Perfect Image Enlargement on an EXTREME crop + Full Luminar AI Edit

in this episode of anthony edits your photos i'll be working on this amazing shot of a black panther unfortunately the photo has one major flaw that we need to address we're using an amazing piece of software we're going to solve that before taking the photo into luminar ai and towards the end of the video i'm going to share with you an ingenious photo hack where we increase contrast by decreasing contrast stay with me [Music] now while predominantly this is a loom not ai editing tutorial i will be using an extra piece of software to enlarge and enhance our photo flawlessly from topaz labs and if you want to get hold of that i've got a link and a discount code in the description below but for now let's get into luminar ai apparently in this region of india it's rare to see black panthers in the same place as you see tigers leopards etc and you can see in the film strip here that ujl has actually sent me several different options for me to work with and so he said just choose the best one and they're all very similar but as you can see in the previous one the panthers head is looking away and in this one here the black panther actually turns its head towards the viewer so no doubt you joel is super excited to see this black panther and he's rattled off a series of shots which is a really good idea because then we can pick the best frame that we want to work with but there's a couple of problems with this file the first being that he shot this as a jpeg rather than raw and when you're shooting jpeg i've mentioned this recently but you're seriously limiting how far you can push that file in post-production so if you want to get the most out of your photos in photo editing shoot in raw but that's actually the least of our problems with this particular photo the main issue we've got is a lack of resolution not on the actual camera sensor itself because this was shot on a 20 megapixel canon canon canon 6d which gives us plenty of resolution to work with if our subject is filling the frame and of course one way around that is to zoom in but as we can see on the info panel this was shot with a telephoto 70 to 200 millimeter lens that would allow us to get nice and zoomed in as tight as we can but still we're way off from the panther and it's probably filling only a couple of percentage of the whole of that sensor so we have a really low resolution file to work with so first of all we've got to fix that and unfortunately we can't fix that with luminar ai photoshops upscaling it's just not good enough basically you're taking pixels and just enlarging the pixels and smearing them together so although we can make the file bigger we're not actually adding meaningful resolution we're not adding detail so if you have low resolution photos or images where you want to crop into a specific area like we do in this one i'm going to show you a dedicated piece of software that is brilliant at doing this but first of all let's take a look at that crop so let's come to the composition ai tool and i'm just going to grab the top here and start bringing that down just till i make the frame the size i want it and what we can do is then bring that over so that panther resides on the line two-thirds of the way in here and we could crop this so we see a little bit of this tree trunk here which will balance nicely the left-hand side of the frame with the brown of the right-hand side of the frame here but what i'd like to do is actually get a little bit more aggressive with the crop and really make our black panther the hero of this shot by making him just a little bit bigger so if we're happy with this crop we just need to click on the composition ai tool tab there and that will apply the crop close it down and even on the screen resolution we can already see that the photo is looking quite soft and we're losing detail we're only 83 but look if we zoom in close to our panther here the resolution is so low that we can see the pixelation around the edge of him we can see the pixelation in the eyes there and that's really not what we want and when you joe was witness to this amazing moment he's managed to capture it on his camera the fact that we're limited to such a pixelated version of that moment is borderline criminal so what can we do so we're going to export the photo from luminar ai bring it into gigapixel let it work its magic before we come back into luminar ai to do our processing so we'll come up to export save photo to disk save it somewhere meaningful with a meaningful name and then our format we could either have jpeg with a high quality 100 or we could go for a tiff i'm just going to stick with a jpeg for this one but if we look at the size here of 2072 by 1381 pixels only gives us a file equivalent to just under three megapixels about 2.8 2.9 megapixels which is just nothing so i'm going to export this and we'll see what gigapixel can do for us so gigapixel ai loads up for us so we can either drag photos in or browse for the particular photo that we were just working on and as i bring that in we're given a four up grid and on the right hand side here we can see a navigator window which basically we can move that around and i'm going to position that over the panthers head so we can see what gigapixel can do in the top left here we can see the original file and you can see just how pixelated that is and on the right hand side you can see that the gigapixel has almost amazingly been able