GETTING STARTED WITH LUMINAR AI - A Beginners Quick Start Guide to Skylums A.I. Editing Software.

so you're all excited because after all the hype luminar ai is here and you're ready to get going with it for sure this is the most intuitive photo editor i've ever used but still for those of you who just want a helping hand to get started find out a little bit about how to use the program this is the video for you if in any way you're feeling a little anxious about oh how am i going to get ai artificial intelligence to edit my photos please don't it's really straightforward and after we finish going through this quick start guide you'll be up and running in no time [Music] hi guys anthony turnham here and on this channel i share free training on photography and photo editing so if that's something you're interested in why not consider subscribing to the channel so in this brief introduction on luminar ai i'm going to cover as much as i can in as quick a time as possible so that you can get up and running with this software we're going to look at the interface we're going to look at importing photos we're going to look at how you can use templates to with one click just edit your photos and if you want to dive deeper into the editing process i'm going to show you those tools involved with that as well and then we're going to look at exporting your photos as well so let's dive into the program and get into it so by now you've received an email from skylum with instructions on how to install luminar ai once you've done that just double click it and open it up and at first glance the screen in front of you it's pretty bland pretty boring not much going on so what do we need to do first the first thing is we need to tell luminar ai where your photos are so if we come up to this plus icon right here and click on that what we can do is either edit a single image or i recommend to start with is add a folder with images now whether you're on pc or mac doesn't really matter all you need to do is navigate to where all of your photos are held on your computer and just select that folder and then just like that all of your photos are imported into luminar and we are currently in the catalog mode of luminar and we can have we can scroll down here and see all of the photos that are imported and it's currently just generating tiny little thumbnail previews and i've got a collection of family photos some landscapes some wedding shots earlier on a bit of architecture we've got all sorts going on here so one important key when you're working with your photos is to stay organized so you can see within this folder here on the right hand side which is basic photo editing examples which is literally a folder that i've just created purely to demonstrate luminar if i drop down using this arrow here you'll see all of the other folders that were contained within this main folder here and so i thoroughly recommend that you organize your folders in a way that suits your workflow and your photography so i've categorized the photos here and then within these categories what i normally like to do is if i jump into portraits my normal way of naming folders would be the reverse date so 2020 1204 and then the name of the photo shoot and then it's really easy from here just to jump straight into categories such as portraits and then an individual photo shoot within that so now we've got some photos inside of luminar let's explore the interface and make some sense of that if you come to the top left hand side here and click on the luminar ai button you've got a menu structure here with little flyouts that give you more options as well we won't delve into each and every one of those but one of the useful things here is right next to any of the options you've got a keystroke or combination of keystrokes which refers to the keyboard hotkey the shortcut and i really recommend if you want to get the most out of this program or any other program learn the shortcuts and you'll be able to fly around the program so much quicker just underneath that we've got a description of the folder that we're currently in tells us when the photos were taken and how many photos exist within there if at any point we want to add more folders to our catalog we can simply click this plus icon and add more folders if you're familiar with adobe lightroom you'll appreciate that one of the really neat things with luminar ai is that the folder structure that is on your computer is reflected in luminar ai if you make changes in your folder structure here it is reflected on your computer and if you make changes on your computer folder structure that is also picked up and reflected in luminar ai without you having to resync or import photos again from within the catalog section once you've made changes to a photograph if you want to you can actually select a photo right click on it and you can actually go to the adjustments and copy those adjustments and from there you're able to select a whole host of photos and you could paste those adjustments right the way through onto all these photos just by right clicking or option clicking on the mac and just go to adjustments paste adjustments so that's a really nice way to quickly edit multiple photos at once so next to catalog we have three other kind of modules that we can look at the first one is templates and that's where we can apply a one-click template just to do a quick edit on a photo next to that we've got edit which actually lets us delve into any changes that a template may have made or we can build our own look right from the beginning from ground up once we've made any changes we can export the photo and that means that any of those changes we've made inside of luminar are hard baked into that photo file and we're then able to share that photo online on social media or send it off to get it printed