7 10 11 put more warmth in bring the brilliance a little bit back okay now let's have a toggle of our before and our after before and after in this edit all we've used is the color harmony tool but let's suppose that that color harmony is part of an overall edit we've got other things going on other tools inside of luminar we just wanted to reduce the effect of what the color harmony tool is doing let's suppose we just want 50 of that one way to fix that would be to come into every single slider and individually halve the amount that we'd cranked it to that would do it because this is the only tool we've used in this particular edit of course we could come down to the bottom slider there and just reduce that but hypothetically we've got other stuff going on so what could we do well because we don't have an overall slider that lets us reduce the color harmony by a certain percentage activate the mask make sure the paint brush tool is selected and then just bring the opacity of this paint brush to the amount we want so in this case we decided 50 would do it and then just make a really nice big brush and then just sweep over the entire photo like this and now when i let go we have 50 percent of the color harmony applied to the photo here's our before here's our after we still have the effect but now it's only with 50 over the whole photo nice and in my opinion that more subtle approach is much more visually pleasing so now if you combine what we've learned with the color harmony tool inside of luminar ai with the other color tools we've got a lot of control over the overall color grading and look of our photo i've created another video all about those other color tools and how to use them inside of luminar ai so if you'd like to check that video out you should see it appearing on the screen now so why don't you go and click on that and i will see you in that video hello dad don't you hello dad me mate what's the meaning of this using that photo of me with that funny red and white wig you know i'd had a few when you took that anyway i look like a right muppet you're gonna have all them youtube subscribers or whatever they are looking at me just because you're 42 years old don't mean i won't be on a plane coming over there to new zealand and giving your ears a blue and good boxing boy you're even listening to me

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 12,790

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, HDR, luminar ai, Luminar, Color Harmony, Colour Harmony, Color Grading, Color theory, color wheel, colur wheel, Skylum, Laminar, Lumiere

Id: KkqnpzvLxq8

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021