Full Landscape Photo edit in Luminar AI - Complete Walkthrough Tutorial

hi guys thanks so much for joining me today i'm going to be doing an edit with inside luminar ai on a landscape a lot of people have been asking me recently for landscape edits i'm sorry i haven't been posting much recently but here we go we're going to do one we're going to add a single image this time and then rather than opening things within the library what you can do is just edit a single image so that's what i'm going to do here i'm going to come to my north island photos from a recent trip and we are going to jump into lake tarawera at the play of plenty and we can view our imagery here and i'm going to work with this image here just as an example and the first thing i like to do when i'm analyzing my photos for any sort of editing is just assess the image and think what do i actually need to do what do i want to do with this ensure we can take creative turns along the way so that we're not defined by what we think originally but assessing the image is an important step along the way and we are underexposed we have a pretty monotone kind of image it's very just within that blue range and just a hint of pink here so i may want to just play with the color slightly just to make it a little more interesting i quite like my angle my shot set up here coming through the jetty here leading you into the image but if you want to find out more information about the image just come down to that bottom right eye icon there click that and that will give you more details about your photo so basically we can see that i shot this at iso 100 on a 22 millimeter zoom on my lens and f11 it's a 30 second exposure that's how we get the nice soft water here i'm on a tripod 30 seconds and it was actually a real mission to get this shot because it looks very tranquil and peaceful but literally as i set my tripod up to get the shot i had boats coming in one after the other disrupting the water fishermen offloading for the day so it's actually really challenging to get this shot let's dive into the template section as a starting point and you can see if we come back here before this photo luminar's making some recommendations for us and we sure we could dive straight in and just see what we can do with luminar's basic adjustments and things like this i really like the fact that we can just click once and get a feel for where could this image go like i actually really like this from where we were to this it's a subtle soft edit on this but i actually really like it um let's try this retro see for me this kind of template just isn't doing anything for me i don't enjoy this at all whereas this one is much more practical so let's look at before and after again yeah so i know that i've got detail within this foliage that i can bring back but i'm going to reset this and just work from the ground up this would definitely be a good starting point but i want to share more of my process with you guys so let's just come into the reset adjustments here and now let's come into the edit section and get going with this one thing i like to do is just jump into the enhance ai and just crank the accent slider all the way to 100 because the ai that's built into this is able to do a lot for us straight away and just get us a good idea of where this photo could go and normally i think that 100 of this particular slider is normally way too much but in this case it's actually doing a really nice job of recovering the highlights and the details bringing in shadows the colors looking much more vibrant really like it so yeah maybe we'll just ease it off a little bit but certainly use this as a good starting point we can come into the light section here and certainly grab our exposure and brighten things up just a little bit we can go a little bit heavy-handed with this i might over expose it certainly through the sky area uh we're far too overexposed now but i might use my local adjustments just to take care of that later let's boost the shadows as well if we push that to the right you can see that we certainly get more detail in here but see the darkening effect on the edge of this i really don't like that kind of transition that we've got now so whereas i might want to boost up those shadows a little bit i want to be mindful of that darkening effect there and we start to see that before we've even taken that too far at all so i'll be real careful with that perhaps we'll even just reset that and not worry about it because we have brought the shadows up with the exposure as a whole now just out frame here we can see there's a little bit of actually a boat that was moored up here on the left hand side and i framed this deliberately to try and crop that out i didn't quite do it must have floated its way into shot during the 30 second exposure so we can sort that out we could uh click composition ai and see what's recommended by luminar and it's coming up with a much much tighter crop here but to be honest i don't want to go too tight with this i don't want to lose too much of the jetty leading in here so we're going to reset that and i'm just going to pull it in ever so slightly from the left hand side here and now to make sure that we're centered here i'm just keeping an eye on this part of the wood here and this here and you can see that we've got a greater gap here so what i'll do is just bring that in from that side so that we match and we've got a nice symmetrical image now one thing that's slightly bugging me is that see the line here where the wood panels have been nailed in we've actually we're not perfectly parallel to the bottom of the frame and that bugs me so let's see if we can fix that by grabbing one of these sliders here and using that horizontal slider we can fix that then i think that we're actually busting our nice horizon line that we had there so maybe somewhere in between we could get do that and then just give it a slight rotation that's looking pretty good so let's