Luminar AI - Best Landscape Editing Plugin For Lightroom (and more)?!

i couldn't sleep the other morning got up early out of bed got in the car and went to my local beach and it was well worth it i was treated to a gorgeous morning beautiful sunrise and i came back with a bag full of photos and they're now sat inside of lightroom so in this video i'm going to share some tips on how i use lightroom to edit my landscape photos and i'll do a round trip at the end from lightroom to luminar to add the finishing touches and then back into lightroom so let's take a look you guys know i'm a big fan of luminar ai but my landscape photos always come into the lightroom first and the reason is i started building my lightroom catalogue a long time ago and if you look on the left hand side here i've got over 10 000 photos sat here in this catalog so that's where everything lives and often for my landscapes i will actually do my initial processing inside of lightroom let's have a look what we can do with this photo here this is part of a bracketed series of five so if i shift click on the end and press n you'll see that we have a mid exposure on the left there and then two darker too brighter and i do that out of habit from what's arisen from my professional work where i'm just making sure i'm always covering my bases and i'm ensuring i don't miss the exposure so this base exposure here this is pretty good and we could certainly work from that one but in actual fact the brighter exposure i think this is actually better even though it's slightly more overexposed by checking on the histogram here we can see that we have all of the detail we need we're not blowing out anywhere so i've got everything i need to work from and i'd sooner work with a slightly brighter file than a darker one so i'm just going to come into develop and i'm going to reset everything so i can start to build my edit from scratch on the left hand side here you'll see that i do have a lot of presets already built to deal with my landscapes i'm going to build this up from the start so you guys see what i do the first thing i will do is change the profile to a camera flat profile and the reason that i do that is that the camera matching profiles are going to give us much better color rendition from our particular camera model than the more generic adobe profile that's applied as standard the other thing you'll notice that initially you might think is to the detriment of the processing is everything becomes less contrasty when you apply a flat or neutral profile but that's actually beneficial because it gives us access to a greater dynamic range through that raw file incidentally you'll only see access to the profiles if you're working on a raw photo which is what i thoroughly recommend if you're doing photo editing you don't want to be working with jpegs you want to be working with raw wherever you can let's have a look at the color balance if we cool it down we can introduce more of those blues or we can warm things up but i was kind of happy where it was let's go for about 5700 we can introduce just a little bit more magenta i'll bring the exposure down slightly and we'll just bring back just a little bit of contrast now the footprints that were in this file really bugged me they are not my footprints there somebody else's they obviously didn't get the memo that i was going down to the beach nice and early to take these photos so i'm gonna have to deal with those i'm gonna use the healing brush tool and just heal those out absolutely we could use the clone tool if we wanted to and all we need to do is paint over one of the footprints and then just make sure we're cloning from an area of similar tone and similar color value but the reason i like to use the heel tool rather than the clone tool is because we can paint over one of these footprints and the heel tool is going to do a much better job of matching the sample area to where we're actually applying that to so i'm going to stick with the heel tool and just go over these footprints sometimes lightroom auto selects a good area to sample from but if you're not happy like i'm not happy to re-sample this shell here i'll just move it away to an area where i do want to sample from and talking of that shell let's just click on that once and remove it but the most parts with my landscapes when i'm working on an edit i'm considering what would this look like on somebody's wall if they were to blow this up to a meter wide or even bigger i'm always asking myself what do i want to remove what do i want to leave in and for the most part i'm always airing on the side of simplicity and less is more so hence the reason things like these little shells and certainly the footprints i am going to remove so now what i'm going to do is just speed up the video while i retouch these areas okay at a certain point you'll see that the footprints get small enough that they're barely even noticeable so once we get to that point i'm just going to leave them alone and i think we're about there now i know for a fact i haven't cleaned my sensor for some time and i can actually see sensor spots up here but if you want to see them more clearly just come down to this option here and turn on visualize spots and there you can see it looks like while my lens has been off my camera somebody's just sneezed right into the body and it looks awful and again if someone's getting this printed and blown up on their wall those dust spots are going to be so visible so i want to make