so let's have a look at templates click the templates icon here now if you were paying attention before this photograph fully loaded and popped into clarity the luminar logo over here had a slight blue wash radiating through it and when it's doing that when you see that that's luminar ai saying i'm thinking about something in the same way your cursor sometimes turns into a spinning wheel in the operating system that's luminar's way of saying hey i'm just thinking about something at the moment and the really great thing with luminar ai that i've found so far is it really doesn't have to think about things too long not like its predecessors so this is a rather underexposed photograph so that'd be an easy fix with luminar but let's start with something that's a better exposed photograph to start with you will have just seen that one just pop slightly and that is basically saying luminar's analyze the photo and it's ready to start editing now here's a really clever part of templates luminar makes suggestions for you which is for this photo and this is part of the ai working recognizing what it is which is a portrait and we've got access to a variety of different template collections so if we were to come into easy portraits we've now got a few different looks available to us within here so all we need to do is click one if we click high key it's made those adjustments and applied it to the photo and you can quickly enhance your photo with one click if you want to fade the shot we could go for a look like that if we want a low key look let's try that so i think i quite like the fade look with this which is really cool now if you decide you don't really like any of these looks no problem just click the arrow next to templates and that will send you back to the place we were in before and bear in mind while luminar is making these suggestions by no means do you have to go down that route there's really nothing to stop you going crazy and saying hey i want to actually select mother nature savannah and clicking on this and then coming into here for something that's completely different and now we can put this bitter cold look on this photo or we could go for warming sun as well as having access to luminar ai's own templates you have also got the option to create your own collection so this star here gives you access to your favorites that you use on a regular basis any templates that you've purchased and you've also got your user templates here if i click the down arrow next to that user templates you'll see that i've already created some of my own and then you're free to click those and see what those templates look like on your photo if you decide that you like the look of a template but you feel that the effect is slightly strong all you need to do is come down to the right hand bottom corner here and you have a fade slider so currently that's all the way to the right that'd be 100 and now we can drop that down if i push it to the left you'll see our photo returns back to its normal unedited state and we can increase the amount of that particular template to any amount we want so if you want about 50 of that you just put that slider halfway up which is great if you just want to take a template away or any editing that you've done these little three ellipses here just click those and you can reset the adjustments i've created a template that leverages luminar's artificial intelligence just to enhance the photo that's my at basic enhance if i click that overall i like that improvement and the great thing about that template that i created is it works really well with most photos and enhances them just with that one click and now while you're free to stay with the one click option and that's a really simple way of editing your photos if like me you want to get a little bit more complex and take more of a creative role in things this is where we come into the edit section here so click on the edit module and now on the right hand side you'll see that our options have changed we're currently in what is known as the essentials section but there are three other main sections to know about as well one is the creative one is the portrait section and the other is the professional section the final icon down here is called local masking and that makes specific changes to your image and we might have a quick look at that later but for now let's stick with the essentials section and this is where all the heavy lifting of editing your photo happens these are the fundamental basics that go into improving your photo now if you want to know what any template is doing to your photo and what tools are involved in creating a particular look all you need to do is come into this section and look for the little bullet point next to any one of these tools so for example we can see that within essentials for this particular enhancement light has been used enhance ai structure ai details and vignetting to access any of these tools and make further changes all you need to do is click on them that will create a drop down that contains all of the sliders pertaining to that tool and then you're free just to go nuts and change things at will so for example i might want to grab the temperature push it to the right and just give this a much warmer feel once you've finished working with a tool just click on the name of it again and that will close the panel back down enhance ai and particularly the accent ai tool are really valuable ones to know because that is leveraging a lot of artificial intelligence for improving your photo so i've pushed that all the way to 100 and that will give us the opportunity to look at a couple of other features here within panels so if you want to toggle the effect on and off you've got this switch here so we can turn that off and turn it back on and you can see exactly what effect that tool