Luminar AI Edit & Increase Image Resolution Without Losing Quality!!! REMARKABLE

on the channel recently you've had a couple of videos of me just talking a lot about luminar neo so in this one we're going back to basics i'm going to be using luminar ai and i'm going to be editing this photo sent in by leanne since i started the anthony edits your photos video series you guys have sent me a lot of photos and i really appreciate that but it's brought to my attention a couple of issues that i keep seeing over and over and again the first can be solved with a bit of advice and that is stop shooting your stuff in jpeg if you want to do photo editing start shooting in raw at least jpeg plus raw so that you can get more out of the photo editing software you're going to be able to bring out more information and finesse your photos much better if you're shooting in raw the second thing comes down to resolution now i'm spoiled i'm a professional photographer so i'm working with very high megapixel cameras right but i i get it a lot of you guys are still working with small sensors but the thing is when you're photographing things such as birds wildlife and you're zooming in since so many pictures of birds but often the bird represents such a small percentage of the overall frame that by the time you've zoomed in to that actual bird you're looking at a really reduced resolution picture so if you want to do anything meaningful with that like print it out put it on your wall even sometimes using it for social media the resolution just isn't there so that's why i've actually selected this photo we're working on today and stay with me till the end of the video because i'm going to show you a tool that can actually seriously save our bacon i've used it multiple times for my own work to actually blow up even six megapixel files from way back when and enlarge to span a whole business corridor so this program is insane at enlargement so i can't wait to show you i really think you're going to like this one guys so let's get into luminar ai and see what i can do with this edit the first thing i'd recommend you do before you even start working on your photo is just understand the file itself and to help you do that you've got this info panel down here that exists inside of the catalog section so if we open that up if you don't see it just click on that eye and we can see this was shot at iso 200 so we shouldn't have too much digital noise too much grain in the file itself because obviously the lower the iso is when we shoot the photo the less noise we have to deal with so that's pretty cool we can tell this was shot on a canon eos 6d and hopefully you'll know what camera you're shooting your stuff on but more importantly we can see that this is only 2736 pixels wide by 1824 high so that doesn't give us much in the way of pixel real estate if we think about the composition itself we want to make the bird the main feature in this photo so we want to zoom right in we're going to crop in on that and we're going to be disregarding probably about three quarters of this photo maybe even more so that's going to bring us down to a really tiny maybe one one and a half megapixel file by the time we've cropped this bad boy out so at the end of the video i'll show you how we can get around that but for now let's work on the actual edit itself if i zoom into the bird itself and as i said that's going to be our key player in the photo we really want to be zoomed in on him we can see that he's relatively sharp i think we're actually sharper slightly higher up the branch here so we've possibly missed the focus point just ever so slightly but it's no big deal we can certainly bring some of that detail back using luminar so let's get into the edit the first thing i like to do is grab the accent ai slider inside of enhance ai and just crank that up and see what it does and straight away i'm seeing that we're certainly brightening everything up we're certainly increasing a lot more saturation and while these tools are acting on a global sense as in we're changing the whole picture with that slider i actually like to analyze the photo incrementally like i look at individual parts and components so i'm looking at the branch i'm looking at the bird and i'm assessing what this tool is doing to the bird and the branch separately from what it's doing to the background so if i toggle that off and i toggle it on you can see that it definitely looks better for these elements but i just feel like it's just boosting up the brightness and vibrancy of that background far too much so that's where our masking comes in and if we just click on the add mask button here and we select the paint brush basically we can just start painting in this effect only where we want it so i'm going to come up to the top of the branch here and i'm going to do one stroke down there and you will see that i actually changed my opacity to 25 percent so basically what i'm going to do is as i paint over the elements i'm just increasing the amount of that effect by 25 each time i paint over it and so by doing that i can basically paint over this bird a couple of times three times now so i'm about 75 percent of that effect that we created i've done one stroke over the branch so that gave us a 25 of the effect over the branch and now if i do one more stroke just through that sort of center part there we're building that up to around 50 and finally i'm just going to go over this bird just a little bit more and if you feel like you've bled over the edge