Complete Portrait Edit in Luminar AI - Every Portrait AI tool + Advanced Techniques

if portrait photography and editing portrait photos is your thing this video is for you [Music] hi guys anthony turner here and welcome to another photo editing tutorial if you're new to this channel i'm a professional photographer with over 25 years of photo editing experience and that's what i'm trying to share with you guys here on this channel so if that's something that interests you why don't you consider subscribing in this video we're looking at the insanely powerful ai driven portrait editing tools inside of luminar ai we're going to focus on just one photograph and i'm going to work through every single tool inside of the portrait section of luminar and make sure you stay tuned to the end guys because i've actually got a special guest stopping by so without any more waffle let's get into it so here we are in this portrait section and the photo we're going to work on is this one here so the easiest way to edit a portrait would be just to jump into the templates see what luminar ai is suggesting for you so in this one we've got experimental monochrome and blockbuster but we could also come into the close-ups which is portrait-based and we could for instance click on brush up and that's given a nice softening of the skin if we look at our before and after it's also done a little bit of work on with the body ai if we go to featured face straight away we can see we've got a bit more of a contrasty kind of look here so before and after and i quite like that one we've got focus and also midday as well and if we look at our before and after of that i feel like each of these four templates does quite a nice job of doing an edit without being too excessive with what it's doing which is really nice but if we right click come to adjustments and revert to original if you're anything like me and like to take control of your edit the best thing to do is to jump into the edit section and actually get hold of those tools yourself so what i'd like to do with this particular photo is just do a basic edit to get the overall photo looking good and then dive into the portrait section itself so good place to start with most photos is in the enhancer ai and just pushing accent ai slider up and just see what it does and while for most photographs it does a really really good job particularly landscapes things like that whereas with the portrait section itself we're actually enhancing the background and to be honest i'm not too worried about that so i'm not going to take my normal approach and do that i'm going to jump into the light section and just play around with the basic sliders to see what we can do i feel like our color temperature is pretty good where it is so i'm not going to play with that too much the exposure is also pretty good but i may want to increase the contrast just slightly it's worth having a little play with the highlights and the shadows and just see what they're doing and it's also worth coming into the black points and just making sure that we're happy that we've got a nice rich black and also a nice white point in our photo too so now if we look at our before and are after we can see that we've got a nice amount of contrast in this photo you can see how i actually framed the model against the dark wood here so she wasn't competing for your attention against the metal in the background here but i still feel like this is a little bit distracting so if we get a vignette and we actually crank that pretty heavily towards 100 and we're going to feather that nicely so it's a nice soft transition and possibly even bring it in just a little bit and choose our subject to be more around the model's face and now we can ease the amount back just so it's not as aggressive and it's a little more subtle and if we turn that off and on we notice now that our eye goes much more towards our model and that's what you want in a portrait now we've got tools available to us in the creative tab that i think would be really beneficial for this photo but what we're going to do is first of all jump into the important portrait section and i'm going to walk you through each of these sections face skin body and high key we're going to look at each tool within that section and i'm going to explain what it's doing why you might want to use it or why you may want to actually avoid it once we've looked at how we can improve our portrait with the ai section i'm going to show you some tools and techniques that you can use that are a little bit more advanced but give you a little bit more refined control and that'll be coming up towards the end of the video so let's get going with face ai the first thing you can do if you want to is actually brighten the face of your model so if i push that to 100 we can see exactly what's going on and i'll normally do that with most of my tools i'm working with is just push them all the way up even though it's way over the top i want to do that so that you can see exactly what effect that is having and while we're working on the face of our model what i'm also going to do is zoom in so that we can actually see these changes that we're making a 50 zoom is quite nice in this instance so face light is a really good tool just to help bring your viewers attention to the face of the model our eye naturally gets drawn towards brighter parts of an image so if we can brighten up our model's face that can be a really beneficial thing for a portrait usually i don't like to push this face light