is having so we can turn it off turn it on if you want to reset the tool to its original defaults you just click this arrow here and that resets the tool now those options have disappeared because the tool is just not doing anything but if i push that back to 100 again we have a third tool here and that's all to do with masking and that is basically allowing you to paint in the effect exactly where you want it so in this example i may decide that i like what it's doing to our subject and also maybe to the hay a little bit but i find that it's becoming a little too distracting bringing out the contrast of the background so if i toggle that off and on you'll see what i mean so we can click this masking tool here we can choose whether we want to paint in the effect or erase it and we are just going to paint it in over our model the radius lets us pick what size brush we want to work with how soft or hard the edge of that brush is i normally like a nice soft brush and keep that at 100 and how opaque do we want that effect to be how strong so 100 it's fully on at zero you're not doing anything so let's start with 50 and just paint this in on our model you can see that we're getting you can see that we're getting a red overlay happening here and that's basically just indicating the mask of where we're painting this and we don't need to be too precise but we have now painted that effect over our model and the hay only so if we now toggle this off and on you can see that that is just affecting the model and the hay and the fact that you can do that with any of these tools means that you have really precise control over your photos if you want to this video isn't going to be one where i dive into every single tool but i encourage you to dive into them yourselves you can't break anything they're just really fun to play around with so for example if we grab the structure and push that all the way to 100 or take it away to the negative 100 you can see exactly what that effect is doing and so one of the really great things about this software is you can just play around to your heart's content and get really really creative with things now let's jump into the creative section and see what can be done here now some of the tools in here are just mind-blowingly powerful and i really want to demonstrate some of these to you sky ai particularly so let's find a photo that's going to work on let's come back to our catalog and anything with the sky in is going to be a prime candidate but let's find a landscape to work on this software is super intuitive but i get it there's a lot to take in so do me a favor if this makes sense to you just write in the comments makes sense if you're a little bit lost just write lost if you don't have luminar ai yet but would like to get yourself a copy you can use my discount code at sky10 using the link below that helps the channel out as well because i get a very small commission from that and that just helps me keep creating free training for you guys that's a win for you and a win for me but right now let's get back into the quick start guide one of my general rules is i don't change a sky unless i need to but if we look at this particular photograph here with the mountains and the sheep i feel that the photo is okay but the sky is really lackluster there's nothing much going on there so let's see what luminar's ai can do for us if we jump back into the edit section within the creative component of the edit section and we jump into sky ai with just one click we should be able to replace that sky now as a man who spent many hours in my life masking out skies masking around trees mountains things like this to me this is mind-blowing that this software can do this i absolutely love it and now it's a case of selecting a sky that you feel works well with your particular image so while i really prefer to keep my sky swaps in the realms of believability there's no hard and fast rules around this if you want to throw in let's say a dramatic sunset you just click it apply it and all of a sudden you've created a brand new look now while luminar ships with standard skies i would recommend to you either build your own sky library by photographing the sky around you or if that is not currently an option for you then you can use the link below go to the skyline website and you can actually purchase sky packs where professional photographers have been out and captured some stunning high resolution photos of skies that you can use in your own work now while often one click can do the trick sometimes the masking isn't perfect and you may need just to play around with closing the gaps and a few of these sliders just to perfect the mask but overall it does a pretty good job sometimes gets you spot on sometimes you need to finesse it but there are a couple of sliders that can really help with the believability of introducing new skies one would be relight scene if we push that to the right what that does is take color information from the new sky you've introduced and introduce that into the foreground to help tie things in as well as using the sliders to correct where the mask goes you've also got access to the mask in the same way we showed you that other tool you can just paint things out there as well if the sky is crisply in focus and you can see these mountains were already dropping out of focus in my photo what you can do is defocus the sky until you feel it matches the photo if it needs to drop back because of haziness you can actually introduce some atmospheric haze to drop the sky back like that as well and if the sky temperature isn't quite right you can change that too augmented sky lets you actually introduce new objects into the sky such as birds clouds a moon into a night scene you can even put in some lightning now atmosphere ai is a really cool tool for introducing