to detect that this is an eye and created circularity for us so this preview here is showing us what gigapixel standard ai model will do for us just below it that is a low resolution model and that gives us a slightly different result if i move to a new area of the photo you'll see that it's re-rendered and each one needs to be calculated to show us what the result will be like currently my top right and my bottom left window are both set to standard so i may as well change that to something different so let's go for very compressed let gigapixel do its calculations and although this preview of very compressed is probably the worst conversion out of the bunch it's still much better than the pixelated original the ai is intelligently smoothing edges and adding detail which is amazing the ai model that you choose for your enlargement very much depends on the photo itself and in this case the standard model is doing the best job i'm not going to change the settings too much i'm happy with them as they are all i need to do is just save the image the settings in the interface are really simple we can suppress noise we can remove blur but i'm not going to mess around with those in this case all i'm going to do is just save the image and gigapixel ai is smart enough to append our file name with a scale factor of six which is what we've gone for here you can see the original resolution which as i said was just under three megapixels and that is converting to twelve thousand by eight thousand two hundred pixels and that is over a hundred and three megapixel file that we can create from this so i could click the four times enlargement button and go with that if i wanted to or i can actually specify the exact pixel width which is what i'm going to do here and i'm going to enter 5472 which may sound like an arbitrary number but that is the original sensor size that the photo was shot on so although we've cropped it in we're actually recreating a file that is identical to the original sensor size so let's go with that and we'll just save that photo and now gigapixel ai is going to do a lot of number crunching to actually calculate our final image and how long this takes will depend on how fast your computer is and also the final output size the bigger the file the longer it's going to take so now we've got our photo back inside luminar ai upscaled to something meaningful now we need a game plan of how we're going to edit it so i actually think this is a really good point for photo editing in general when you're just starting out it's really good idea to get to know the tools and from that point of view grab the sliders move them around and see what effect they have on your photo once you know the tools then it's time to be a little bit more methodical in your approach of your photo editing so what i'd recommend you do before you actually start editing the photo is just look at it just let it sit and think what do i actually want to do here what do i want to achieve because if we're editing i.e changing the photo in any way we need to know what it is we want to actually achieve so for this photo in particular it's an amazing moment that has been captured by the photographer so what i want to do with my photo edit is be respectful of the authenticity of that photo and that moment i don't want to be getting too crazy and creative with the edit i just want to enhance what's already there and perhaps bring out viewers attention more if we can to the panther itself so let's have a look at how i might do that when i cropped this photo i was quite mindful of this kind of wedge shape that we have going on here so i want to see if i can enhance this in some way we've also got our panther here which is our main player so we really want to draw our viewers eye here so that might come in the form of darkening down the surrounds and that will help to bring our viewers eye to the brighter area because of where the panther was stood we have a lot of long grasses coming through here and i'm just finding those really distracting so if we can remove those particularly that long one through there it will really help to give a cleaner view of the panther who is obviously the main player in this photo and the fact that we're going to remove the odd bits of grass here i think we're exercising a reasonable level of artistic license without being visually deceitful so a couple of other things i'd like to do is maybe darken down the foreground here just so that our eye leads in a little better towards him as well and we can do the same here as well either maybe blur this area slightly up here and again that will just help to bring our viewers eye down towards the panther i'm also finding a lot of this foliage around here to the left just a little bit distracting because it's quite bright so perhaps we'll dial in and see what we can do about that and the other thing i'd love to do to the actual panther itself because at the moment it's just a bit of a black blob i would love to see whether i can actually add a little bit more dimensionality perhaps with a bit of dodging and burning okay hopefully you follow along with my game plan make sense in here but my gosh i've made the right mess of that haven't i so let's delete that and get into the edit the very first thing i'm going to do is remove these grasses from over the top of our panther so i'm going to come down and select the clone tool i'm going to come up to my zoom tab here hold the space bar and drag our panther over and