too far but even just introducing a small amount of it somewhere around that sort of 20 mark can actually really help your image along you've got the option to slim the face down if you want to so let me show you what that can do and as i push that to a hundred you can see a shift in the geometry of her face and pulling that in now whether or not you choose to slim someone's face is entirely up to you and perhaps whether you've had guidance from the person you're photographing wanting that and then yeah sure you can do that but personally i prefer to photograph people in the most flattering way possible and actually avoid changing the geometry of their face or their body in post-production but the fact that you can slim somebody's face down that option is there the next section we go on to is eyes and although this is set at 80 currently this isn't doing anything because what that does is it allows you to change the actual color of the iris so for example if we chose blue you can see that straight away is popped in blue irises into our eyes and one of the things i think is really clever is that the ai knows exactly where the eyes are knows where the irises are and can place that perfectly and so if you want to you can use the slider to change the color of somebody's eyes if you like the look of these portrait editing tools and you think that luminar ai could be a good fit for your photography skyline will give me a discount code to share with you guys which is at sky10 and you can use that with a link below and you get to save some money at the checkout and i get a small commission from skylim as well so it's a win-win let's get back into the photo editing if you have a specific purpose for doing that for example if you wanted to match in the color of her dungarees here with her eyes you could do that but i think the best most useful use for this is to choose the same color as her eyes so in this case brown and if we turn that off and on if for some reason you didn't have good light in her eyes when you took the photograph that can really help things along in this case i think we actually got quite good light in her eyes when we took this photo she's in a barn but the barn had a huge opening to it and that was letting a whole heap of light in directly onto her face that's why we've got this nice soft light on her face and if you ever want to see how a portrait was lit one little trick for you is what you can do is zoom into the eyes and normally you'll get a good indication of where the light sources are coming from so you can see this big square here that represents the big opening of the barn behind me it's a really great way to reverse engineer studio photography as well if you see a lighting setup that you think wow this looks really cool but you have no idea how the photographer's done it you can often look at the eyes and see whether they've used a big umbrella or an octa box or whatever to light the subject so that's quite a good technique to use as a learning tool to see how other photographers have lit portraits anyway let's just zoom back out and carry on with this we'll turn our face ai back on and we're going to use maybe a little bit of this iris visibility but not too much i think for a genuinely good edit subtlety is the key if i pull iris flare up you'll see that we start to get a highlight in the underside of the iris and when you have a portrait well lit this is actually quite common that you get this lighting here but if for some reason you didn't capture it in camera and you wanted to introduce a little bit of that the option to do so is there let's leave that around 44 and move on along with changing the geometry of the face we can actually enlarge our model's eyes we could go and start pushing this up and make her a little bit more disney or we could go fully onto a hundred and turn her into a manga character you may think this falls into my ethical category of don't do this but in fact there is actually a reason why this could be quite useful sometimes if you're taking photograph of somebody and they're facing towards the sun in bright light they may be squinting and pulling their eyes tighter shut than they may normally do and so actually by using this slider you may actually be making their eyes more similar to how they would normally appear so again we could enlarge her eyes and just do it ever so ever so slightly if you want to whiten the eyes of your model you can do that again that's one of those sliders don't push it all the way to 100 it's going to look really fake unbelievable don't do that but a little bit of it might help now the eye enhancer when we push this up you'll see i actually really really like this i find this is a more believable edit on the iris even a hundred percent it doesn't look terrible you can see exactly what it's doing there and it does actually enhance the eyes so i'm going to leave a fair bit of that in this go around that sort of like 50 60 mcconner mark red eye removal is only useful if you are taking flash photography inside and the light bounces in through the eye and lights up the back of somebody's eyes and then you get that and then you get the red effect of all their blood vessels showing up through their pupils which is pretty ghastly but nowadays the low light capability of so many cameras is so good that if you don't have to use flash photography try and avoid it as much as you can sammy doesn't really have any dark circles she must be very well rested but if she did we can actually bring this up and