atmospheric effects such as fog and mist for example if we grabbed a haze crank the amount all the way to 100 you can see that it's found the horizon line and is putting that in exactly in the right place using the depth slider lets you actually bring that effect forward now using the depth slider lets you bring that effect forward towards the viewer so that is a really powerful tool as well there is so much more to explore inside this creative section uh but we'll leave it maybe just with one more um what we could do is place the sun center for sun rays and this is really cool tool we could just have that popping up over the edge of this mountain here and just reduce the amount right down so it's something believable if portraits are your thing luminar ai has got you absolutely covered so if we come back to the catalog select a portrait folder and open one of these up where we can see our model's face we can click to zoom in we can come to our templates and use my basic enhanced template realize when we've zoomed in that i've totally missed my focus and turn on the sharpening so from our before to our after that's helped save me a little bit but now let's jump into the portrait section and see what the ai can do here we jump into face ai you can see that we could brighten the face up if we want to we can slim the face if we wanted to now personally i'm not a fan of changing the geometry of people's faces and bodies too much but just so you know those options are there inside of the eyes tab you've got all manner of options for improving the look so if i just grab the eye enhancer and crank that all the way to 100 you can see that that's a pretty strong effect but if i turn that off and on you can certainly notice what it's doing and now you can dial that back to a point where you feel it's a little more natural and believable but it's given her eyes a little bit more pop as you can see you can work with circles under her eyes you can change the look of her mouth the color redness of her lips if you want to all these things done with sliders and zero masking on your part so the software is doing the hard work and the boring tasks so that you don't have to skin ai is a really great tool just for helping us to smooth skin but without losing all the detail in the pores we don't hear but if you had a direct light source on the model's face you can actually remove the shine and you can also click the skin defects removal as well which will help remove any blemishes as well if we double click we can zoom back out and we can come to body ai and you can actually change the body shape of your model if you want to but again i really recommend doing this with a lot of caution and consideration before you go diving in changing how people look if you want to brighten and give your portrait a little bit of a boost the high key option is here and you can brighten it up like that now if we dive into the pro section i just like to say don't be afraid of this the fact that it's called professional it could equally be called miscellaneous or other i don't think there's anything harder or more difficult about these tools than in any of the other sections it's almost as if they didn't quite fit neatly within the other sections but anyway let's have a look at optics now this is really important if you turn on auto distortion corrections and remove chromatic aberrations without going into too much detail about this it may not look like too much has happened but basically the auto distortion correction is going to analyze what lens was on your camera when a photo was taken and any distortion through the glass optics of that lens is going to be corrected and also any slight fringing that you may experience when you zoom right in if your lens quality isn't that great and even quality lenses still come into this problem they might get a purple green kind of fringe around them that is all sorted out dodge and burn is really great tool if you're wanting to lighten or darken areas of your photo so we could lighten up this bit of her hair for example we could darken down this part of her dress if we wanted to so that option is there as well so before and after to work with dodge and burn and do it well does take a little bit of practice but it's something that is worth learning if you want to take your photos to the next level because you're really able to guide the viewer's eye around the brighter and darker parts of an image if you've come over from photoshop you'll know all about clone and stamp but if you're new to it let me just explain it to you here the clone and stamp tool basically lets you sample one area of a photo and paint it over another so for example this clamp that we've got here that was just helping to tighten the dress on her it wasn't actually her clothing so we tightened that the back which for the most part in the shoot we didn't see but in this shot we did so let's see can we paint this out let's click here you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to decrease or increase the size of the brush and you can see that we're taking from one part of the image and painting to another so just as a much more dramatic example what i can do is hold the alt key or option on mac click on her face and that's saying we're going to sample from the pixels on her face and now i could if i want paint another sammy over here and that tool is usually used for cleaning up imperfections in your photo but you can get more creative with it if you want if at any point you've done something in your photo or your editing process that you don't really like you have the option not just to undo the very last thing but to come into a whole history list of the changes you've made so in this photograph all i've done was apply a template and then did that clone and stamp so what i can do is just jump back to before