just a little bit here like this little bit of green around his head there you can come in grab the eraser tool maybe crank the opacity slightly higher just so we can get it done a bit quicker and you can come in and just be a little bit more refined i'm being pretty rough and ready with this just for the sake of doing this quickly for the tutorial but you can get as refined as you want with your masking and there we go we've removed it from there so now we can toggle this effect off and then put it back on and we can see how the enhanced ai is just only affecting the bird and the branch one of the things i like to do when i'm working on any photo is i look for problem areas look for things in the photo that are going to distract the viewers eye that don't really add anything to the scene itself and if you take them away are they actually going to be missed and if the answer is no then there's no problem getting rid of them so as an example of that you see this little bright spot here this little bouquet area here where we've obviously got a little speck of light behind out focus from the camera and that's just grabbing my attention i have a lot more of those areas around the edge of the frame as well i'm really not concerned about those ones it's just these kind of areas are going to be visible when i crop the photo in and talking about why don't we just crop that right now so that we can get a better composition and actually see what we're dealing with and as i sort of alluded to i really want to come in much closer to this bird now we could either put him right in the center like this we could move this over and have him on one of the third lines here and have a lot of negative space over to the right or we could push him over this side and have negative space to the left i think that really comes down to personal preference and if this top left hand corner here wasn't so busy with different things and different colors going on i'd probably leave that but i'm thinking maybe here might be a better crop for us okay i'm gonna go with that and now i have cropped our photo down you can already see that pixelation creeping in so if we want to print this out it's basically a non-starter without a particular tool that i will show you towards the end of the video that's actually going to really save our bacon here but for now i'm going to get rid of this little light spot here that i was telling you about before maybe just reduce these two here so how we're going to do that let's come down to the professional section here and we're going to select the clone tool and as the little dialog box here is suggesting we basically click to select a new source so i can sample from here and i can paint it over the top of here but rather than doing it at 100 i think i'm just going to start at 50 click and start painting so that we can still have a hint of that light ball but perhaps not with its full intensity and then we can do the same for the other two just in the background there as well we can just steal a little bit of green from elsewhere and just dull those down just a little bit because we really want the bird to be the key feature and we want him to pop and so if we have distracting elements that's just going to compete with our attention so i'm also going to sample from here and just get rid of this little bottom bit here you can really get carried away with this as i may well do here so i'm just gonna um just retouch just a couple of these bits over here just from stealing from some darker areas perhaps just that bit there so let's have a quick look at before and our after you can see that we've just minimized those bright spots and now the key player the bird grabs much more of our attention in the frame okay let's carry on with the edit let's jump into the light section and i think the color balance is pretty good but we may just be edging on the side of green here so we could just push that towards the magenta a little bit now while the exposure is okay i'm just going to brighten things up just a little bit because i'm actually going to use the vignette tool later just to again focus our attention here and darken down those areas around him so i'm not worried about the rest of the photo getting too bright but i do want to introduce a little bit more detail on our bird i'm going to get the smart contrast just to add a little bit of that just for a little bit more impact have a little play with the highlight slider but i don't feel like that's doing too much for us and the shadow slider i just bump that up just a little bit and before i go any further i'm just going to again click the eyeball tool just so i can see where i've come from where i've got to okay and i feel like we're much brighter heading in a good direction bird's starting to look good let's press on next tool we're going to look at his structure ai because he's got all this lovely feathering on his chest here around his face we've got a lot of detail on the branch here and if we use the structure ai tool and i push that let's say all the way to 100 and be really aggressive far too much and as i said before it affects the whole photo globally and that's not what we want to do whenever you're playing with any of these tools any of these sliders don't just consider it as whether it's a yes i want this no i don't or a certain percentage think where in the photo might i want to apply this and i think that again we can add some of this to bring out detail in his feather maybe in his face and a little bit on the