that will brighten that area under the eyes so let's leave a little bit of that in there now this slider called improve eyebrows i think that's very much a matter of opinion whether you think that's improved or not um i would personally call that darken eyebrows i feel that it often is far too much particularly 100 and i don't know whether i want to make her eyebrows darker but just for the sake of demonstration let's push that around 38 and now as we move on we've got a section all about the lips so let's saturate the lips and now let's make them redder and if we want to darken the lips we can use this slider and if we want to whiten her already insanely white teeth we can do that as well now to do any of these things with the traditional photo editing would take a while because you've got to create masks you've got to create layers that are going to affect the colors you're going to have to create a layer to brighten the teeth and then mask that back in exactly where the teeth are so the fact that the ai can recognize exactly where her mouth is and make these changes is a real time saver if this is something you're wanting to do personally because she hadn't got any lipstick on anyway and we're going for quite a natural look in this photo i'm not too worried about adding these kind of effects perhaps darkening the lips is is quite good just because it gives a bit more contrast between her skin and her lips but in terms of the teeth whitening her teeth are already very very white so i'll leave that alone but that is an overview of face ai and how you can use that so let's turn that off and turn it on and one more time just so you can see this is off and this is on so the first section deals to the overall face the next section is eyes and the next section is mouth but what about the model's skin well that's where skin ai comes in so let's close down face ai by clicking on the tab and open up skin ai and skin ai when i push that to a hundred what that's attempting to do is actually soften out and smooth the skin without destroying all the pores and the texture of the skin so it's not just like blurring the pixels it's trying to retain some sort of detail in the pores if you've got a shine going on you can use that slider to reduce that but our lighting was pretty soft so she's not really shining as such and you've also got this skin defects removal box which you can check and then luminar does its best to remove skin defects in my experience this tool isn't always the best now i'm sure with future releases of luminar ai this particular tool will be improved and it will get better results but for now i don't find them great so there is an alternative method for retouching skin and i'll show you that just a little bit later now the skin ai effect i don't normally like to put it onto a hundred but i'll normally push it somewhere around maybe 70 just so we're keeping the essence of the real skin and if you feel there's areas where it's being applied but you don't want it just like most of the tools within luminar ai they have a mask associated with them so you can click that icon there and you can paint them in or erase it let's zoom back out let's go to 25 okay so before we press on to body ai let's just have a quick look at our before and after and i think we're really heading in the right direction with this it's looking pretty cool so the body ai is pretty simple to be honest uh basically take the shape one way and you're going to enlarge the width of your model and you take it the other way and you're going to bring them right in and this one does come down to ethics of changing someone in my opinion for the most part i like to leave them exactly as they are and normally i'll try and pose my model in camera as best i can to flatter their body shape as best i can at the time i take the photo but this tool may be very useful for you if that's something you want to do the same with abdomen as well obviously that's focusing around the abdomen area and i've pushed out to a hundred and because we can't actually see her abdomen so legs coming up here and her arms down here it's not actually doing any changing whatsoever but when your model is standing straight that does have quite an effect so let's look at the very last section here and before we do i'd just like to say that i actually personally feel like this is in the wrong section sitting inside the portrait i think the high key effect would be better suited to be part of the creative collection because i don't feel that the high key effect is exclusive to portraits sure it can look really great for them but um yeah anyway that's that's just an aside and my opinion on it i think that should have been in the creative section but if i push the amount all the way to 100 you can see what this effect does and how useful it is to you i'm not sure i mean personally i don't really use the high key effect too much in my workflow but it might be something that you feel works quite well for your portraits so if we turn that off and we turn it on you just see that it's just brightening things up giving things a bit more of a whitened glow it's quite good because you do have access to more refinement tools such as glow you can increase the contrast if you want to and you can also saturate the image by using that slider there or desaturate it and as with other tools you've got the mask here so if you decided you might just want the effect on her face only let's crank the opacity up to 100 so we can do that quickly and now if i turn it off