sure i clean those up so i will do that but if cleaning dust spots off of your photos is something that you have to deal with regularly and you find it as tedious as i do you'll be pleased to know that luminar neo which is being released and is currently on pre-sale order they've actually building in an automatic feature which is going to use ai to identify where these dust spots are and actually automatically remove them so i'm really looking forward to seeing that so if that sounds like something that might be of interest to you check out the link below because they're currently selling it before it's released at a much discounted price so check out that link but for now i'm going to have to heal them out manually so i'm using my right bracket key just to increase the size of the healing brush just slightly and i'm just going to go through and just click on these it would have been so much better if i had just cleaned my sensor okay now we've got a nice clean file to work with let's press on as i grab the highlight slider and wiggle that around i can see that most of the highlights obviously exist in the sky so i'm just going to bring that down slightly i'll boost the shadows up they bring the whites up slightly and i'll bring the blacks down as well and you can see here that i've got this set up so that when i actually hit or start clipping the blacks we actually get a warning here we could turn that on for the whites as well in the top right of the histogram here just by clicking this little icon show highlight clipping and then when you push the whites all the way up now we get a big red warning where we're blowing out those whites so those are quite handy to turn on when you're actually adjusting these sliders but you can also just dial it into taste or just keep your eye on the histogram here and see if it's starting to clip okay let's move on to the present section here and i don't really want to be playing around too much with the texture because i'm liking the idea of a nice smooth beach it's just really inviting just to walk across and i don't want to increase like crunchy texture and bring highlight to any sharp stones or anything like that but the clarity slider may be of use because if i push this all the way to 100 obviously that's far too much but we can certainly see all this amazing detail we've got going on in the sand and that was what actually drew me to this photo in the first place i'm sorry guys i started this video not really giving us much screen real estate so i've pressed shift f a couple of times just get rid of that top bar and we can also press shift tab and that can get rid of all of our side panels or we can close our panels individually if we want but anyway back to the clarity slider look that's far too much how we have it a hundred but you can certainly see that it's starting to bring out detail through the sand and i really like that so what i might do is just introduce a little bit of that and now move on to the dehaze now i'm going to push this to 100 as well because i always like to push my sliders to 100 just to see what they're doing even push them into the negative figures and you'll find that different raw files actually respond differently to these sliders as well and also it comes down to personal preference as well just how far you're willing to push those sliders anyway i don't normally push the dehaze slider that far so i'm just going to introduce a small amount of that okay let's have a look at the vibrance and saturation and again just a little play around see what it's doing see what we like so i'm going to introduce a little bit more vibrance and perhaps a little more saturation but we certainly don't want to go too far with those we can go into our tone curve and we could further enhance our contrast if we want just by introducing s-curve i don't want to push this too far and we can click on the toggle switch there to see our before and after of that effect and it's subtle but i like it i'm not going to worry about any color or color grading changes because i prefer to do those in luminar and the detail section as well absolutely we could add sharpening in lightroom but again i actually prefer luminar ai's sharpening algorithm than lightroom's one i think it does a better job so i'm just going to leave that as well but one thing i will look at is lens correction now i'm certainly going to remove chromatic aberration by ticking that box and that is just the fringing that you sometimes see particularly around the edge of your frame i've zoomed into 300 and i've moved to the edge of the frame so this is easier to see but if i tick remove chromatic aberration see before and after we're getting rid of all that cyan and magenta fringing that you get so that's a really useful thing to turn on and i'd recommend if you're building presets make sure that you build in remove chromatic aberration into your preset and another one that's really useful is enable profile correction so if we turn that on and i zoom back out let's look at our before and after and what lightroom's doing for us is looking up which lens we shot that with and it's applying corrections based on the limitations of our lens for example the vignetting the darkening around the edge that you get with pretty much every lens is trying to remove that and any distortion pin cushion or barrel distortion is also trying to remove that as well so if i turn this off turn it on you can see that there's a very subtle shift but oftentimes in