branch similar to what we did with the enhancer ai so let's do that let's grab the mask tool and this time i'm going to set that i don't know 38 that's fine and i'm just going to start painting i've gone way over the um the branch there no excuses for doing that because i'm using a wacom tablet at the moment so it should be nice and precise i'm not going to worry too much about that and i'm just reducing the size of the brush there just to paint a little bit more of finely on this guy and maybe another little streak just down there okay and we'll just toggle the palette off and toggle it on off and on and i just feel like the branch itself is just getting a little bit too crunchy so what we're going to do is come back to that mask tool come to the eraser i'm going to use the right bracket key to increase the size of my brush here and i'm just going to remove some of that effect from the actual branch itself because yes the branch is interesting but it's certainly a secondary player in the overall photo now the next thing i'm thinking of doing is very much personal preference i'm going to come into the color section and i feel like the greens are getting far too vibrant they're just getting away on us a little bit but you may like the combination of the yellow and the green and that's absolutely fine but for me i find that the green is competing with the nice yellow that we have here on the bird and so what i'm going to do is rather than just come in and reduce the overall saturation which is obviously going to desaturate our whole photo or grab the vibrance and bring that down what i'm going to do is actually come into the hsl which as you know stands for hue saturation and luminance and now we can control the colors individually so i can come into the greens and if i grab this and start wiggling that around you can see that we are affecting the color the hue of the greens so one option we have is we could actually try and harmonize the background so that it matches our bird a little better and that's not a bad idea we could kind of push it towards that direction but we can also come into the saturation itself and just bring that down so it's not quite as vibrant and in your face by the same token we can grab the yellow slider and actually boost that up we come to the luminance section and just see whether we can oh yeah look at that that's really great because as we push the luminance of the yellow up that's actually bringing out the detail in the chest here sure we're getting a little bit overexposed just on this little patch here but i think there's a way that i can actually deal with that using the local masks so we can certainly come to that now before we move on from the luminance section i just want to see whether i can just control those greens a little bit look if i take it all the way to the left obviously that's really nasty really ugly and not what we want to do but you can see how we can isolate and make our subject pop from the background so rather than being aggressive like that and going well that's really ugly and far too much what we can do is just utilize some of that so we can just be really subtle and just bring that down to -13 here's our before here's our after okay we're really coming along with this and i've changed my mind on this i've done a bit of a u-turn i'm going to come back to the saturation and i de-saturated those greens i'm not going to go quite as heavily with that and one thing i did which i'm going to actually just put back is just move those greens back towards a proper green hue rather than the yellows i think it was better when we had the combination of yellow plus green rather than just pushing it all towards a yellow palette that contrast of color just helps our bird pop as well so here's our before here's our after all right not looking too bad the next thing i'm going to do is just zoom in to 200 and bring our bird to the middle and i'm going to sharpen the image so if i come into the detail section here what i would recommend you do whenever you're trying to sharpen your image is of course the sharpened slider itself is going to do a fantastic job i'm very impressed with luminar ai's sharpen tool just on its own just without any other adjustments but if you want to use the small medium and large details what i recommend you do is actually just grab just one at a time push it all the way to 100 and have a look at what it's doing to your image you can double click it to reset it and then go for the next one what about medium okay not too bad and go for large and i don't really think that one's doing too much for us i actually like what the small details was doing and also the medium details as well so if i toggle that off and i toggle it on certainly helping us a little bit and now we can just push in some of that sharpness as well and if i toggle this off and i toggle it on you can see that the majority of sharpening is happening where we want it which is on the branch and on the bird itself but we are sharpening up some of this noise some of this grain in the background so as i toggle that off and on you can just see it just pops it out a little bit we don't really want that so once again just grab a mask we can paint over our bird i'm going to push it all the way to 100 be pretty aggressive with this say please sharpen up our bird quite a lot now i'm going to drop it down to 50 percent and that's going to allow me to say okay now just sharpen up the branch but not as much as the bird just do it 50 and if i turn the palette