and on you can see that we've just brightened her face there or maybe you want to brighten her arm up maybe her leg as well so we could do that so off and on because the vignette had darkened the edges her arm and leg were getting quite dark so do you know what we'll erase the effect from her face because i don't want it there but we will leave it on her arm and leg here so we've just brightened those up off and on a little bit brighter so i mentioned earlier that there are a couple of tools that you can use to enhance your portraits that actually live outside of this portrait section so i'll tell you what they are first and then i'll show you them in action so the first tool is dodge and burn and the purpose of that is allowing you to sculpt a more three-dimensional version of your portrait you can darken down the shadows or dull down highlights if you want or if there are areas that need brightening you can do that too but there's a downfall to using dodge and burn which i will also show you and there's a better way to achieve a darkening and brightening effect that you control rather than using dodge and burn and introducing the negative artifacts i'll show you the alternative is really easy and you get a much better result with it and the other tool that i'd like to show you as well is clone and stamp and that's going to enable us to fix up any skin blemishes things like that and do it manually rather than hoping that luminar's ai can pick up on those skin defects which as we saw earlier it's not always that great at doing so let's take a look at dodge and burn first now as i'm sure you're aware dodging and burning is just the process of making certain areas brighter or certain areas darker so if i'm painting with lightened here you can see we can brighten things up or if i want to darken areas i can select darken and i can paint to darken things in so you may want to brighten the model's forehead cheeks the bridge of her nose that sort of thing and you may want to darken down maybe around the jawline under the chin just so she pops out a little bit more and you're sculpting the face now here's a caveat to do this well does take quite a bit of practice it's also much easier to do with a graphics tablet but i'm currently doing this all with a mouse so let me reset this and let's have a look what we can do so the first thing i'll do is analyze the model's face i think we're quite bright around this part of her face i'd like more attention just around where her features are so we could darken all of this area down i also feel that her arm and her hand are calling for too much attention because they are quite bright before i start painting what i'm going to do is actually bring the strength quite far down so that i can build it up with subsequent layering of my brush strokes and i'm going to use the plus keys on my keyboard just to make my brush a bit bigger and now i can start painting now there is a problem now there is a problem with using this tool when you darken down areas within your photo using dodge and burn a side effect artefact of doing that unfortunately is that you saturate the colors so if i turn this off and on you'll see that we've darkened those areas but we've also introduced much more orange and red tones through here which isn't really what we want so while dodge and burn resides within the professional tab personally i don't think that's a professional approach to solving this problem so i'm going to turn that off and show you a much better way to do this come into the local masking and we're going to add a basic mask now we can create our own burning effect by bringing the exposure down we could work with the contrast as well so things don't get too contrasty as we reduce the brightness level and if we feel like things are getting too saturated we've got that option to desaturate as well so what we're trying to do is darken an area but match the saturation to the areas that remain the same so now using my brush i'm going to just paint this effect in similarly to how we did this with the dodge and burn tool but now as i paint this and i'm at 100 we're darkening that that looks pretty bloody awful at the moment but now the brilliant thing unlike dodge and burn is we've got control we can actually play with our sliders to get this to a point where we want it so i'm going to reintroduce the saturation because we're not getting as much of a over saturated artifact as we did with the dodge and burn and whereas with the dodge and burn i was working at just i think five or ten percent or something like that here i've got this smashed on really heavily 100 at the moment just so that you can see that yes you can darken things down but now we can use the arrays tool maybe bring that to say 50 and we can start to um finesse this so i can take that off from areas if i want as well in this area here we were just a little bit too rough and ready on her face and it's always good just to check your before and you're after to see how you're doing i've got a really nasty halo around this i'm i would never be as brutal and unrefined with my painting as i was here i just want this is purely for demonstration purposes i just wanted to show you the effect quickly but again if you want to come back in add to your amount you can do that you can basically just sort of toggle between the erase tool and the paint tool and change your opacity and keeping it low you can just do things quite subtly and we can try and make things a little darker under a cheekbone as well and maybe