Luminar 4 with Jeff Carlson

hi everyone I'm Mercedes from rocky nook thank you so much for joining us today we're here today with Jeff Carlson his book on lumen r4 is just releasing now the e-book is available now on our website and the print book is coming soon so Jeff is going to go around luminar today give us a little preview of that tell you about what you can find in the book and also is going to offer you a special discount on the loom in our book today so without further ado you came here to see Jeff so I will turn it over to him and we will take your questions at the end so go ahead and submit your questions at any time and then at the end we will ask Jeff whatever questions you have so Jeff good morning thanks for joining us good morning how is everybody I can only speak for me but I'm good we're all excited to see what you have to say well thank you thank you so as Mercedes said thank you Mercedes uh you know the the book is out now and if if you know who I am I've written a lot of books and I have to say and I know this sounds like a total salesy thing but like this is one of the one of my most favorite projects I worked on partially because luminar is fairly new it's exciting it has some different approaches that it takes to photo editing but also like and hopefully this comes through when you read the book when I was writing it like I had fun writing it I actually had a reader ask me they're like so what did sky ylim say about some of the things that you criticize them about and um yeah it's like well you know like everything was constructive criticism and I think that you know they will know what I'm talking about and their there are some areas that are you know not as strong as others and there are other areas that we'll talk about today that are just really strong and do things that other photo app photo editing applications don't do so with that what what I want to do today is just basically give a quick introduction to what luminar is you can go to sky limbs website and you'll see a lot of their tutorials and and their marketing materials like you'll get a really good idea there you can download a you know a like a 30 day trial version I believe it's 30 days and [Applause] it's it's a really interesting alternative to the big guns to Lightroom to photoshop and so that that was really one of the reasons why we decided to do a book on it why rocky note came to me and we were like what should we what should we cover because part of this story is Adobe we have to include Adobe because you know several years ago they went with a subscription model and the subscription model you know you're paying monthly to use their programs and you know I'll be straightforward I have a Creative Cloud subscription because I write about Lightroom and Photoshop and all of that too but for a lot of people like they just didn't want to do that and that's totally fine and so because of that we saw this this great explosion of like like a smaller photo ecosystem of apps a lot on the Mac there have been you know several under windows for a long time and it just gave oxygen to all these these other developers who you know had this opportunity to say look we can do a lot of this we can you know be as good or better at photo editing and we can you know charge you know a flat fee for it so someone can just buy it and not have to do the recurring subscription and at the time I thought that was just going to be something that you know people would get upset about the subscription and then it would kind of go away and it really hasn't and so you know one of the reasons why we're here is because there's this opportunity for a company likes caelum to really you know push hard and say alright we're gonna be a you know a big alternative to the big guns and not only that we're gonna do it in our own way and that's one of the things that I like about luminar so you're showing is just a small little thumbnail right now you have your screen share on already but I think it's making you appear a little bit minimized yes that's that's a problem how about let's switch and actually bring up luminary now everything looks right thanks Jeff there we go thank you I'm just this tiny little tiny person in this big machine so so luminar is as I said it's a photo editor and everything is all encapsulated into this one window it runs on the Mac it runs under Windows and if you are familiar with say Photoshop you will notice a distinct lack of floating things I almost said a word that I probably shouldn't say on a public webinar you know you don't have floating palettes you don't have long legacy controls you don't have like six ways to do one thing so for somebody who is is not you know experienced with photo editing luminar is perfect you can jump right in you can do a lot of you know basic adjustments very obvious things that you don't have to like puzzle through but at the same time if you are experienced with photo editing you can also be able to you know dig deep into some of the more advanced features so what we're going to do here after I turn on my Do Not Disturb because I forgot to do that a couple of things that I want to say me yes it edits photos and we'll cover that there's also a library married to it and this is one of the one of the areas where luminar is not as strong as some other programs it's not a full digital asset manager currently it doesn't have keywords and text search those are things that are going to be added later in this year but what I want to focus on here is if you want to have a photo library or let's say you want to build a bunch of like like you have a project like you just did a photo shoot and you have all these photos that you need to do something with you can load them into the library and what I like about this is it's it's all right there for you you don't have to if you remember older versions and in some applications like you have to open each file individually and you you know you headed it and then you have to figure out okay where am I going to say but am I going to save it as a PSD file am I gonna export it as a JPEG and like everything is nice and central and you know in in my history of working I love that I've written about you know taking control of your digital photos and and just you know not having to deal with that layer is is is a great convenience so that's one option it also works really well as a plugin love your you know the everything that you're that you're bringing into is in one central location well you can really like the way luminar does it so you can basically excuse me you and I can't remember where yeah because I don't have it open here there is a way they can basically say edit this in luminar and lumen art just appears in your photos window and you get all of luminar like you don't have to run it as a separate application you have