my landscape work i actually leave that off because i like a little bit of the vignetting and i also feel that because we're not dealing with something structural like architecture with nice straight lines it's often very hard to see that pin cushioning or barrel distortion and so i prefer to leave my original pixels that the sensor captured intact rather than just pulling them and smearing them ever so slightly for that supposed lens correction so architecture absolutely every time i turn that on landscapes usually i'll leave it off but now for one of the most important things in photo editing whether it's lightroom or luminar whatever you're working in local masking is an absolute must to master so let's take a look at that now so we could either work with a radial filter which if i just click and drag we now have access to let's say bump up the exposure darken it down and all of those initial changes that we made in lightroom before we can make those changes again but we can do that in a localized way so we're only talking into specific areas of the image and that is so so important so for the sky for example i can actually control the temperature and make it more blue i can reduce that exposure down which i quite like and so using that methodology let's make some changes okay let's brighten the sand up maybe we're going to increase the temperature there what if we increase the contrast there okay we don't want to go too hard too crunchy with that but i certainly want to draw attention to these lovely lead-in lines so now maybe we'll introduce that clarity you'll remember earlier on i introduced clarity but i was doing it globally so i didn't want to go too heavy with it at that point because i knew i could come back in with local masking a radial filter or even a brush whatever but just apply that enhanced clarity specifically on the sand only i'm gonna move that down just ever so slightly and we're getting a little overexposed on the bank here so i'm just gonna draw another filter radial filters are pretty useful and you can grab just outside of them and rotate them if you want to and what we're going to do is just double click to reset and just start easing that back down i think it's the highlights are just getting a little bit blown out so i won't worry about reducing the exposure just the highlights we could introduce a radial filter from over this side on the left hand side where the sun was actually rising and we can introduce some more orangey magenta tones into there just to represent the sun rising let me delete that just to see our before control z to bring it back okay we're just starting to blow out a little bit so i'm just gonna control the highlights maybe bring the whites down slightly okay so that's working with the radial filter but let's try something different let's try the graduated filter and what i'm going to do is actually just control the brightness of certain areas the graduated filter is an amazing tool and so useful for bringing down that brightness value of the sky you'll remember back in the day when we had to put filters in front of our camera to darken down the skies we can do that with a graduated filter in post-production now so it frees us up when we're on location much more so i'm just going to click and drag and at the moment we're increasing the exposure so i'm just going to bring that down and i'm going to go real heavy so you can really see what's going on here so you can see that we are darkening down the top part of the photo in the sky and we can rotate it slightly if we want to so let's just do that i'm not going to be as heavy-handed with it as that you can see that we're darkening down in the trees here slightly so if i wanted to i could boost the shadows up ever so slightly and if this filter is going in places where you don't want it so for example over these dark areas we can come in and use our range masking and just say hey we don't want that affecting the very dark areas so in the luminance section the brightness we're just going to pull that off of the blacks and as i lift that up it's just removing it from this area here and if we still feel like that area is just a little bit dark what we can do is just grab a little radial filter pop it in there and just boost our shadows up just in that little area control the highlights a little bit or again come down to our range mask grab the luminance and just pull it out of the highlights by taking the marker on the right hand side that represents the highlights and just bringing that down okay we're heading in the right direction a really good thing to do along the way is just to press the backslash key and you'll get a before and press it again and you get an after so you can compare where you started to where you've got to and more often than not i find that my editing has gone too far by playing around with the different sliders and tools we've basically compounded the editing effect and normally the effect is just a little bit overbaked a little bit too strong oh yeah it is so i really wish lightroom natively included a slider that could actually reduce the overall amount of the effect you've created but at the moment they don't so what you can do if you feel like it's over saturated slightly so i might just want to come back in and just reduce that saturation back down grab the temperature perhaps perhaps we went a little too warm on that reduce that maybe even the contrast might be up a little bit too high i'm going to err on the side