How To Use Local Masking in Luminar AI - Power Photo Editing Without Layers!

oh my god layers are gone from luminar what are we gonna do it's all over it's not it's not all over don't worry now while it is true that layers are gone from luminar ai the guys at skyline have provided us with another tool which is actually really similar to the way that layers worked in luminar 4 and that is the local masking feature super powerful and by implementing this approach rather than layers the development team have actually been able to speed up luminar ai considerably so it really is a win but it's really important also that you know how to use this feature so let's take a look at it in this video so in the last video we created this template which took this photo and turned it into a more vintage kind of feel we then applied that to a series of other photographs and while for the most part it works really nicely this photograph here just ran into a couple of problems but it's a really easy fix so if we come to the edit section here and just take a look at what's going on if we look at the light section here what i want to do is actually increase the exposure because i feel that the subject herself she's just getting a little bit lost and this is quite a dark kind of moody shot at the moment and i wanted much lighter brighter kind of feel to this so let's boost that up somewhere around that 1.35 i also wasn't quite convinced when we created that template of the use of film grain so if we want to get rid of that what we can actually do is just come back into the creative section come to film grain and just turn that off but for the sake of consistency with the template that we created before i'm going to leave a little bit of film grain on there and just reduce the amount but now what we need to do is actually fix up this sky because this is completely bleached out and where we could try and control that with the highlights within the light section and bring those a little further down it's not really recovering that much by doing that i propose a much much better way to deal with that is actually to come into this section here which is called local masking and that is going to let us actually speak directly into the sky and control that area predominantly that is the purpose of this local masking feature and that is to speak into individual areas of your photograph and make specific changes to those areas so what i'm going to do is look at the sky fix that up and then perhaps we can also look at increasing a bit of texture and detail in her dress here as well and if you're wondering how luminar ai is getting those kind of light leak effect on some of the portrait images you've seen where it's getting like color flares coming in that is also done through local masking so first things first let's come to this add section here and just click on basic now this is going to bring up a basic adjustment panel where we can control some really key elements such as exposure contrast the highlights in the shadows the ai structure and the color the saturation of that color and then the tools at the top here just refer to the brush that you're actually going to paint the effect in with or remove it so let's grab the highlight slider and just bring that to the left and straight away you can see we're reintroducing detail into the sky and we can also grab the exposure slider and bring that down as well if we're wanting to give the sky just a little bit more warmth because it's quite gray at the moment we can just grab that warmth slider and you know if you push it to the right you're adding a nice orangey tone if you push it to the left it's a bluey tone so we just want to introduce a little bit of warmth maybe around that sort of 16 mark that's nice and now to paint that in all we need to do is select our paint brush and just start painting and as we make brush strokes you can see that we're able to paint this in now if you feel like all this can take a while you can just increase the size of your brush either with the slider and increase the radius here or you can use your bracket keys on your keyboard and usually i like to have my left hand on my bracket keys and my right hand on my mouse and just paint that in and i'm currently painting at 50 opacity and that just allows you to build the effect up and you'll see that the brush itself has two circles the inner part of the circle represents the brush at its fullest intensity whatever that opacity may be set to and then between the inner circle and the outer circle that is a transition from that amount back through to zero so you get a soft transition through that area and if you feel you want to smooth that transition off a little better what you can do is just come to the eraser tool maybe drop the opacity slightly so the effect isn't too strong and increase it so we've got a nice soft brush and just ease that off that area there if you want to click and do that again you can do and now if we look at our before and after this is our before a very white bleached out sky no detail and we turn that on and all of a sudden we've got detail back in the sky and unlike doing a sky swap this is the genuine actual sky that was there when this photo was taken and now i said that these act a little bit like layers and they do what we can do is add another layer another local mask and that just pops out on top so if we want to make further changes we can do that so i said about the dress earlier if we add ai structure you can see that all of a sudden we get a lot more detail through in the dress that's far too much but we can reduce that amount perhaps maybe bring the shadows up slightly as well just so that the the ripples in the dress don't get too dark let's have a look at increasing the contrast maybe we'll tickle a little bit of that in and also bring the exposure up just just a smidge so we're having a nice bright white dress and so you can see how those changes have has affected the whole image but that's not really what you want and the point of these local masks is that you affect the image locally so we're going to reduce the size of our brush and we are now just going to paint that back in over the bride's veil and her dress and again we can build that effect up with a low opacity and just going over a couple of times and there we go let's turn that off and on and i'm sure our bride is going to be very happy with us because we brought more attention to her dress and also the details of that dress so that's how the basic panel works inside of local masking if you want to remove either of those effects you can just click on the cross icon there but rather than just applying local adjustments what you can also do is introduce additional imagery into your photo and that's where it's kind of like layering really so let's click the add button and we can add what's called a texture but it's basically any image you want to load in so you come to your load texture section here and from there you can navigate to where you hold your own textures or images whatever you want to load in and if you don't have a texture library i strongly recommend when you're walking around with your camera if you see some interesting textures and patterns and things just start collecting them in your own little library because you can start to get some really interesting effects by adding those into images you could do something quite subtle like this texture bell grade i click it and it's loaded in at 50 opacity let's put it all the way to 100 so you can see this is our texture and then what we can do through the advanced settings is just change the blending mode and so we can overlay that texture do soft light we can multiply there are really heaps of different options and if you're familiar with photoshop these won't be anything new to you so if we look at our before and after we've just added some texture in there you could add for instance a canvas texture when i've worked on fine art pieces for clients before i often add in textures to the background it just helps to enhance what might otherwise be set a plain wall or something but if you're wanting to composite elements into your photo you can do that here as well you simply add a new texture layer here so i'm calling it a layer it's not here a local mask but effectively a texture layer and then select what you want to composite in and just paint it in where you want it so let's look at our before and after before and after so in the original you can see that there is detail there in the sky but after we applied our template the vintage look that we wanted to put on there we lost all that detail in the sky and we had to bring that back and that's where local masking can come in we've brightened up her dress added some detail to that as well and purely for demonstration purposes i've thrown a texture over the top of this as well i don't actually want to put textures on this so i'm just going to quickly kill those i've decided that i think this is looking a little too cold so i'm just going to jump in and warm this temperature up slightly and i think i'm going to push the whites up slightly as well just so we get a little brighter image and there we go from this to this and i think that's a really nice image well hopefully you can see the layers excuse me local masking is super powerful in luminar ai and learning how to use it is a really valuable skill it's going to give you an extra layer of control over your image so you can take your photography to the next level thanks so much for watching everyone much love and i'll catch you in the next video cheers thanks so much for watching guys not catching and

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 9,315

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, Skylum, Luminar, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Luminar AI, Luminar 4, Layers, Local Masking, Local Masks, Textures

Id: kU564dZ7Lz8

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020