First Tests of Luminar NEO Tech Demo! Are The 3 New A.I. Photo Editing Tools Any Good?

there's been a lot of hype and talk about luminar neo but as of yet nobody's seen anything no one's got a working copy well in this video i'm going to share with you my first look at a technical copy that i have on my machine of luminar neo [Music] as those of you eagerly waiting for your copy of luminar neo to drop no it's currently in production so we don't have a full working copy yet but i do have a few tools available to me to give a test run to share with you guys what i think share with you the results so that's what we're going to look at in this video but i do have to preface what we're looking at here with a couple of caveats and most importantly this is not the finished version as i said in particular the layout itself may still be changing what we're looking at here are three functional tools not the actual layout of luminar neo itself furthermore this particular version i have is very nuts and bolts it's very much a skeleton framework just to hold those tools this version has not been performance enhanced so i can't really speak to you about the actual speed of the performance of these tools furthermore as you guys know one of the exciting things about luminar neo is we've been told we've been promised by skylum that it is going to be significantly faster than illuminat maybe i'm throwing in the words significantly but it's going to be faster than luminar ai so i'm really looking forward to that but in this particular version this is very much a nuts and bolts version a skeleton framework if you will just to hold those tools so that we can actually explore them so i can't really talk to you about the speed of luminar neo as yet so what are the first three tools that skylim are allowing us to look at we've got the dust removal tool power line removal tool and what i'm most excited about which is the relight ai feature so we're going to take a look at all three of those in this video dust spots what pain they are am i right they're the bane of our lives as photographers it's so hard to keep your sensor clean of dust especially when you're continually changing lenses inevitably you're gonna end up with a dusty sensor if you shoot a lot of your work with a really shallow depth of field f28 something like that it's not as much of a big deal but for me i shoot landscapes i shoot travel i shoot architecture and for all of those i'm up around f8 and higher because i want a lot of things in focus and that means that inevitably the dust on my sensor is going to start to show up particularly in the sky so i'm really interested to see whether or not the ai can actually handle this i've literally just gone outside taken some shots of the sky with a camera i know has been sat around for a long time it's going to have a lot of dust on the sensor so let's see if luminar neo can clean these shots up let's take a look so welcome to a sneak peek first look at luminar neo in front of me in the catalogue here i have five very similar shots i just took in my garden and the reason i have five shots is because i've shot them at different apertures so the low end i've got an f 5.6 where the dust spots start to get a little softer and at the high end i've got an f22 so let's start with that and as you can see here f22 those dust spots are rendered hideously sharp they're really black nasty spots so let's come into the edit section and here you can see inside of tools we've literally only got the arrays and real ai available to us at the moment but like i say it's just for evaluation so let's see what the arrays tool can do this area will look very familiar to those of you who use luminar ai but just below we have remove power lines and remove dust spots and so hopefully with this one click hopefully that yeah it's okay i'm not going to talk about the speed um because i'm not allowed to do that but if i was going to mention the speed which i won't i'd probably say that was actually really fast but it's cleaned up all of those dust spots that's really impressive but to be fair they were really sharp really obvious so i think we should go in and actually try one that i shot at f 5.6 which is this one and all those dust spots are in exactly the same position but now they're rendered just a little bit softer because we're shooting at f 5.6 so let's come into the erase section and we're going to go remove dust spots and let's see yeah it's it's got rid of them again i can actually see just a little bit on two of the dust spots here i can still see a little bit of visibility there so if that was an issue what we can come in and do just like luminar ai we can just click over those with the erase tool hit erase and hopefully she's good to go so while i have done a bit of coding in my time i am by no means an ai expert i have no idea how this is working underneath the hood but i did have a sneaky suspicion that removing dust spots from the sky was going to be an easier task than potentially removing the power lines which is what we're going to look at next and i in my gut i'm kind of thinking that we're going to run into a couple of problems here and i am being a bit mean to luminar neo here because i've gone back into my travel catalogue remember when we used to be able to travel and i've gone to austria where there is a lot of cables running overhead ruining all the nice architectural shots that you could otherwise get but they're just so crisscrossed all over the frames that i'd given up all hope of getting rid of those i was never going to waste the time needed to clean those images up they are just you know travel shots for me i'm not too worried about them but if luminar neo can get rid of those power lines then we're winning so let's take a look okay let's jump into the power lines section here and let's open up this image so this is a really good example of what i'm talking about there's just power lines running all over the place and not only are they present in the sky but they're also intersecting all over these buildings here so i really i don't expect that luminar is going to be able to actually remove those so let's have a go let's hit remove power lines it's going to do its calculations and there's a lot in here so i'm wondering it's done it it's done it and that is surprisingly impressive