just on this side as well so let's turn that off and on and if you feel like you've gone way too far with it all just come back to the eraser and maybe with 30 we can reduce 30 percent of the effect we've created by painting over the top of all of it and now we have a much more subtle effect to what we've done in the same way that we've used in effect a burn tool that we created we can also create our own dodging tool so we can add a new local mask and we can bring the exposure up and we can make sure that we're not over exposing the highlights by protecting them and now we know that when we paint this effect in anywhere we are going to brighten that area so just select your brush and this time we'll be a little bit more refined let's go with an opacity of about 14 15 and now we're just going to paint onto our model and it does take practice to kind of get a feel for where you want to brighten a portrait and but there's heaps online about where you should paint and where you should sculpt a model to actually improve their features and there's the t-zone the forehead coming down the nose and then across the top of the cheeks as well makeup artists do this all the time with makeup just to sculpt the face and effectively that's what you're doing here as a retoucher we could brighten her leg a wee bit further as well just with a nice big broad brush stroke if we felt like that was just getting a little bit too dark same with the arm as well and help sculpt three-dimensionality you just kind of look for the highlights and just try and enhance those like she's got a little bit of a highlight running down her neck here so we could add paint there so we're brightening that and again i'm i'm well aware that i've been very heavy-handed with this i'm going to turn this off and if you want to use this technique i would suggest that you take your time to do it in a really nice refined way for the sake of the video i will leave it there but just trust me in the fact that if i was to spend 20 30 minutes working on this i could create a really nice refined version of this and with practice you would be able to as well now within this portrait section and the skin ai we saw how by clicking this box we were trying to do skin defects removal and i didn't feel it did a great job so how do we solve this problem well this time we do come into the pro section and we're going to use the clone and stamp tool and luminar prepares our image there it takes us back to our original and what we're going to do is jump into maybe a hundred percent and obviously this is not where i want to be working so i hold the spacebar key and now that allows me to click and drag to bring our models face into view and you see this message here click to set the source that basically means you can click where you want to copy from and then you can paint what you're copying somewhere else so for example if i click here on her forehead where her skin is much smoother and then this area here where we've just got a little mark here we can paint over the top of that and currently i'm set to 100 opacity i would recommend probably starting with that somewhere around 50 because again you can build the effect up so we can see a little vein running here in her forehead so if we wanted to get rid of that we could click off to the side where the skin is much smoother and then click on the vein and we can paint that away or at least minimize it and then if we want to go again we can just hold alt or option and click and then paint again and you can keep doing that just to build up that effect and remove areas that you don't want to be there in the portrait so now i'm just going to click around in different areas of the photo and sample and paint over any skin defects now when i do anything like this if somebody has something that is unique to them let's say a scar or something i will leave that in unless i'm specifically asked to remove it so in general my rule is if something is not going to be there in a week's time or a couple of weeks then it's okay to remove it it's fair game like a spot whereas if something is a permanent mark on somebody's face um a birthmark or a mole or something i will leave that exactly where it is so we've got a little mole here i'm gonna leave that alone you can use this technique if you wanted to clean up say for example this eyebrow hair here if you thought that looked a little out of place you can press the bracket keys on your keyboard to make your brush smaller and just paint over it sampling from a different area and always try and sample from the same color and tonality of the skin so things look a little more natural and believable so of course this is not as quick as ticking a check box but this is a much much better way in terms of giving you ultimate control over retouching your portrait and then if you're happy with what you've done you just close the clone and stamp tool down and that will apply the effects onto your base layer and then it will reapply all of the effects as it's done now that we did with the other tools and now we can look at our before and after and you can see that we've had all those ai tools that we did and then the skin retouching that we just did as well that little bit of dodge and burn that we did now deliberately for my tutorials i always work pretty heavy-handed so that you get more of an idea of what the tools do more often than not i use them in a higher strength than i normally would but if i get to the end of the edit and i feel like well everything's really