apply that just by closing down the composition ai tool and now i see that we're just getting a little bit of this mesh creeping in here so although we're nice and straight across the bottom as per the wooden panel i still don't like that so let's just correct that as well let's just bring that in just a little bit tighter oh let's come all the way up here i think that's going to be a cleaner crop now let's jump into the structure ai and just have a little play with this and see what it's doing for us okay if we take that to 100 we can see that we certainly bring out a lot more detail in this and while i i like maybe what it's doing in the foliage and perhaps even on the wood as well the rest of the image i'm not really enjoying it perhaps in the background on this kind of mountain shape here that's pretty useful if we take that back yeah let's let's put that quite high maybe somewhere around that sort of 80 mark and now let's use a mask just to paint that in where we want it and i'm going to bring the opacity of my mask quite far down so that i can bring build this up in layers let's stick around 20 and let's just start to paint this in so i'm going to increase the structure on the foliage okay just a little soft effect of that there let's do the same here on this side now i didn't get the water on this side so let me paint over that as well just that boosts that and now i'm going to reduce the size of my brush just with my left bracket key there and i'm painting over the top in passes over this mountain in the background so i've gone over that a couple of times let's go for a third time here don't need to be too precise with this mask all right let's have that off and on okay and that's definitely given us a little bit of pop there so let's do the same over these bits of wood here as well let's do a couple of passes over the top of this just to enhance the texture in the wood and do these bits of wood further up as well and you can see i'm being really loose with the masking here how i'm painting it i've got a soft edged brush so i'm not too worried about the fact that my mask is not perfect so let's turn that off and turn that on just a little bit more detail where we want it so i feel we need to make this a little bit more impactful as it is so let's jump into the vignette tool and we're going to push this all the way to -100 and obviously that will help to bring our attention to the centerpiece of the image more we need to certainly feather this off so let's push that to a hundred and i feel like we might need to bring this in a little tighter and let's have a go playing with the roundness of this [Music] yeah maybe maybe something like that and now we know what the vignette looks like we can just ease the amount back okay so if i turn that off and now start introducing it to a point where i'm happy so you don't even start to notice it until you hit around that minus 40 mark but something something around here could be quite nice yep let's go let's go for that turn it off and turn it on and you see how we had an overexposed sky to begin with i knew i was going to do some adjustments that were going to darken some things down so i wasn't too worried about that so this is our before and this is our after and perhaps i feel like we may have gone just a little heavy-handed with that let's ease it back just a bit if we jump into the landscape tools we've got things to enhance the foliage and bring the greens up in that but i'm actually not a huge fan of greens in my imagery it's just a personal preference so i steer clear of those but we could we could push up the golden hour and that's going to enhance those nice orangey gold uh colors that we've got going on so yeah maybe i'll just put a little bit of that in let's play with the dehaze slider as well and see where that's going okay that's certainly um introducing some saturation which is kind of cool see the white that we've got through here at the moment i wanted to fix that up and i was going to do it different way but the dehaze slider is solving that problem for us at the moment which is quite nice if i want to i could push that quite heavily i don't really like what it's doing to the blues around the edge of the frame but this golden look that we're getting on going on through the middle here is quite nice so what i could do is actually create a mask just to deal to this area through the middle here so we could do a radial mask or in this case i think probably just as quick as for me to paint it with a very very large brush so let's start making some sweeps over here anything that i do in the sky i want to match coming down into the water as well because obviously we've got a reflection situation going on here so let's do that and i'll just make a couple of strokes through the area that was white before so that we get that yellowy color coming into that so let's turn that off and on i don't mind it but it's a little bit too heavy so let's ease that back let's try that before and after yep not too bad now in my last video i looked at dodge and burn and how you can apply a couple of layers to actually create a more controlled version of dodging and burning and we looked at that on a portrait so i'd actually like to show you that on a landscape because a few people have said well does this apply to a landscape in the comments and i said absolutely yes it does so let me show you how that works so let's add a basic mask here and we're going to create a brighter exposure this is going to be our brightening effect so this is the dodge i don't want to over expose things so i'll bring the highlights down just a little bit just so that we're not blowing things out if we do brighten things up and just to activate the mask i'm just going to make one brush stroke across the top of the foliage here there we go so that's brightened up that line across the top of that the trees there and now i've got that active uh we'll add another mask now that we can see our original uh