of caution and now i'm going to do my favorite thing which is take it into luminar for the finishing because that just allows us a little bit more creative control over this lightroom is a fantastic raw editor but it is quite limited and adobe designed it to go from lightroom into photoshop for more creative finishing but while i still love using photoshop nowadays for the most part i prefer to go lightroom to luminar just because it's a quicker workflow we're still dealing with a slider-based application and utilizing the ai with creative tools inside of luminar we can do things so much quicker than we can inside of photoshop so with that in mind let's go to luminar so i'm going to deselect these five photos i have at the moment and just make sure that the photo we were just working on is only selected i'm going to right click go to edit in and as long as we've got luminar ai installed we just click on that and we're going to edit a copy with the adjustments that we've made inside of lightroom the options we've got here are perfect we're working with 16 bits in adobe rgb nice big color space and a nice tiff file with no compression is perfect so we'll just click edit and luminaire ai is going to open up and bring that photo in for us as a tiff and in the template section of luminar ai straight away it's recognized that it's a landscape so it's making suggestions for the template collection so we could go into easy landscapes and apply a forest stream for example or clean light or whatever template we want to apply but here's the thing these templates are designed to work on photos that haven't been edited yet i've already done a lot of the foundation work inside of lightroom so these are going to be pretty heavy-handed on top of what i've already done so i'm not going to touch any templates and do what i like to do which is take full control so i'm going to open up the edit section and just show you some of the things that i like to do to my landscapes i'm just going to go into the history and go back to the original image and in the edit section i always like to come into the accent ai and if i crank that all the way to 100 well just like with the sliders inside of lightroom 100 is far too much and this is a particularly strong tool but you can see here that it's enhancing the colors it's enhancing the contrast it's doing a lot of heavy lifting for us on this file and like i say these tools are designed to work on photos that haven't been edited yet so i've already done the processing inside of lightroom so i don't want to go too heavy-handed with this but i may want to just tickle in a little bit so i don't know maybe around 20 might be nice and then we can use this toggle switch to see before see after yeah okay a little goes a long way if you guys aren't familiar with luminar i'm just going to open up the light section so that you can actually see even just within this light panel we've got access to a lot of the same tools and sliders that lightroom has so if you want to use just luminar on its own and often i will do all of my editing inside of luminar then it's got the raw processor that lightroom has and then it's got all those extra ai tools which is really cool but because i've already done a lot of that work in lightroom i can just leave that structure ai is a little bit like the clarity tool inside of lightroom but a little bit more intelligent so do you know what i'm going to do i'm going to put a little bit of this in here and unlike lightroom where it's a global effect normally we can mask this tool in directly so i can click the brush and i can say okay i want a little bit of this kind of clarity effect or structure as they call it in luminar and i just want it over here and so i can paint over that feature there and now if i toggle that off and toggle it on you can see that we've only enhanced the detail along this sandbank here we might say we want to add some of that in and around the sand here to enhance that as well come back to the masking feature but rather than putting 100 of that effect on i don't know why don't we go for something like 35 and just like in lightroom we can use the bracket keys to play with the size of the brush and just do a swipe over the sand and let's have a look at our before and thereafter nice as within lightroom we have the ability to work with a vignette this is a more intelligent version and i'll show you why i prefer using inside of luminar versus lightroom and that is this box here we actually get to choose our subject so let's do a pretty heavy-handed vignette for now and really pull this down here so you can see what this does rather than having the effect applied just to the center of the frame we can choose the subject and we can actually click anywhere we like and make that the center point so for example we can see that the lines are all receding off into the distance kind of to this point over here so we could say this is the most important part of our landscape photo right here where all of these lines in the sand are converging on the horizon line here and now we've helped guide the viewer to this area here what we can do is obviously just tame that effect back we don't want it so strong we certainly want to increase the feathering just so it's a smoother transition and another benefit of this vignette tool over the one in lightroom we can actually increase the inner light so if we want to actually boost the exposure in the center part of the vignette we can do that so sometimes