compounded and we've taken things too far that's when you come to your template slider here and we can ease that back so we can take things all the way back to the beginning go to 100 and then we can just wiggle that back and forth and kind of get a feel for okay what's what's a good amount and maybe somewhere just around that 50 percent or just above might be a much better place from this to this we've got a nice edit and it's more subtle let's zoom back out now and now let's do our before and after before and after and now in a portrait workflow this is the time when i'd say if you want to get more creative in terms of perhaps adding a mood to your image and coming in and choosing a lut that you might want to go for let's go with los angeles for example add that at the end of your workflow because if you add that look at the beginning at the initial part sure you can do that but as i'm sure you know the more effects you apply to your image the more you're asking of your processor and the more likely it is that luminar ai will start to slow down so what i recommend you do is do the heavy lifting of doing the portrait ai tools get the portrait looking how you want it and then come into the creative stuff so the mood which is a more harmonizing look for the overall image or you may want to add some of the mystical filter we could just add in a little bit of that let's say somewhere around 20 turn that off and on but as i say save that until the end so now let's look at our final before and after and i think that's been a nice portrait edit let's jump into the history section down in the bottom right by clicking this icon and let's do a quick overview of the workflow we've gone through and as you see the history list scrolling by here you'll see that we've done quite a few steps and it's pretty cool that luminar's recorded all of those so if we jump back to our original image let's build it from here you can see first of all we looked at things like the midday template how you can fix things just with one click using a template and in terms of a one click fix i think that is a really powerful tool just to be able to click that and have that done as i move up we talked about ai enhance we then went back to our original and started building things from there we looked at the accent ai and just put a little bit of that on then we added smart contrast we looked at the highlights blacks and whites and enhanced the look a little further with those because i felt like our attention may get distracted by this bright contrasty metal over here we worked with the vignette and i created a vignette effect which just darkened down all of that around there and brought our attention more to our model so at this point we've got a pretty nice looking photograph but we haven't even looked at the portrait ai tools yet as i scroll through these options you'll be able to see that we had face light we worked with the eyes we worked with the lips the teeth and also the skin so by the time we'd finished that we got all the way to this using luminar's ai tools we looked at the body ai but i'm not a big fan of that but then we moved on and also looked at how we could apply the high key effect and you can see it just brightened up the legs and arms because that's where we painted it in with a mask we then looked at dodge and burn and how you can use that to sculpt things but at the same time i brought attention to how it can over saturate certain areas of your image and why i think a better approach is actually to use the basic adjustment masks and so that's what we did i'll click that and that will show us first of all i created a darkening effect and then i worked on a brightening effect this is where you can really spend some time and finesse your portrait if you want to but i appreciate for a lot of you that may be overkill but one useful thing to know is if the checkbox for remove skin defects isn't doing a particularly good job and which i find is often actually the case unfortunately you can come in and use the clone and stamp tool and as you saw there we were able to clean up any so-called defects ourselves and do that manually so while luminal ai is a powerful ai engine under the hood you still have that ability to take manual control which i think is great and so that was our portrait edit finished and at the end basically i've just put on a little bit of mystical filter and a colorized look which you see there and there you have it our before and thereafter mazzy what are you doing come here so i'm trying to finish up my video and i've got this one making all sorts of weird noises anyway just wanted to say thanks so much for watching i hope the uh what you can't smell the person through the monitor you weirdo i hope you've enjoyed this walkthrough of luminar ai's portrait tools hopefully you can see that some of them are really really useful some of them yeah not so much but overall can you stop that thanks but overall if you do portraits in your photography this is well worth checking out these tools thanks so much for watching guys and i will see you in the next video if you're new to this channel i'm a profes blah blah blah

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 14,995

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, portrait, portrait AI, portrait editing, portrait photography photo editing, Luminar AI, Luminar, Luminar Portrait edit, dodge and burn, clone stamp

Id: kx7GCP0S6UI

Length: 32min 57sec (1977 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 27 2020