image underneath nice basic mask and we're gonna darken down with this one and as i darken this down you can see how much more saturated the colors look through this center part of the image here and i quite like that let's also bring the highlights down but bring the shadows up just a little bit just so that if things are getting too dark we're not completely smashing those blacks down into pure black and now with the paint brush we can paint this in so i'm just going to make one stroke at 20 just coming across here just so that i'm activating that mask and as soon as that popped there you can see where i actually made that stroke so that 20 opacity that's just a little bit too much that's not very soft um you want everything to be believable you don't want to see where your brush strokes have been so i am gonna just reset no i'm not gonna reset that because i don't want to have to redo all these settings so i'm just gonna get my raise tool actually and crank the opacity of my eraser to 100 and just get rid of that effect i painted on but now we have our two masks available to us we're able to control the brightness and the darkness within specific areas of the photos and that's really powerful so if i get my brush here i'm going to give this another go i'm going to bring the opacity down to i don't know let's let's start with seven and just start to build this up so i want to darken down just this area through here where i just feel like it's a little bit too bright and just getting a little bit bleached out so let's do a few strokes there through there and another one it's just all about softly softly building this up build the effect up just where you want it and check your progress by turning the effect off and on and i feel like i don't really want to darken things down too much at the moment now i'm going to jump into the brightening effect get my paintbrush and i'm just going to start to look at my image and think okay which areas are too dark which which one which areas do i want to introduce a little bit more brightness to so maybe around that edge of the foliage the edge of the trees there where it was uh quite dark we can brighten that up but we want to be mindful that we don't end up getting too much of a halo going on where the foliage meets the sky i feel that the shadow here is very dark so we're going to start trying to brighten this up so we can just get a little bit more detail and color through this area because as this brightens it's going to come away from that blackness that we kind of had going on before and just reintroduce the color that is associated with the reflection so if i turn that off sorry off and on you'll see that by brightening that we've turned it a little bit more green to match what's going on above and i'll do the same here i'll just give this a little bit of a scribble back and forth over the top of that so that we've done the same on this side and just brightened that reflection up i also feel that the corners of the frame just kind of to do with the fact that we added that vignette but also the fact that i'm using a filter on my lens i was using a 10 stop neutral density filter and that kind of has the effect after that 30 second exposure of just darkening those corners of the frame down so i'm just brightening those up just by painting over those areas i might increase my opacity slightly just so i can get the job done just a little bit quicker i feel that the effect isn't as uniform as i might like it but that's okay so let's have a look at our before and after with the brightening yeah i'm happy with that and one thing i'd also like to do is just give a little bit more definition and three-dimensionality to this the wood that we've got going on here and so i'm imagining like a highlight in the center of the bit of wood so let's paint that in on both sides bring the size of the brush down a little bit and i might do the same on the ones just a little bit further away as well and now if i jump back into my darkening filter what i want to do is bring down the brightness level of the top of the sky and i'm going to do that using a gradient mask so it says click and drag to draw gradient so i can draw a nice straight gradient down from the top of the sky and that is going to transition that darkness now i've let go so this effect that we've created in this mask here that exposure of minus 1.8 highlights -14 boosting the shadows just a little bit that effect is applied at the top here of the gradient at 100 percent by the time it gets to the midpoint it's going to be 50 and by the time it gets to the bottom of this gradient it's non-existent so we've gone from 100 to zero percent just darkening the sky down so if i turn that off and on you can see that we've darkened the top of the sky and that's actually a really nice technique to help your viewer's eye come to the center of the frame as well as doing that vignetting around the edge of the frame we've also controlled in a linear fashion from top to the center darkening that down so i think we're a pretty good point to have a look at our before when we started and thereafter before and after and i feel like we've headed in a really good direction i feel like we might be a little bit bright just having a comparison between that before and after i feel like we are still overexposing slightly through here but that's not a problem we can just jump back into our essentials tab jump into the light and just bring the exposure down to a point where we feel we're happier so i don't want to like darken it down too much but maybe 1.16 and so i'm happy with that there's just a couple more things that i'm mindful that i want to do and you'll see that there's a bit of sense of dust here in the sky that little dot there and there might be a couple of other little bits floating around in the sky as well and i just want to take care of those so that's one thing i want to do i also want to deal to the sharpening of the image and make sure