all the controls all the interface and you make your edits and when you're done and you click this to the Save button to save the edits that saved version is still right there in your photos library and it's all non-destructive so if you decide you know what I really don't like the direction that I took that or I you know I made it black and white but I can I'd want to go back to the original you can just revert back to that original you're not you're not giving up anything another great thing about this this approach is if you look here on my my luminar library here you'll see that I have different folders on my hard drive that are the source for some of the images here but I also have like luminar Nass and luminar external SSD these are folders that I created on a network attacks attached storage and I also have a an external drive and luminar is really great about not getting confused about where things are if the photos are not currently connected like on this luminar external SSD that's okay you know you won't be able to edit them but it's not like it's completely forgotten where they are which is something that you know photos has not been great about in the past and other applications you know if it's not connected it doesn't exist and that's that's not helpful at all you can also store your images on a you know a Dropbox folder or Google Drive folder so you're taking advantage of being able to have network backups of of the you know cloud backups of those things okay so this is all you know sort of infrastructure why I like luminaires approach oh one more thing let's say you do have one image that you want to bring in and you don't want to deal with the library you don't want to deal with folders or anything like that there is the ability to just edit single image and it brings that in and so you do have that sort of one-off flexibility so you know even though lumen ARS library is not as robust as other things it does a lot and I don't think people give it credit enough for that so I'll leave that right there mm-hmm excuse me now let's talk about what makes lumen are different obviously let's take this picture right here if we we've opened this pic this photo here we're going to go to the Edit panel now they had a panel over here on the right and I'm hoping that that shows up just clearly yep you have basically like these these five categories of edits you have essentials you have creative edits you have portrait edits professional edits and then deprecated shows up occasionally if you have like an image that was open in a previous version of luminar and these are all just different tools that allow you to do you know you're you're editing your so for example like let's take a look at the light edit sorry the light tool you'll see you know there are sliders here for color temperature exposure contrast highlights shadows if you have done photo editing pretty much any photo editing in the past these are familiar but these are also things where you know you have to know what they do you have to know what highlights does you have to you know get an idea of okay well exposure for example exposure will sort of blast light everywhere maybe you don't want that maybe you just want to you know adjust the whites or maybe you want to adjust a tone curve so all of that is there and that's great but let's take a step back and say okay what if you either don't know how to do all that or aren't as familiar with it what if you don't really want to you know go super deep on an image I mean this image here that I shot hopefully it's coming through on the webinar it's dark it's definitely underexposed I deliberately shot it this way because I didn't want the sky to completely blow out to white and because I shot this in RAW I knew that I would have some flexibility with that luminar reads RAW files and one nice aspect of it is that unlike say Photoshop Photoshop has to open a raw file and then develop it and then sort of create a version that you can then edit and luminar is smart enough to just say look I know how to redraw images and we're just gonna edit it straightaway so I have this image I want to do something with it I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time on it maybe I'm in a hurry maybe I just shot this and I want to you know post it to Instagram and say wow look at this this amazing scene that I found this is where a lot of sky limbs work over the past couple of years kicks in so one nice thing about luminar is it's got a lot of AI machine learning artificial intelligence underpinnings they've done a lot of work to basically have the application say okay I can recognize things in this scene or I can recognize that oh this looks like a landscape image it looks like there's probably a sky there it looks like there's a foreground and a background all sorts of these these computations that help the application know what it's working with so for example let's go with AI enhance a i enhance is like the one-stop make better slider okay right now we've done nothing to this image and I just want to make it better and all I have to do is go to AI accent and just drag here and you know I'm gonna crank this up a little little high and see what happens now there are a lot of other programs that have like an auto button or maybe they have you know something similar and in the past there have been some where like you click auto you don't really know what you're getting or maybe you'll you'll click auto you'll be like okay well that's kind of a good direction this AI accent like boom this is a perfectly good you know I would print this and put it on my wall kind of image and that took me what 15 seconds probably longer because I was talking about it if I wanted to enhance the sky now in this particular image I don't know if it's gonna do a whole lot but what's important is that the the software knows that that's a sky and so when I click that yeah actually it kind of makes a little more dramatic these were all colors that were already there in the image in the sky I haven't you know added any purple I haven't done anything like that this is just you know what was there in the file and luminar has been able to pull that out just with those two little sliders and you know for a lot of people especially like like let's say you are using photos or using Lightroom classic or something like that you know maybe you don't want to go into all of the the different tools well throw it into lumen are using the the photos extension in photos hit AI accent and there you go you've got a great picture so what else the things like like AI structure if you're familiar with the the clarity slider in other programs it can get really crunchy right like like it it kind of boost the contrast boost some of the local contrast and you know the the AI structure it it sees different things