off and on we now have a much more refined sharpening going on okay let's jump into the vignette section first of all let's uh let's put this to screen again we're going to go to vignette now one thing you could do if you wanted to is actually push the amount to positive 100 now normally i'm always taking my vignette to the left hand side but if you want to you could do it for an artistic effect push it to 100 you could play with the size so you could create quite an artistic little card that you might send to people or even a very small 6x4 print this would work quite nicely for but we're going to stick to a photo rather than that sort of artistic interpretation so what i'm going to do is just push that amount down and to the left we're going to choose the subject and we're going to say let the subject be the bird here toggle it on again it's subtle but it's just helping to bring our eye towards the bird now through my editing so far one of the things i've done is actually just overcook his chest here just a little bit and so what we can do is actually come into a local mask and what we're going to do is darken just this area down so i'm going to add a basic local mask and what i want to do is play with these sliders until i can see that this area here brings back the detail and so i'm going to bring the exposure down perhaps bring the contrast away so there's less contrast in there that might help us and it does and we've got a very saturated yellow so actually by taking the warmth slider towards the blue on the left hand side here that's actually helping that now the fact that i'm destroying the rest of my picture at the moment i really don't care that's not what i'm interested in i'm only interested in that little highlight on the bird's chest we might also just want to bring the saturation of that area down just a little bit as well okay i'm going to go with that it's not perfect but it's going to work for what we're after and i'm just using my left bracket key just to bring the size of that down and i'm just going to paint once there and just one more little paint there and you can see what was that little hot spot if i toggle that off and toggle it on we've just taken care of that now you guys are probably familiar with the portrait bokeh ai tool and i know that a frustration for some people is that it only works on humans at the moment we may see the improvement of that ai over time but currently just humans so is there something else we could do to blur the background and leave our attention on the bird rather than using a human so let's go to basic and in this local mask what i'm going to do is grab the structure ai now if i push this all the way to 100 as you can see all the local contrast gets increased everything gets real crunchy and gritty and it's not really the look we're after but what if we went the opposite way as i've pushed that to the left we've effectively blurred the background so whether we want that much that's debatable but what we could do is utilize that to blur more around the edges and then reduce the effect as we get closer to the bird so a good way to do that rather than just painting a mask as we've done in the past we can actually grab a radial mask so a round mask and that's going to allow us to click on a center point and drag out from there and so what we've got going on here on the center circle we have zero of the effect that we just created so bringing that structure ai down to negative 100 that's not doing anything here it's only affecting at 100 outside this outer circle what's going on between this radius here around the center point and the output well this is our transition point so from none of the effect to 100 of the effect we have a smooth transition between the two and you can see that as we progress towards the outer circle we get more and more blurry and so that's up to us how tight we make that transition how soft we make it we can just grab that and pull it around we can move this around but as long as we're over the bird i'm happy we could also further enhance the vignette effect by actually darkening that background down a little bit so obviously if you take something really far you can have a really extreme effect and sometimes it's good to do that just to see exactly what a tool is doing and then once you know what the effect is you can then bring it back and ease it to a point that you feel looks a little bit more natural almost unnoticeable right let's have a look at where we've come from and where we've got to okay this is where we started this is where we've got to we could absolutely do more with this we could jump in and we could get into some of these creative tools like i often quite like playing around with the mystical filter and particularly if you've sharpened things up quite a bit because the mystical filter almost does the opposite of that in a really nice kind of dreamy way if i push that to 100 you can see it just kind of blends and smooths the colors together but does it what i find quite a nice pleasing way so let's put some of that in here's our before here's our after if you want to give the overall photo more cohesion from a color palette perspective a really good way to do that is to come into the mood section so for example you can just come in here and start mousing over these and just see if there's one of these that just kind of floats your boat so i don't know for example let's go for wooden and if we toggle out before and our after you can see that the color palette has just become