we are nice and sharp and then once i've done all of that then it's play time and what i mean by that is i'll just put some finishing creative touches on i'll probably want to soften the image perhaps with the autumn effect or perhaps with the mystical filter and then my favorite absolute favorite thing to do with any image is the color grading so let's do all of those things sounds overwhelming but it's not let's uh let's start with these sense of dust spots that i found i'm going to click on the arrays section here and i'm just going to paint over the top of the dust spots just do a couple of clicks and i'm looking left and right to see if there is anything else this little boy or i think in the states you call it a buoy i'm going to get rid of that as well and i'm going to click done and i'll click erase on that and what i'd also like to do while this is applying that arrays i'm thinking i'd also like to erase this line here on the right of the jetty and there's also this little area here that potentially i'd like to get rid of but i'm not 100 sure that luminar is going to do a great job of that so i'm going to try the erase tool because that's the quickest tool to use and it's the easiest so i'm going to just paint over this section here and just see what luminar does um be interesting to see uh let's also do this little bit here as well say come on luminar save me some time what have you got let's click erase and see how it does now i'm not convinced that this is going to be able to um cleanly get rid of these items in my image um no no it's it's not done it's a shame it was worth a try um but let's let's not worry about that i'm going to reset that tool and everything's back as it was including the spots here and i'll show you another approach which is probably one i prefer and that's just using the clone and stamp tool and that's taken us back to our base image and literally we are going to click from a source here in the sky and basically i'm going to now paint what's here where i've clicked over that area where that little dust spot was and we can do the same again here we can click and paint and we can also do the same with this section down here so i could just click in the water to the side and i know that everything that i'm painting here will be sampling from this area here and painting it over the top and i'm just going to zoom in on this and i just want to actually zoom in on this area here so that i can do this a little bit more precisely so i'll just jump back into that clone and stamp tool and i'll click to select my source and now i can just paint in along here and i'm going to go along the edge i'd normally be using a graphics tablet to actually do this so i had a more precise kind of drawing feel to this but i'm using my mouse here so it's not not as accurate as i would like a little harder to achieve a nice drawn look but uh we can we can do it well enough okay so we'll just paint away this area here and that's that's a better way of actually removing items if you want a little bit more control than using the erase tool and i just want to clean that edge up it was a bit fuzzy before so i'll get a harder brush or a smaller brush so relatively it's harder now and just clean those edges up yep and we'll just apply that i didn't do the best job of painting there but look for the sake of this demonstration we're we're close enough let's zoom back out by clicking on the screen there and let's sharpen this up let's come into the details section and again it's nice to zoom in when you're doing any sharpening work so we'll just zoom in here and you can see that this image is not the sharpest it's it's not bad but it's not the sharpest straight off of camera and whenever you're dealing with filters in front of your lens you'll always get an image that's just slightly softer than normal pushing that sharpening to around 50 percent is quite nice um we could work with the small details and just bring out a little bit more detail in this photo and if we felt that the noise was just getting to an unacceptable level we could come into denoise and just use some luminosity denoise if i push that all the way to 100 you'll see that it'll again kind of soften the image off a little bit and almost give us a painterly quality and that can be used to your advantage if you want a painterly look to your photo um but i don't so i'm just going to tickle in a little bit of this maybe around that 14 mark and just let luminar render that and that's yeah i'm happy with that so let's look at our before and thereafter yep that's nice click on the screen to zoom back out and let's get creative now let's jump into the creative section and i'm going to jump into the mood no i'm not i'm going to come to mystical and we're going to bump the mystical amount up and that's going to help give us a little bit of a glow to our image so if i turn that off and on we can see that we've introduced a kind of glow but it's also brightening things up a little bit through here a little bit too much i don't want to use this um anywhere near the amount i had it at before but just tickling in a small amount of it something around that 14 that's quite nice and in terms of color grading uh for the final step we could come into toning and work this way the thing i love with luminara there is there's so many different ways that you can color grade so let me show you toning for this example my favorite way is choosing a lut and just working with luts i find that a really powerful and quick way to achieve a particular look for your photo i really enjoy these cinematic toning ones i think they work really nicely so for example bakersfield here looks great normally long beach is quite a nice one um you know it's it's a really quick way to color grade your photos but i'm going to show you a different way for this one and we're going to jump into toning and we can control i'm going to put the amount all the way to 100 to start with so we get the full effect