this particular example isn't great for AI structure because one of the the really great things about AI structure is if you have a person in this picture when you would apply clarity to it an image that had a person in it well clarity and people don't really go well together you you get all the accent on like every wrinkle and shadow and you know like the background might look great it's you know nice and crisp and and dramatic and the person front just looks like they got you know run through a really bad filter or something ai structure is great because the software knows part part of that the AI knows that oh there's a person there and I can see where their head is and I can kind of tell where the shoulders are and so it'll apply the structure to the background without you know totally destroying the person in the front and that sort of leads to another thing that I want to mention briefly when you have this this AI stuff going on traditionally you would have to be the one who defines different areas so in in this picture I know we're sort of sticking on this example for a little while but it's sort of a nice easy block like in other applications you might want to do something to the sky and so you'd have to either mask out the sky you have to you know create a mask for that or maybe make like a gradient mask that would apply an edit just to that area but with the AI it just knows where that is and it does it so it saves you a lot of time which is also nice okay let's go to another another example here here is a portrait now you may be a portrait photographer you may not be a portrait photographer but you probably take pictures of people excuse me and you know family pictures I think it's probably safe to say that you always want a flattering version of people now if you have dabbled with some other sort of portrait specific applications or tools there are some that can really go crazy like like you can make somebody look plastic you know you're like oh I'm gonna smooth the skin or you know if if you want to do it in a more traditional manner you go to Photoshop and you build a whole bunch of layers and you blur a later and you paint through some others and you know it's oh my it it's an ordeal let me just tell you that so let's walk through how this works okay in this case I'm going to do just a little bit of manual tweaks here to make this picture better this is my friend Rob and again as you can tell I underexposed this I tend to underexpose more often I think mostly because I'm a little gun-shy about you know blowing out highlights and partially because I find that I'm a photographer who who knows what can be done later so although yes I should absolutely you know try to get it right in camera every time there are some times when I know that okay this if I you know if I lower my shutter speed or you know provide more exposure at the time I will you know maybe make it too bright and so I know what I can do afterwards so in this case I'm just going to I'm looking at some notes here I'm going to sort of drop the highlights here I'm going to increase the shadows we're going to just bring him basically make him look a little a little more a little better exposed and these are in the the essential light edits now let's go to the portrait tools portrait tools again these are AI based and so they know that there's a person in this photo and not just that there's a person they know that this this is a person and you can see his eyes you can tell where his nose is his lips as teeth you know it knows what it's looking at and based on that it can do a lot of edits that normally you would have to mask on and actually in the the most recent version luminar 4.2 they did a lot of under the hood work with the AI for portraits and you know what I'm doing here could also be applied to a picture that had like you know three people four people you could have somebody who's sort of like their their head is slightly turned away and it would still be able to know what you're doing all right so let's let's blast through some of these these edits real quick the AI skin enhancer this is basically like the let's make somebody's skin a little bit better okay again hopefully the the detail is coming through here on the webinar you can see you know he has perfectly fine skin a little bit of aging a little bit of weathering that's you know like character right so we don't want to get rid of the character but we want to make it a little more flattering so I'm just gonna drag this skin enhancer up a bit alright now a couple things to notice and I'm just gonna do it before and after right so this is this is before all of the edits but you can still tell with the with the skin smoothing actually I can turn it off here so this is before this is after now he looks a little better it's a little more pleasing a little more flattering but super important here you notice that he still has texture he still has wrinkles we're not trying to get rid of all of his wrinkles if you did want to do that you could probably use like the there's a clone and stamp tool there's an erase tool you know in in some pictures you do want to get rid of specific things and you definitely have the ability to do that but let me also point out look at his mustache and his beard okay the AI knows that that's facial hair and it knows that if you're gonna smooth things you don't want to smooth the facial hair into this you know sort of gray brown smear because that's like the first indication that oh this has been touched up right so yeah I find myself using AI skin enhance or even just a little bit when I'm doing portraits and also let me point out you know we're here at 81 I can crank this up to a hundred and you know he still looks human he's not you know this plasticized robot so you know it's it's useful but it also is realistic and that's that's another thing that I like about luminaires approach they're not trying to you know go overboard there are certainly applications where you know you can go super crazy and you know veer into the like oh well this is my artistic rendering of Rob think no no I just want a better picture of Rob now we're going to next jump to the AI portrait enhancer and this is where we can do more specific things face smoothing that's that's great oh I should probably also point out that you know the the skin enhancing hasn't affected anything else it hasn't affected his his shirt like like it knows where the face is now we can do other things like let's say we want to enhance his eyes eyes are the thing especially in portraits that we look at so I'm just gonna drag the eye enhancer up and what says what that's doing is it's adding a little bit of clarity a little bit of contrast just making his eyes pop a little bit more okay so there's a after there's before we're not you know giving him like super