a little more harmonized and the reason for that is if i push the amount all the way to 100 you can see that basically the mood tool is applying a color lookup table something borrowed from the movie industry it's very clever stuff but basically remaps the colors that exist in your photo to another color scheme you can see that we've introduced more of a wooden color scheme and then the amount of 100 i would never recommend that but for sure you can just ease a little bit of this in and i think the default is 30 and that's normally a pretty good place to be so look here we are at 35 here's our before everything's looking a little flat the colors aren't particularly vibrant and the bird is definitely competing against the background and when i release that ammo the bird sings visually speaking and perhaps literally as well at the time but if we feel like we've gone just a little bit too far like i feel like we're bleaching out on some of the whites on the actual branch that he's sitting on just a little bit what we can do is come down to our my template which is what we've created through this edit and we can just grab the amount slider and just ease that back a little bit because it's very easy using all of these tools and when you compound one on top of the other it's very easy to quickly take your edit too far i think that's a little more tastefully done it's not so in your face let's call that a day for our edit inside of luminar ai and let's have a quick look at before and thereafter [Music] so the tool i'm going to show you now is called gigapixel ai it's brought to us by topaz labs it's absolutely amazing normally when photo editing software enlarges our photos it's basically taking those square pixels and just stretching them and then it smears the edges of them together and normally the results aren't very good at all basically you've just made the squares that it was made up of bigger squares gigapixel does it differently it's got artificial intelligence built into it that creates some absolutely amazing results i don't know exactly how it does it it's pretty mind-blowing best thing is i show you and it's really easy to do so in order for us to do anything with this photo now we need to get it out of luminar we need to export it so come to the export tab we're going to go save photo to disk and i'm going to call it something more meaningful i want to export as a jpeg i'm not going to sharpen because all that's going to do is draw attention to those pixels that this picture is made up of and i'm also not going to come in and change the dimensions because if i make the photo bigger here all luminar is going to do is spit out a bigger version and just stretch basically smear the pixels to increase the size of the photo and that's not what we want either that's just going to result in a big blurry file so let me hit the export and i'll show you what we can do about it so let's load up gigapixel all i need to do is come to browse select the photo we were just working on before let's have a look at our bird here and what this ai driven software has created for us here on the right blown up from the original very pixelated version on the left hand side the calculations and computations have been done by the ai to actually create this version on the right hand side here that's all done automatically all we have to do is just select an ai model that we want it to use and usually the standard does a really really good job we can see in the bottom bit here we've got a 15 by 10 inch file here that we could print out we can go bigger than that that's just a three times increase you can go up to six times if you're working on a low resolution camera or you're regularly needing to zoom in like i did in this example on this bird here this piece of software is absolutely invaluable i've been using it for a couple of years now really successfully to increase the size the print resolution of some of my smaller files that businesses and offices want to put onto their walls i'm not going to go into all the details around this program and this particular video i think the results on the left to the right they speak for themselves this is insane if you want to get hold of this i've got a link in the description below that's an affiliate link so i get a really small commission off that link doesn't cost you guys any more so i really appreciate it if you like the look of this or even just want to check out just use that link helps me out we can just come to save image and we're going to have an amazing result you guys know that i love a clever bit of technology almost as much as i love photo editing so what gigapixel ai is able to do i think is super cool if you guys would like me to make a video dedicated just a gigapixel and how you actually use that get the most out of it just write gigapixel in the comments below i've got that link as i say so help me out use that link if you're interested or even just use it just go and check it out thanks so much for watching guys if you enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up there's another one popping up on the screen now that i think you'll enjoy as well cheers i'll see you in that one

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 22,219

Rating: 4.8810534 out of 5

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Lightroom, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, HDR, architecture photography, architectural photography

Id: 6PTCOtmt7oQ

Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021