in the sky area i would never know that there were power lines there and looking over the top of the buildings for the most part it's done a really really good job but i can see a little bit of artifacting running through here where these lights were supported so if we use the eye tool which you may notice has moved but like i was saying before this is not the finished interface so the eye tool for before and after may just move back to where we're all familiar with it from luminar ai i don't know we'll wait and see but anyway let's look at our before there are so many power lines let's look at our after that is actually really impressive now while it's not perfect over the buildings in terms of speeding up your workflow if you did have to clean those up that is a massive step forward i tried to think how long that would take me if i was inside a photoshop using the clone and stamp tool or the heel tool you would be there for like at least a day cleaning up all of that mess but let me show you something that i actually think is really cool you see how we've got these lights now just free hanging in the middle of the road and to be honest that is where luminar has done the worst job because that's where i can see just slight warping going through the building here but what we can do is actually come to the restore tool here basically we can paint over the top of where those wires were if we wanted to bring those back i won't do them all but let's let's just do this area for example and we hit restore we can bring those back and you can obviously keep doing that if you want to so if there's an area where you think do you know what is probably better just to leave those in you can just paint over it pretty rough and ready and hit restore and that bits back as it was so now if we look at our before and after the annoying kind of wires that are just hanging around and not really doing much they are gone whereas the ones that were actually serving a purpose of holding those lights up they are back okay let's try another one let's open up this one here and let's jump into the edit section come to arrays and just like that let's click remove power lines and see what luminar neo can do for us okay pretty good it's got over the most distracting ones that are over the sky so even though it hasn't done a perfect job and it's left one power line running across the building here that's probably a really easy fix so we could actually just come with the erase tool and just paint over that i really don't know why i'm doing this with a mouse when i do actually have a proper pen tablet but anyway it just shows you that you can do it with a mouse let's click erase and let's see what that can do for us if i were to post this on social media i don't think that anyone would actually pick up that there's anything and miss with this photo and it's certainly better than the original if we look at where those wires were originally and now this finished version that literally we've done with one click it wasn't perfect but it got us really close and then i've just done that one touch up with the erase tool click to raise and we're we're good to go so this is looking pretty good okay if i jump to the catalogue you guys might have noticed that there's some random photos in here of sheep what i'm going to actually try and do is now break luminar neo's ai i'm going to see if i can throw some curve balls at it and just see whether i can confuse the ai so first things first let's open up this photograph here that i took of a sheep just the other day let's come into edit now my thoughts are that we've got a kind of blue sky at the top of this frame we've got wires is the ai going to get confused thinking that this fence that the sheep is behind is in some way power lines so let's remove power lines and see what it does come on ai you think okay it says power lines removed and nothing's changed i'm just going to click the eyeball to check nothing's changed so okay i can't break it with that but i will find something i'm sure that i can break it with okay this is a good example these lines here are not power lines they are part of one of those big bungee balls that people fire up in a theme park called prata so let's see what it does here let's go to i mean they're pretty ugly anyway but um let's click remove power lines and see what it does okay i've confused the ai here it's got rid of them it thought they were power lines they're not they're bungee cords but you know what because i'm a fan of cleaner imagery i don't like things all busy and messy i actually prefer that image so if we look at our before and after um you can oh actually we have confused it it's got rid of some of the people on the ride so it's done a good job of getting rid of the wires so that's pretty cool but again if we want to if we're like oh some people have just randomly gone missing we can come in uh just paint over that area and let's click restore and those people are back okay i didn't realize the wires were going to be there so again we could come into the erase tool do a little bit of a raising click erase the chances are if you're watching this you've already pre-ordered or got yourself a copy of luminar neo if however you don't have that and you like the look of it i've got a link in the description below which will take you straight to whatever the best offer is that skylum currently have at the moment and i'll get a small commission from that as well so that just helps me keep creating content for you guys as well so it's a win-win for everyone but obviously only if you like the look of it if you think it'd be a good fit for your editing go ahead and use the link so basically we've gone from this to this it's removed the bungee cords but i'm quite pleased with that let's try one more example let's open up this one see how we get on come into edit arrays remove power lines i'm getting to know the flow of this now and again where the sky is it's done a very good job and then i guess i can come in just using the erase tool here and again i wish i had my wacom tablet on the go here but i'll just click erase and that's done a good enough job and if you feel like one area is not quite right like it introduced a little bit blue there okay we'll just give it another go let's have a quick look at our before and after