bright cat eyes which is something that you'll see actually you probably see in you know some of my old photos when I was trying to do it manually like oh that we really need to bring out the lightness of the eyes and then you look at it again you realize that no no no no no no no we need to stick with human human aspects of it let's say we want to get rid of some dark circles this is something that is you know we all have them and it's it's not smoothing them away it's just minimizing them and so what we've done here is just with those two things we've you know drawn more attention to his eyes I think I want to add a little bit of face light face light this I I probably use face light in all my portraits to some degree because you want to just bring a little bit of attention to the face and you don't want to increase the exposure which you know increases everything or you may not want to increase like the whites value under the light tool because again that it's not very targeted but here luminar knows where the face is let's see I think we're going to improve his eyebrows just a little bit not sure how best to express this other than you know luminar is okay this is my theory I've not actually spoken to Scylla more the developers about this this is this is my inference but you know one of the things about portrait editing like fashion you know is just that aspect of okay how much do you added somebody how much do you retouch before you know we're getting into you know unrealistic portrayals of people and you know like like there's that whole realm and with luminar I appreciate the fact that you know the approach here is we're gonna make things a little bit better we're gonna make it really easy for you to do this and we're not going to go completely overboard one example I'm going to show here this photo isn't a good example but there's this slim face 2.0 and what this does is this you know as it says it Slim's his face and you're like whoa hey hang on like he was given that that that head structure for a reason you know however where this comes into play is if you have shot a portrait of somebody and let's say you're using a wider than usual lens or maybe they're close to the camera and you get that that distortion that's just from the lens where you know their heads just gonna look a little bit bigger well use a tool like that that can compensate for that and not you know make it look really out of out of order one other thing I want to point out here which drives me crazy there's this spot got this little spot on the back of my that my backdrop there or maybe it was a bit of dust I can easily go into my canvas tools go to the erase tool and just touch that out and the way luminar does this is a little bit tricky and this is something that that I cover in my book when it uses the erase tool or the clone and stamp tool it actually makes a copy of the image and puts it on a new layer so if you're gonna do any erasing you want to do that sort of in in your last step and when I click erase that spot is gone and at least the first time I started working on this this image like that spot just really drove me crazy so here we have an edited finished there are you know of course other things that I could do perhaps I want to you know it increased the the shadow side of his of his his face you know like there's always more that you can do but compared to the original like that's a pretty good that's a pretty good job and you know it took us what six minutes seven minutes now speaking of time let's say we have a bunch of photos that you shot during like a photo session and here I'm just gonna throw some edits on here some AI edits increase the face light let's you know enhance their eyes quite a bit pretend that she has dark circles that sort of thing lip session okay and I'm I'm you know doing this quickly and probably exaggerating these just because we can so we can show a difference okay I've edited my shot and like hey I really like the way that turned out now I have a whole bunch of other images if I go back to the library oops if I go back to the grid excuse me I have all these other images shot from the same session and I could go and laborious Li you know make those edits on each one but of course we don't have to do that because we live in the modern age so what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to select all of those and I'm going to go to image and adjustments and sync adjustments now you've probably seen this in other applications you can copy and paste adjustments to different different images but one thing I want to point out here is the the images that sorry the edits that we just did were all portrait edits and so the AI is looking at faces and it's looking for lips okay for example like like like adding color and contrast to the lips well in these pictures you know her her lips are not in the same place right so if you wanted to you know do this manually you would have to you know possibly mask those lips or you know maybe do a layer that was only looking for red tones you know basically more laborious things and here the AI says okay well no I know that I need to increase the the eye enhancer and so I'm gonna find the eyes and apply that to that section or I'm gonna increase the face light well it would be really easy to just sort of copy and paste a mask from from one layer to another one image to another but you know that might mean that the the face light you know is like shifted off to the side and then you'd have to move it over just you know lots of little things where you you get to actually take advantage of the fact that the app is smart enough and that the app can do things that you don't have to deal with which i think is is pretty great okay so we've we've done that let me really quickly I want to show this this feature and I know that I have some friends from Sky l'm here hello everybody I want to talk about AI sky replacement now believe me rolled my eyes pretty hard when this first came out because I was like ah like I've done a lot of landscape photography and part of that is like you go to a sunset or you get up really early for a sunrise and you shoot what's there and some days it's great some days you get really lucky and the clouds and the Sun and everything just works just right and those those are the pictures that you take home and you you make prints of and you sell prints and what have you and some days it doesn't quite work and that's okay and so there's like like that little purist in me that's like like oh well that's not the way it was on the day so I can't just replace a sky like that would be that would be dishonest right okay well I need to sort of you know get off my high horse for a minute and realize that okay we are engaged in a creative art form so let's take this this picture as an example I like this