just a little bit of that is just a helping hand as well so here's our before here's our after really subtle but i do like that before coming into my favorite bit which is the creative section now this bit's a lot of fun i don't want to veer off too much from my original camera capture on this one but let's suppose i did want to actually change the sky the sky ai tool is amazing basically we can just click on a sky luminar does a calculation and it's going to drop in the new sky and look at the precision of the masking around the trees here on this sandbank is absolutely amazing so this guy i've dropped in isn't the best example but i do have a whole heap of skies in my library here and as i scroll through these you can see that i've got access to so many different skies if you do want to do some sky swaps i strongly recommend don't use the ones that come with luminar reason being they're so recognizable now so i'd recommend getting yourself a really deep sky library where you've got a lot of options i'll put a link to my favorite one that's got over 300 skies in the kit and you can do things inside alumni where you can flip them you can change the color temperature all sorts of stuff like this so you have a lot of variation because everything's captured on a 50 plus megapixel camera so really high quality i try and stick to the authentic sky when i'm working my landscapes but for my architectural work uh that sky kit's been invaluable so yeah i'll put a link to that below but like i say i'm not going to change the sky in this one so i'm just going to turn that off the augmented sky section here lets us add things like the moon to the sky stuff like that i'm not going to worry about that either atmosphere ai is pretty useful for landscape work as well for example we could add some haze in crank the amount up we can play with the depth slider and luminar's ai intelligently maps the depth of the scene so that we can actually bring it towards us have it recede into the background now gotta be honest won't be the first time i'd added a bit of mist or fog inside of photoshop so the fact i can do that with a slider i think that's awesome there's so much we could do in this creative section but i'm just going to look at two other tools i'm going to open up the mystical tool here and i'm going to crank the amount of that up and i really like applying this to my landscapes i don't know what it is but there's something about it gives it a nice soft ethereal look and i think that works really well for landscapes so here's our before and here's our after and the other thing i'll show you is the mood tool because i love how we can just mouse over these look up tables and it gives our photo a completely different look and we're able to just really quickly pivot on our color grading and get a different feel or look or just enhance what was already there so in this case let's go for i quite liked anaheim when i very first opened it i like the color scheme this is adding so i'm just going to grab the saturation and push that a little higher so we're introducing more of that color so here's our before and after just with that individual tool but if we want to look at overall effect what we can do is click this slider here and we can just drag over and that's quite satisfying and seeing where we've come from and where we've got to but another way to do that is not to use the slider itself but just use the eye tool and i find that's a little more useful just for seeing the before seeing the after and what i like at the end of your processing if you feel like you've gone too far unlike in lightroom where you're kind of stuck and have to go into the individual sliders and tools what we can do is come down to the bottom right here and we can just grab this overall slider we can take it to zero so we can see where we came from 100 where we got to and we can go do you know what i don't want 100 maybe 50 is where we want it maybe a little bit more and you can just dial that in to taste so if you're anything like me it's really easy to get carried away so having that slider where we can just reduce the overall effect is a real bonus so once you're happy with the overall look all we need to do is come to the top right click apply and luminaire is going to export our photo and send it back into lightroom and that will be brought back into our catalog and just like that we're back inside lightroom with our edited version from luminar so this is where we came from with our initial raw capture then we did an edit inside of lightroom and then as i do with most of my landscape photos i took it into luminar and i just took it that little bit further and added more of a creative edge to it so there you have it guys that was my lightroom to luminar and back to lightroom round trip if you'd like to see a video of me out and about capturing this and the other shots from the beach that morning just write on location in the description below and if i get enough interest in it i'll put a video together for you guys and upload it to the channel thanks for watching i've got another video popping up around my head right now so when you click that and i'll see you in that one cheers for watching guys bye for now

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 2,769

Rating: 4.9565215 out of 5

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, Luminar AI, Plugin, Lightroom classic, LRC, Luminar neo

Id: iiV5Uud4gl4

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021