and then we can ease this back off if we want to but we can choose we can saturate the highlights and now we can choose the hue the color that we want those highlights to be so i quite like the enhancing the pink idea that orangy pink that we had going on that's quite a nice idea but if i take this through the range of colors you can see that those highlights can become any color you want them to but for this let's let's push the yellows more towards that kind of pinky look that we had initially and now we can jump into the shadows and we need to saturate the shadows if you start trying to move the hue slider and nothing's happening the reason for that is if your saturation is zero there is no color to add if it's already at zero there's yeah nothing to add so bump the saturation up obviously not to 100 but let me just show you if it's 100 you can now see that as you move through the hues you can get different color effects but you may want to push that quite high the saturation so that you can choose something go yeah i like that color i can see the color that i'm applying now i'm going to ease that all the way back and just feather it into the point that you're happy with so perhaps we want that around 42 for this example so let's turn our coloring off and on off and on and we've kind of harmonized the whole image by introducing a highlight color and a shadow color we can further play with that hue if we want to maybe give it just a slightly more purple kind of look and now we've got the colors where we want them we might decide that it's just a bit too much and this is the great thing we can now grab the amount slider and just by easing that from left to right kind of find a place where we're happy with what we've done and probably just airing on the side of caution and not going too strong just easing that back gives us a little bit more of a realistic look but just while we are on color grading let me show you another really really great way to color grade and this is the way that i use when i'm working in photoshop i really love this approach if you come into light and you actually need to drop down the curves section here and the white circle here when you're on that this controls your contrast of your image so you can brighten things up if you want or you can bring the curve down and that will darken things down we could bring the highlights which are represented by the right hand side of the curve bring the highlights down and still keep the shadows slightly brighter so if you push the points on the curve up things get brighter if you pull them down they get darker and the left hand side talks to the shadows the right hand side to the highlights and finally luminar has caught up with me um but that's basically kept the shadows nice and bright but just darken down those highlights so we get a nice saturated highlight through here but what i want to do is color grading so nothing to do with the contrast i want to come into the colors so you have red green and blue and so if you wanted to introduce more red through your image you could come to the red here and bring that up because remember i said bringing the point up introduces more of of the color so there we go we've got red um we could come into the blue section here and what you can do is also bring the points down so if i bring the highlight point of the blues down it's taking blue away from the highlight so we're getting more of a yellow through the center point of the image if we wanted to introduce blue into the shadows all you do is get the shadow control point on the left hand side and just raise that up and now we're going to introduce blues into the shadows so that is far too much but what i wanted to do is just demonstrate how that works so using the curves panel you can actually color grade your image with a lot of control so i'm just going to just have a little play around with these sliders and just put them somewhere that i feel that i want them to be i don't want that too red and perhaps somewhere around there for my overall color grade i'm happy with so let's look at our before image and our after and i think we've done a really nice enhancement on that original image it's faithful to the original scene it's much more now how i remember seeing it with my eye as well so this is the camera's view of it but when i was stood there i saw all the rich greeny blue colors that were going on as the sun was setting i saw all the detail in the background here which is kind of missing from the raw file so this is our before and this is our after and that's a walk through edit in luminar ai i hope you guys have enjoyed this landscape edit let me know what you think because i've literally hit record freestyled this and normally my videos are more thought out in advance and i kind of feel like maybe that's making them sound more robotic and contrived so i try to just freestyle like i say so you guys get a more authentic representation of my thought process as i'm editing so please if you like this just do me a favor write liked it in the comments a thumbs up goes a million miles for me really helps support the channel and if you guys don't have luminar ai yet please use the link in the description with the code at sky10 and that will save you some do re me everybody's a winner baby um so i will catch you in next video guys let me know if there's anything you'd like to know about in luminar ai i'm getting so many comments these days that it's hard to keep up with responding but i am really trying to do that um but if there's particular things you want to know then by all means let me know and i may be able to make a video for you cheers for watching catch you in the next one

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 17,444

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, Luminar AI, Ai editing, Luminar, Colour Grading, color grading

Id: h2XWdLj7Q_s

Length: 32min 4sec (1924 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021