picture I really like the way that the light is hitting the the water down like the wave down the lower left the sky there was there's really no sky like it was a beautiful clear blue sky which for photographers tends to be boring so maybe I want to improve this right for for creative means or maybe I'm a real-estate photographer and I'm shooting a house or a building and you know it doesn't really matter what the sky was at the time you want to make a pleasing image that somebody is gonna look at that and say oh I want to buy that place that place looks great and or you know maybe you do come to a day like this and you got skunked by the sky you had a really great time it's always great to get out and shoot landscape photography but it just wasn't what you were expecting and so you know maybe you were there at another time they had a really great sky and you want to put that in so here's how this works and again I know I'm banging on about the AI stuff but it really is stuff that differential it's luminar from a lot of the others so we want to replace this guy in the AI sky replacement tool there are a bunch of skies that are just built in and I'm gonna do dramatic sky number two now that's all I did okay I just picked that that is pretty darn good you'll notice that you know you don't have like really weird haloing behind this lighthouse the color is coming through the glass here you know I didn't have to make a mask to separate the rocks or maybe you know paste the image in as a separate layer and then you know erase the masking and all that like like there's so much that I did not have to do it almost seems too easy now there's kind of the danger here in that now the light doesn't really match the light in the photo so you have to make sure that you're you're picking images that match the same direction of light as for your for your sky that matches the rest of the image otherwise you know it looks really I mean I could do something like this and you'd be like oh wow look at that that looks not realistic at all but then again hey I'm being creative maybe I want to do that but in this case here's a here's a a sky that's pretty you know it's I don't want to say it's easy because there's still a lot of a lot of this this outcropping and the building there but you know this guy was clear the app kind of had it easy to figure out where this guy was and put a replacement in so let's throw this at it now this is a picture that I have done the sky replacement for this manually and it was a bear because yes we know where the sky is but the computer may not recognize like like look at all these slats like all these different areas behind it you know it would probably require us to do a lot of hand-drawn masking different layers blah blah blah blah all right in this case I'm gonna load my own sky image let's see what happens okay that is pretty darn impressive right so we're gonna ignore the fact that the Sun actually doesn't rise from that direction because you know we're we're being dramatic here but it's done a really good job of figuring out okay yeah yes these these slats this this Arbor is blocking the sky but the AI has figured out where this guy is I mean you know for example like look at this tree like little spindly branches can you imagine doing that by hand no no you can't you can but don't now it's not perfect if you notice up here there some of these slats right here have have have been ignored because the the software wasn't exactly sure what to do about that well we have settings that can fix that so we can push this up a bit now just this one slider sky global is is basically just telling it to reevaluate the scene and figure out if there's any areas where it should be pushed in oh but if we look over here it's kind of you know decided well maybe this post right here is part of the sky too so we can close gaps and deal with that now there's definitely like a bit of touch-and-go in terms of finding the right balance like here we lost a little bit of detail on the top here but it's still the same color and it's you know kind of amorphous and cloudy so that doesn't really bother me a whole lot we can also do we can relight the scene because obviously we've introduced a color that wasn't there in the first place so if I rewrite the scene then it becomes more uniform okay so you know I have to give them credit I did roll my eyes pretty hard and then I started using it and like I was sold I was very happy about it we are getting almost close to the Q&A time but I want to show just another example or two this picture right here now I've talked so far I've talked about the AI stuff and it's great there are also like lots of other tools like like lots of these other creative tools you can add sun rays that can be really terrible but you can also make them look really good you know and there are there are things like you can add glow and film grain and there's there's you know a lot of different possibilities here but let's go back when I'm just slightly on my high horse and I'm looking at this picture here I love this picture but it's a little green it's a little blue and quite honestly that so this is at a little town called Leavenworth in Washington beautiful beautiful place amazing in the fall and the weekend that we were able to go up like the trees weren't quite there yet like they were starting but I really wanted that like that like fall color and in some areas I got it this this here like it's the the trees are just starting right well there are controls and tools in luminar that really let you go deep into being able to edit something like this I like to say that that luminar is deceptively deep so all the stuff i've shown you so far is stuff you can do really quickly but if you want to sit down and really you know dig into cific hughes or you want to you know just like do real targeted color it can absolutely do that too and the way I'm going to show that is sort of backwards there's this feature called luminar looks and looks are like you know presets sort of and if you'll notice little sales pitch here this is a set called rocky nook looks that you can download from Scylla m-- for free and add to luminar it also comes with some skies and some textures the the link to that is in the back of the book and what these do is these let you you know apply different looks this is one that I created called Leavenworth fall based on how I edited this image alright now that's more of what I had in mind now to be honest that's a little bit too much it's a little too saturated for my taste maybe it was like really late or I'd had too much coffee when I was first editing it and so I can just I can bring back that looks amount and sort of get it to where I want it to be so hey you're like oh okay well great it makes orange things more orange and yellow things more