i made those clone and stamp adjustments if i wanted to go all the way back to the original image i can do that too the more edits you make the bigger this list is going to be and the great thing is you can just jump back in time if you feel like you've gone in the wrong direction or made a mistake you can just come down to this right hand icon here the history tab open that up and just click anywhere in the history to jump back to where you were the last tool for editing i want to show you is the local masking tool and this is really powerful if we click this we're now able to add either a basic adjustment mask or a texture to our photograph if we click on the basic adjustment that will let us make changes to the image so for example let's increase the contrast here brighten things up just a smidge maybe reduce the highlights and boost the warmth slightly as well and now currently that effect is applied to the whole image but as the name implies the idea of this is that we can mask this in so in the same way that we used the paint brush earlier to paint it in we can either paint in the effect like this and you can see that the photo returned to its original state but when i let go of this brush we will have introduced that effect at 49 if we wanted to introduce the full effect of it we can crank that up to 100 and let's paint that over her face at 100 so now our model has a nice bit of pop a nice bit of contrast and if we toggle that effect off and on you can see exactly what we've done for the sake of demonstration i'm just going to do a couple of strong edits to this picture if i jump to the creative section i can introduce a mood which is like a coloring effect and if you scroll the mouse over these effects you can see in real time what that look is going to be like on your particular photo so let's go for baker's field in this example and let's also throw a whole heap of mystical effect on this and i'm being quite heavy-handed with my edit purely so that i can show you how the before and after tools work so this eye icon up here if we click and hold that you can see this is our original photo if we release it you can see the after and that's a really nice way to see exactly where you came from and where you've got to and sometimes by doing that that's when you're able to say you know what i like the effect but i think i've gone too far with it and you can come down to this little slider here and as i showed you before just reduce that effect so that you're getting the look you're after but without that high intensity there's one more alternative to that before and after which is this slider here and that's a really nice way to look at your before and after as well and to get back and get rid of that we just click that icon again and once you're happy with your edit and you're ready to share it with the world that's when we export the photo so now we come to this section here click export once we've clicked export we've got a couple of options here we can send out via mail upload to 500 pics but probably the most powerful and useful option is this one highlighted here which is save photo to disk so within this dialog box you've got the location which refers to where on your computer you're going to save the photo so you're able to click browse and navigate to a specific folder your file name speaks for itself call it something meaningful and appropriate and now you can export your photo using these settings if you want to and you're going to create a jpeg file that is based on exactly the same size as the original photo so let me quickly go over these options for you it may look scary if you've not seen stuff like this before but it's really easy the format being jpeg just means that it's the most universally readable and acceptable file so that's a great option to go with if you want to sharpen your photograph on export you can you could put that somewhere around medium but i prefer to sharpen my photograph before i export it if you're uploading your photograph online you'll probably want to resize your photograph to something smaller and for the specifics for different social media platforms just look those up online they're readily available unless you have a specific reason to do so leave the color spacer srgb that's the most universally red color space so keep it at that if you're sending your photos off to print 300 is probably the most useful resolution 300 pixels per inch but if the photo is staying online staying as a digital format you don't need to worry about that at all in terms of quality 80 is a really good compromise between file size and quality and when you're done hit export and away it goes now this is one area where luminar does take a little longer than some programs because all of those changes that we made with those tools a lot of them are ai driven there's a lot of processing that goes into that so if you're exporting a lot of photographs i'd suggest that's the time to take a stretch break and go and make yourself a nice drink so without diving into more detail than that guys that's a really brief overview of luminar ai that hopefully will get you up and running if you found this video useful do me a favor give me a thumbs up means the world to me if you've got any questions or you'd like further clarifications about anything we've talked about please leave me a comment below and remember if you don't have a copy of luminar ai yet you can use my discount code of at sky10 with the link below thanks so much for watching guys and i will see you in a future video bye for now you

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 79,725

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, Luminar AI, Luminar, Quickstart, Getting started, artificial intelligence, best photo editor

Id: yWM7nNL7IHQ

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020