okay well while it's not 100 perfect i am actually really impressed with what it can do so sometimes i'm finding i'm just having to give it a little helping hand with the erase tool where it may get confused or perhaps restore some certain areas with those power lines but in terms of dealing with the level of complexity that i'm actually throwing at it it's pretty good it's pretty good i have to be straight up with you when i installed this test version of luminar neo the very first thing i did was import some photos that i could test relight ai on because it's that tool that i'm most excited about out of these three so let's take a look at it i'll show you how it works and i'll show you what you can do with it so let's kick things off by starting with this photo here because i feel that that's pretty straightforward in terms of depth perspective it's pretty strong leading lines from foreground to background so it'll be good way for us to understand this tool the promise of the relight ai tool is that it's going to be able to separate the foreground and the background in our photo and allow us to re-light those independently so for example if i grab the brightness near slider ai is going to identify the foreground in the image and allow me to brighten that up or darken it down if i want it to the brightness far slider is going to allow me to brighten up what's further away and then the depth slider if i grab that and move that back and forth you can see that's allowing us to actually move the transition point closer or further away in our scene i'm going to drop the brightness far amount down just so we have a little bit more color in the sky and then you'll be able to see this section a little better the warmth near slider allows us to change the foreground color into more cooler tones or we can raise them up into warmer tones and then we can do the same with the warmth far as well so if we wanted to warm the background up cool the foreground down for example we can do that so let's have a look at our before and after and you can see just with that one tool we actually have quite a lot of control but the actual front to back geometry of this photo is pretty straightforward so let's dive into something a little bit more complex and perhaps a little bit more useful as well maybe where we've got people in the foreground who are under exposed with a background behind them because i'm seeing that if this works this is actually a really practical application for this tool so let's jump into the catalogue and all of these photos that we have here are just from a recent trip away with my family so let's have a look at this one here and this is a photo of my kids going into lake wanaka on a very cold day you can see the snow up on the mountains and often this lake is completely flat the wind was going crazy causing these waves but let's see what our relight ai tool can do basically we have to move this slider to actually invoke the tool and straight away you can see that we have a really precise mask going on around my son and around my daughter and they are getting brighter so already i'm seeing the benefit of using this tool we can grab the depth slider and push that brightness further into the scene if we want to and if we feel that the edge of the mask around our subject isn't quite right then we have this option to actually play with d halo slider and the way that works is it's just tightening the mask and then feathering it slightly so if i zoom into the photo here we can actually see that there is no haloing around our subjects okay let's try one more let's jump into the catalog and let's give this one a go here as you can tell from the shadows on the floor the sun was actually backlighting this environment and so these guys are all under exposed but i wanted to shoot it this way because i wanted to see the lake in the background so let's see whether relight ai can do us any favors all right so i've pushed that all the way to a hundred i've been pretty crude with it i haven't refined any of the other sliders and already we've got a much better result we've taken a shot of my wife and my kids it was underexposed couldn't really see them then all of a sudden we see them we see them in that environment so already we're heading in the right direction we could bring the exposure of the background down slightly if we wanted to for a little bit more contrast but i just think that's not looking particularly believable so we'll brighten up the background just a little bit as well and now let's play with that depth slider and you can see that even when i drop that down to very low numbers because these guys are right in the foreground they still remain illuminated but as i push it to the right you can see that that brightness from the foreground creeps further back into the scene so this is really cool i'm gonna push the d halo amount to zero just to see what it looks like and then crank it all the way to a hundred zero hundred okay and as i'm doing that you can just see a little bit of haloing going on around our subjects but it's not really that noticeable especially when you're not wiggling it back and forth and you just settle on an amount currently with this test build of luminar neo you'll notice that the photos are reverting to their original state when i come back to the catalog but this is just for testing the tools so i'm really not worried about that so i'm interested to see here whether luminar neo's artificial intelligence is actually smart enough to create a depth map that knows that we're looking up at our subject here our rather awesome man looking rather pensive there who knows who that guy's what a model right let's grab the brightness near and crank that up again and look at that straight away we're getting all of this illumination coming in through here and if i'm not mistaken it's actually wrapping up around here as well it's almost as if luminar neo recognizes that this section here is closer than this section here which it was and so it's actually doing a really good job of brightening that up so what i'm going to do is let's darken that down just so we get a bit more blue in the sky let's grab the depth slider and just bring that brightness that we created further into the scene and if i move this left and right you can actually see how the brightness