yellow whatever but let's go over and look at our tools you'll see all these tools here are now lit up and that's because when you apply a look it's not just sort of stamping you know an edited version on top it's moving all those sliders so for example I can go into color here I can go to advanced settings and I can see that oh okay so the oranges you know I've I've dropped the hue to make them a little more orange I boosted the luminance and I can say you know I think it's a little bit too much so I can just come in and adjust those manually and this will give you an idea of you know the type of you know not finicky details but you know if if you want to have a lot of control and you want to you know touch up really specific things like all of that is there in luminar as well and even though I've sort of been deprecating about you know layers and masks those absolutely have their place and luminar does that too in fact you can have a mask for every tool if you want or you could you know apply a tool and you say you know what like for whatever reason that is not it doesn't give the punch that I wanted so you can create a new layer and apply that tool again sort of double up on it if you want so there's there's there's just a lot here that you can work with without you know feeling like like oh like it only does AI stuff and so you know it's it's only for beginners it's like well if you really know what you're doing or if you read my book and you learn where you'd what doing because the book covers all the tools lots of different you know techniques there are several walkthroughs etc part of it is to help you understand okay like like why is it doing this why would you use you know remove color cast for example then you can you can dig into those types of things let me make sure that I have mine covered here yeah oh okay one last thing and then I promise we'll jump to questions to sort of add on to that okay here's a picture of my wife at that same sunflower field and this was actually this is a completely different day but this was a situation where you know the sunflowers were out the Sun was going down we were driving by and we're like oh let's let's jump out and get some pictures right this I I love this picture like like the look on her face is is that that sort of thoughtful yet come on Jeff are you done taking the picture yet that I'm sure some of you have seen many times but what I want to show about this is this is not where where it began this is the the end of the edit this is where we started this is not a very good picture this is really underexposed because again I wanted to you know not blow out the sky if you can tell I'm gonna do the sort of split you know that the skin on her neck is a little bit flushed because it was it was hot that's something that I you know went in and corrected for so I included this image in the book and and there's a walkthrough of how I edited this specifically because not necessarily because it's you know the best image I've ever taken but it's an image that I like that I wanted to make better that I think you know in other circumstances I'd look at and go and that's not really salvageable and with luminar it absolutely was so I think that is what I have for right now Mercedes do we have questions running right against the the edge here but we can stay as long as you okay so when you're ready you let me know I have I have a good amount of questions for you okay ready if anyone else has more questions go ahead and submit them now in the chat and we'll see if we can get to them before I get to the questions though I want to let you know this just came in to us and I think it's really exciting for everyone to know about which is if if you are going to buy a luminar for or if you are going to upgrade lumen are three two lumen are four we have a special 20% off coupon code that you can use for that and that code is rocky 20 so you you can't buy luminar from rocky no if you have to buy luminar from sky lung but if you go there to either upgrade lumen or three or by luminaire four apply the code rocky 20 and check out and you will save 20% so I thought that was really cool for Sky limb to do it for us and everyone in this webinar so I want to make sure everyone knows that and we'll include that also in our email that goes out to you tomorrow with the replay link so that's another thing I want to mention some people a couple people had technical glitches during this um so if you had a problem watching the webinar you'll get a replay link tomorrow so you can watch it again at your convenience excellent yeah so now with that kind of the bookkeeping out of the way I'll get to so what raw versions can luminar read that is a very good question that I do not have on the off the top of my head I believe as a 4.2 anything that's on the market right now it can read I know that there was some lag with some like like newer Canon models but I think that was the case with all photo developers that the the crazy and I'm gonna say the stupid thing about raw is that all the camera manufacturers have their own flavors and they change them for every single model and so all the software developers have to update based on those those new definitions basically and sometimes they share them and sometimes they don't in a timely fashion they being the camera manufacturers so I believe that anything on the market right now is supported but I know that that if you go to the sky limbs website they do have a page or that they did have a page that basically breaks down that compatibility what updates are you really excited about in Oh like like updates coming up you think or don't know just something I think the question they weren't too specific but I think it was between one or three and Luminara for what updates came oh yeah Oh from three to four was actually like a really big jump so it has some AI features you probably know that I've been mentioning over and over again the AI stuff is really good so that's that's been nice if you currently have three one of the things I really like about four is just you know like it has performance improvements and it has you know things like AI sky replacement there's there's a brand new one that came out with 4.2 called AI sky augmentation I think I'm saying that wrong that's sorry AI augmented sky which lets you do you know even more sort of creative things so that's that's cool but like going from three to four Scylla really did a lot of work sort of cleaning things out before in in version 3 you had sort of filters for everything and it was it was innovative in that you could sort of pick and choose which things you wanted and put them into workspaces that you know really were tailored to the types of photos you wanted to do like like if you never shoot portraits you don't need any of the portrait tools but there was