then click to select a sample source and then i can just start painting over the top of the twigs and each point i'm just going to click and re-sample an area or tone of the panther that i think best matches where i'm painting over and if i don't get it right i can just re-sample from somewhere similar and paint over again i'm using the alt or option on a mac just to tell luminar where i want to sample from and then i click once on the beginning of a line and then i just start painting up and over the top of it and each time i get to a new piece of grass i select a new sample point and begin painting again so if i tackle this piece of grass here all i'm doing is looking for the tone that should be represented there and we're probably sampling from a pretty good place there super easy okay now you've got the idea of how i'm going to be using the clone tool i'm going to speed this bit up for you [Music] so i've done my best to remove the grass from over the panther here so let's look at before and our after before and after if you didn't see this original i don't think you'd really know any difference okay so now we're ready to start our proper edit so let's come to fit to screen and we'll do the edit in two passes the first will be a global edit where we make sure that the photo's looking good overall and then i'll come into specific areas of the photo to make changes using our local masks so first of all let's get into the enhanced ai grab the accent ai slider and just give that a little tweak left and right and just see what it's doing for us it's always such a good kickstarter that i like to just leverage just a little bit of that accent ai next we're going to jump into the light section because i feel that our color balance is just a little bit on the green side so i'm going to grab the temperature and warm that up slightly and i also think i need to just add in a little bit of magenta all right let's look at our before and thereafter okay the exposure's pretty good so i'll leave that but if i start grabbing the smart contrast and pushing that up while it's certainly adding a lot of richness to the foliage and the tree trunks here unfortunately it's pushing our panther so far into the territories of pure black that we're losing all detail so i want to be really mindful about how much of that i put in so i'm going to double click to reset that and leave that alone as well now i might bring the highlights down just a little bit to protect the highlights on the leaves there and i'm going to grab the shadow slider and start to increase that because i've dropped the highlights and i've boosted the shadows i'm aware that i've lost a little bit of contrast in the overall photo so to rectify that i could either play with the whites and black slider here or what i prefer to do is come to my curve section and just grab the bottom slider which represents the blacks and just move that up until it just literally starts to touch the start of our histogram curve and then i let go and looking at the redrawn histogram i can see that this comes down to this exact bottom left point which means i've now got a pure black and i'm going to follow the same approach for the whites so i can grab the top right hand point and start pulling that towards the left until the point basically matches up with this very bottom of the histogram here and once i know that's in a line i can let go and now we have much better contrast in our image unlike luminar ai's other tools we don't actually have a toggle to see the before and after with the light panel but what we can do is actually undo the changes that we did so this will give us our before and then we can just use the hotkey for undo which is ctrl z and that will reapply those changes so it's a bit of a hack a bit of a workaround but we can see our before and after that way okay let's move on to the structure ai tool and i'm going to push this all the way to 100 which is obviously far too much but if i toggle this off and i toggle it on what i'm looking for is areas of the photo where i think this may actually be of benefit in particular our panther so without and with and looking at the panther and he suddenly got a lot more pop to him so what i'm gonna do is actually use our paintbrush tool and if i were to paint with a hundred percent opacity we would have this exact effect wherever i painted but what i'm gonna do is just bring the opacity down to i know 15 20 whatever and now what i can do is just start painting layers of this effect over the panther now i've clicked and i'm starting to paint so currently we won't see that effect at all but as soon as i release we just got a slight 16 structure ai enhancement over the panther i'm just going to bring the brush size up with my right bracket key and just go for another sweep and if i'm bleeding over the edge of the panther here i really don't mind too much i'm not worried about getting structural halos around him it's not going to be that noticeable and then if there's areas on the panther where i particularly want to add structure so eyes for example on his face or maybe where his leg meets his body here i may want to put a little bit more structure there this bit of detail and with that addition of structure our panthers starting to pop out a little bit more so let's look at it without the structure and then bring it back and i think that's just a nice little addition a nice little change to him perhaps it's a little heavy-handed so we'll ease it back to 73 percent