just encroaches into the scene into the depth of the image and then if we combine that with let's say warming up this near area here so we're getting more of those yellowy earthy tones in the rock and let's go the other way with the far distance and just sort of cool that down so we're introducing more blues if we look at our before and our after just with that one tool we've made a big difference here and something that really excites me is we're going to be able to use this tool in conjunction with all of the other tools that are going to be inside of luminar neo and so the complexities of layering these different effects is really going to open up the realms of creativity which is exactly what skyline have said they want to do with this piece of software and that brings me on to another really useful point you guys may recall that in another video i discussed how luminar neo is very different in terms of the engine running it than luminar ai and that's actually opening up a lot more possibilities for us and one of those possibilities is we can actually reuse tools again and again um which may not sound like a big deal but it is you can really let your artistry soar because you can just layer complexity and depth in your images it's pretty exciting i'm excited you can tell um but let me show you how we can add this tool on top of itself so if i close the relay ai panel down you can see that our photo now has those changes and if i open relay ai again look all of these sliders have reset so once again i can come back in and play with the brightness slider so let's say this time i don't want as much tension down here on the foreground so instead of brightening it what i could do is actually darken this area down and obviously i don't want it over me so this time i can get the depth slider and just bring that all the way down and it's almost like bringing just a little bit of a darkening vignette just to that foreground and as i understand it we're also going to have access to a mask right here just like we have in luminar ai so that we can paint this effect in where we want it so there's a distinct difference between the masks you have the internal tool depth map mask that actually controls the tool itself you do not have access to that itself that's all internally run by the ai but you do have access to your normal mask where you can just paint this change where you want it on your photo hope that makes sense let me know in the comments right make sense if you understood or more clarity if you would like me to explain that further in another video i'm going to give you a conclusion of my thoughts in just a moment but i just wanted to show you one more example reason being it's not a given that it's always the foreground element that we actually want to brighten up sometimes it's actually the background that we want to elevate the brightness of so let me show you this one here i've got another raw photo currently untouched and the background is actually pretty dark the peacock's popping off of that quite nicely but let's say that you do want to introduce a little bit more color in the background let's see if we can do that with relight ai well as you can see by raising the brightness far level to 100 you can see that our peacock has been masked pretty much perfectly and we've been able to brighten up that background and if we want to play with the depth slider what we can do is actually just play with this and it starts to introduce a little bit of that brightness just around the peacock and i quite like that and if we come down and look at our before and thereafter while when i took this i quite liked the idea of putting the peacock against that dark background when i framed it up but you know what i think i prefer this version so here's our before here's our after and after seeing skylum's initial demonstration of this tool i was thinking ah it's it's a nice feature but i think it's kind of limited i don't know how many times i'm going to use that but already i'm seeing different examples of when this tool could actually be useful case in point this picture of a peacock okay so what did i think to my first little play in luminar neo well i really enjoyed it um i was surprised by the results surprised how good they were now while they weren't perfect particularly for the power line removal i didn't expect them to be and i actually expected the photos that i was introducing into luminar neo they were very complex and i was thinking it's really going to fall over here and i was actually really really impressed with how it handled those particular images and the ones where it had fewer power lines i thought it did a great job so that's real good time saver the dust removal that is going to be a massive time saver as well so just for those tools already i'm thinking yeah luminar neo is going to be a really useful tool uh the relight ai tool that i've just been showing now that one that excites me because that's more of a creative tool and i can already imagine combining that with the other tools that we're going to see inside of luminar neo anyway thanks so much for watching guys i've really enjoyed putting this one together for you do me a favor leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed this also let me know if you'd like to see more on luminar neo as they release more tools before it's actually launched to the public happy to share look can't talk this video is too long i'm happy to share that with you if you are interested let me know in the comments if you are otherwise i'll just leave it at that and wait for the launch all together if for some reason you don't have luminar neo yet i have got a link in the description below it's a discounted link so go ahead and use that also helps me out because i get small commission from that so that really helps me out just keep creating content for you guys so i will catch you in the next video right now there should be another video popping up around my head somewhere click on that and i'll see you in that one cheers guys bye for now

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 40,700

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, Skylum, NEO, Luminar AI, Luminar NEO, Luminare NEO, New Luminar, Luminar 5, Tech Demo

Id: XjHOCt8VvsU

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021