also a lot of redundancy like you know there were like three different ways that you could use you know a change contrast for example and so you know putting everything into this this single side bar and just centralizing a lot of stuff it just makes it it's hard to express like like like it's a breath of fresh air you know you you don't have to like spend ten percent of your brain going all right now where was that thing do I have the right thing loaded like everything is consistent it's where it's at I'll also point out that the erase tool in I want to say version 4.1 was dramatically improved before it was OK in fact I can even do like a really quick example of this this pick sure right here when i zoom in there was this little bit of you know I guess that's like little tree leaves or something that was on her her hat this was Quebec in there you know this is like a really highly textured surface and quite honestly I threw the erase tool at it just to see what would happen and you know it it did this fantastic job so you know for for correcting things like that for you know getting rid of of dust spots you know I would like to say that I you know shoot everything super clean and then I go and I find an example of something you know to use for an article or for the book and you know I increase the contrast and I see that oh my like my lens was filthy and I have to you know pick out all the different spots that are up in the sky you know it makes it makes it really really easy if if they were talking about like like like stuff that's that's up coming after the current version features that are that are upcoming there there are going to be improvements to the library module and that's going to be something that that sky ylim has said will come to versions three and four because with version 3 like they're really pushed adding the library module because prior to that luminar was really just like a photo editor and they they you know we're really gung-ho on building a full digital asset manager and here I'm speaking for me not to them but I think anecdotally and looking at other companies like building a dam is hard and I have a feeling that you know they they they introduced the library module it does a lot of basic stuff but you now to do a full full digital asset manager is a lot of work and I'm guessing that there was some sort of internal calculation that said okay we could either you know build this out for X percentage of people who are going to really want it or we can put more resources into the editing engine and the AI and all that so and as far as other things I I don't know what they have I mean when when the book literally the week before the book went to press I found out about version 4.2 and the AiAi augmented sky feature and we were able to - you know sneak that in into the book before it went to press but you know they're working on stuff that that we don't know about I've I've been you know fortunate to be involved in betas and early releases you know talking with Scylla um but you know they've got a lot up their sleeves and that they're you know they like to surprise things so before I get to the next question I just want to comment a lot of people in the chat are asking if luminar Ford will work on their specific system and what the specific system requirements are I'm not gonna ask you those questions I don't know send you to Skylar's website where you can find all that information there but here's here's a question that you can't answer okay if if someone creates a custom look that includes an AI tool will that to adapt to whatever image they apply to look - yes which is one of the cool things about it so you know again like like doing the the syncing adjustments it's it's great about you know again knowing okay this is a sky this is a face you know those sorts of things so yeah yeah so one of the things that I mentioned in my book is that I was also like not so gung-ho on on looks not for any like specific reason of how they're implemented but just because like I've never really been like a preset person like I want to go in and I want to want to edit the way I want to edit I I don't want to just you know take something from somebody else and and and do their version of of my photo if that makes sense and the thing that that sort of opened my eyes was okay in in luminar the looks are basically automation so you know if you have a situation like I showed with the with the girl and and the the long photoshoot you know you you can sync those adjustments or you know you can basically build a look that does you know ninety percent of the things that you want for any portrait session or any you know landscape shot and then work from there so figuring out that that looks are are really automation and can make your life easier in addition to you know yeah maybe you want you know somebody else's look actually I should I should point out that when I go here and we for you are looks so sky ylim used to have a product called tonality which was basically for for doing black and white like like really sophisticated black and white photo editing and they they took all that and they turned them into a bunch of looks so you know I could say like I want to go to you know here and you know apply different you know black and white looks for example and that would give me you know certainly a look that someone else conceived of but then I can also go in and and edit those specific things too people are asking if if you're in the portrait mode can you work on one individual face can you apply portrait mode to all the faces can you talk a little bit more about that if there's more than one person in a portrait yeah yeah no that's a good so what it will do is it will apply the the portrait edits to everybody so let's say we have three people and yeah I don't have an example here three people and that will just apply the same settings to each person but what you could do is so you could do that and then create a new layer hide your previous layer so you can see what you're doing apply let's say a different portrait looks to like the person who's in the middle and then you could mask out the other two people for that layer so you know it's it doesn't have the ability to say okay I want to edit person 1 person 2 person 3 but once you know how layers and masks work you can basically sort of stack those different edits on top of each other great they only have a couple more for you here one question is can can can you sink luminar with Apple photos not really sink so so the the the mechanism that Apple photos uses is this this these editing extensions and this is kind of a workaround that that Apple has put in and partially that's like because images are sandboxed and Apple is specific on how apps work together and so you can't like like say you know in luminar show me all