and we can move on and now i've changed the white balance in the light section i'm pretty happy with the colors overall but one little tip i'd recommend doing is just grab the saturation slider and push it all the way to 100 and if you have an object in your scene that you feel should be neutral such as the black of the panther you can see when the saturation is pushed to 100 it has a lot of blue and purple tinges going on so if you want to minimize a color tinge in a particular area what you can do is come into the saturation section select it we can come down to the offending colors which in this case are the blue and the purple and just ease those back out a little bit and that helps to neutralize our panther so when we reset the saturation to zero by double clicking it we know that it's grays and blacks are more pure and they don't have a particular color bias and so just to be clear the only reason we pushed that saturation to a hundred was just so that it was easier to see those color biases i mentioned before that the highlights on the leaves were a little distracting in my opinion and what you could come and do is come into the luminance section so that's the brightness of particular colors and we could grab the brightness of the green and see if pulling that down to the left helps us at all and we can do the same with the yellows as well but because these areas are the highlights they don't actually have much color in them themselves so i'm not actually able to really control them in this way but it was worth a go now we spoke before about bringing attention to the panther so one thing that will really help us do that is to enhance the details on the panther so i'm going to zoom into him and i'm just going to start grabbing the different detail sliders pull them all the way up and just see how it affects the panther so that's with the small details on and double clicking it resets it i quite like that one if i grab the medium details not so much in love with that and what about the large i think the small details were the most beneficial for us for bringing out the actual details themselves of the panther but i also think the large details also help us just with the sculpting so i'm going to increase the small details all the way up dial in a lesser percentage for the large details and i'm also going to play with the sharpness slider and i'm just keeping my eye on the panther i'm really not concerned about the gnarly effect it's having on the grasses around here i'm not bothered with that whatsoever because i'm just going to paint this effect on the panther only where i want it i'm going to start working with the mask now but before i do i take a visual snapshot in my own mind my own memory i look at the photo and try and remember what these effects are doing so if i toggle this off we see our before and i toggle it on you can see the effect that the sharpening and introduction of the small and the large details is having and now i can get that mask because as soon as i click this is going to disappear and again with that 16 opacity which has been set from the tool we were using before i can just start to paint this over our hero right here and because we're working with a lower opacity if i click and i go again basically i'm just going to keep adding this effect where i paint it it's just layering up the strength and the more we paint the closer we're taking this to that full effect we can use the left bracket key to decrease the size of the brush and to be honest if i wasn't doing a tutorial i would spend a little bit more time being a little bit more precise with this and hopefully you're seeing a problem with this workflow i'm masking over this panther time and time again so surely once i've created one mask for that panther wouldn't it be great if i could just reuse that mask without having to repaint it every time in case it's escaped your attention skyrim are releasing luminar neo and this new piece of software they're going to be enhancing the functionality of masks i'm hoping that we're going to be able to copy masks from one layer to another which would be amazing but one of the things they are introducing is automatic ai driven masking so that means that we're going to actually be able to select classes of items within our photos so that might be animals skies skies how many skies would you have roads foliage things like that and it will automatically select it so i'm really hopeful that'll be a nice step forward for the next evolution of the luminar software okay that mask looks really rough and ready so auto masking sounds amazing to me but let's have a look at our details off and our details on that's a nice little enhancement particularly around his face and his eyes so here's our before is our after okay let's go back to fit to screen and let's add a vignette because i think that's going to help to draw our attention to our panther even more so what i'm going to do is just push the amount all the way to -100 choose our subject being our panther here and now we can play with the feather i always recommend pushing your feather quite high probably all the way to 100 because that's going to give you a smoother gradation from the very darkest parts towards the middle and it's just going to help with the believability if you feel like you want to brighten the center point up we can do that so i might do that just a little bit and we can play with the roundness and just decide exactly what kind of look we want to