of my Apple photos images like that's not possible but you can start in photos and say I want to edit this image using luminaires tools that I want to you know do a sky replacement on on this or you know you use the portrait tools which which photos doesn't have and then basically like open that in lumen are within photos do your edits and then those then just get saved into your library great yeah so is there anything else about the book that that you want everyone to know that that you didn't touch on in this that you think is important yeah so um I guess you know again I sort of went crazy on the AI stuff partially because it's it's like really great to demo it's a lot of fun to like show like oh look you know here it is it's done but you know I also want to get across that that one of the goals of the book was not just you know here's how luminar does it but I tried wherever possible to sort of explain you know why you would want to do this or and you know how it's working like for example you know personally I think everybody should have a thorough understanding of the histogram and I know that a lot of people are like ah histogram a little like weird mountainy colory thing that makes no sense well if you understand histogram you're editing just that like like your ability to edit I think you know goes up 50% just understanding that and so you know I I devote several pages to how it works how luminar uses this to Graham and you know that that also translates to when you're shooting if you understand how that works you can shoot better photos too so things like that you know I've touched on layers and masks and you know those are definitely chapters to to become familiar with because like it can be complicated if you are just sort of like you know hey I'm just gonna throw a layer here or a mask or what's what's a stamp layer but you know once you grok how those things work together it opens up a whole lot of possib these and you can have many many layers and you can have you know a mask for a layer and you could also have like a tool that just has its own mask because you only want to like edit you know this one little aspect of color in this one little area of the image and then you know then you realize that oh well maybe like like this this picture here one of the reasons and not one of the reasons one of the ways that I runned her exposure was I created another mask and then used a lighten blend mode and so when you understand blend modes and how layers work like that does even more stuff that you can understand and so you know luminar has a lot in it that if you want to you know dig in you'll be richly rewarded if you don't totally great you can still make great images and you know edge your way in but I as much as I could in 256 pages to you know pack it with that sort of information that you know if you want to do something and you want to take it an extra level then you can do that chapter 9 it just talks about advanced things and a couple of things like for example if you're doing a sky replacement but you have like like water reflected it's not going to know that that's reflected water or then that the water is reflected sky and so you know with a little bit of creative layers and you know some transformations you can make that look like your replacement sky is reflected in that area so you know that kind of stuff great real quick I just want to remind everyone about that luminar deal I mentioned earlier so 20% off luminar for with the code rocky 20 just all one word no space and then also on Jeff's book on the photographer's guide to lumen are for you can say a forty percent off when you purchase it through rocky enough calm with the code lumen are forty so that will be in but I'll put both of those in the email that everyone's going to get tomorrow so tomorrow everyone's going to get everyone who registered for this webinar is going to get an email that includes a replay link so you can watch this again at your convenience and then the coupon code for the luminar book and also the coupon code for buying lumen are for if you wish to do so so I just want to say thank you to everyone for joining us Jeff one more thing I'll just ask you if you want to take a minute to anything you have coming up anything you want to promote or mention where can people find you on social yeah good and tell everyone that kind of stuff yeah yeah absolutely so Jeff Carlson calm I'm I got to it early enough that Jeff Carlson calm is mine and that's pretty much where you'll find you know links to articles I I write a lot for you know creative pro mackerel DP review all sorts of different outlets on Instagram I'm at Jeff Carlson so please come and and follow me and see some of the some of the images you know that I'm editing here some that show up in the book Twitter is also Jeff Carlson and Facebook of course it's Jeff L Carlson because Facebook you know but yeah other things that I'm working on I'm working on stuff for other publishers but because we're all friends here I recently came out with a book called take control of your digital photos which is all about organizing and so the take control publishers we've been friends with with rocky nook and Peach Pit and there's a long history there of good people working together and I'm currently up a book on the Apple watch so you know I'm freelance writer I do lots of things and a freelance writer and a photographer up until recently I led workshops will see when those get started again but yeah and also at Jeff Carlson comm sign up for my newsletter I promise it doesn't go out very often but it gives me a chance to you know interact with people rather than just sort of like you know hey is anybody out there so totally appreciate that great yeah thank you so much Jeff I a lot of people I just want to tell you a lot of people in the chat are saying that this was really helpful and it was really good the illumine are in this way so thank you for spending your afternoon with us and showing us around luminar to everyone who joined us in the chats today thank you so much for spending some time with us and checking this out and stay tuned for that email tomorrow with the replay and the coupon codes and hopefully we'll see you all again soon thank you Jeff thank you very much should should I stay here and and maybe try to skim through some of the comments and answer things quickly or should we just full question list okay yeah you want to get questions in a blog post or something we can do that too great thanks everyone all right thanks everybody I appreciate it thanks for taking the time

Channel: Rocky Nook

Views: 1,279

Keywords: Jeff Carlson, Rocky Nook, Free Webinar, Webinar, Luminar, Skylum, Luminar 4, Photography, Postprocessing

Id: TLtuG6AkhIo

Length: 72min 15sec (4335 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020