have for that vignette and once we're happy with the overall size and shape now we can come back and play with the amount and the reason i push the amount all the way to -100 just so i can see what i'm doing with the other sliders and then i just dial it back to a point where i feel it's much more subtle much more believable okay let's have a look at our before and without the vignette i just feel like my eye gets a little bit lost in the sea of green on the left hand side and i turn that on and it's just that darkening that helps to hold our eye and bring us in on our panther now as i said at the beginning i don't want to go into the creative section too much i don't want this image to veer off from reality so i'm going to leave most of this alone but one thing i may do is just come into the not the mood tool but the mystical tool and just add a little bit of this now i will just add a little bit so you can see here so this is our before and this is our aft and it's just helping to soften things off and i think when we have such a busy area of foliage with all the dry wood the leaves there's a lot of local contrast in this area around here and it's very visually distracting it's taking our attention away from our panther so if i turn it off and we go back to normal and put it on i just feel that gentle softening goes a long way okay time for my favorite bit let's come up to the eye tool and check out our before and after here's our before looking pretty washed out the color balance isn't quite right we've got all that dry grass over the top of our panther and bamo the colors look better the contrast looks better overall the photo just looks richer and fuller okay i think this is looking good but you don't watch my channel for good we want great right so this next stage is going to involve a little bit of local masking and that's where we're talking into specific areas of a photo and making changes just in that particular area so for the most part i'm going to focus on the panther itself i'm going to show you a really cool trick for using negative contrast to increase contrast okay stay with me that will make sense shortly and i'm also going to try and take care of those very bright leaves that i'm still finding a little bit visually distracting okay let's come up to the paintbrush icon here which is our local masking and we'll add a new basic local mask and i'm going to make some changes here which will affect the photo overall but then i'm going to paint the effect in only where i want it and so i'm going to start off by darkening down those leaves they're really catching my eye these ones here so i'm going to just darken those down and i'll bring the opacity up to let's say 50 percent a few clicks on the right bracket key just to increase the size of that brush and now i'm going to paint that effect in now currently while i'm painting as you'll know we just see the red which represents the mask itself and now when i release we get to see the effect that we created over here applied here with 50 opacity if there are other areas that you think are just a little bit too bright and catching your eye like the grass that's just underneath the panther i'm just going to do one sweep over the top of that just to darken that down and then maybe just the odd click or paint over those leaves again and i'll just reduce the size of that just so that i can get in a little bit more precisely around the panthers head there now this bit above is back that's starting to bug me too you can start to get a little bit lost in this okay let's toggle this off and toggle it on and i'm just controlling that brightness and if you feel like you've gone just a little bit too far you can just always ease that back just a little bit okay i'm going to add another basic mask and the purpose of this mask will be to take care of all the local contrast all this busyness that we have going on in the foliage so that our eye can rest a little easier on our panther in this part of the photo so i'm going to do a couple of things to control that one will be just to darken it down i'm going to reduce the contrast pull those highlights down again a little bit and the biggest change will come from reducing structure and you can see if i take this all the way to -100 we have this kind of weird painterly look going on here where everything's just kind of getting blurred together so i don't want to go that aggressive with it but you can see what it's going to do it's almost emulating a soft out of focus look and now all i need to do is just paint that where i want it and that will be towards the edge of the frames and anywhere in the foliage i don't really want people looking basically where i don't want somebody's eye to rest and so i'm thinking back to that wedge shape that i drew initially when i was documenting what it was i wanted to edit in this photo and so you can see that kind of triangle going on there that i'm leaving alone and again if we think we may have gone just a little bit too far which is very easy to do we can just ease those settings back just a little bit alternatively we could have used the eraser tool with a low opacity and just taken out the effect that way okay final piece of the puzzle let's add another basic mask and this time we're going to paint over the black panther and what i want to do is actually increase contrast in the panther and i'm going to do this in a counter-intuitive way if i was to push the contrast slider to the right you can see that panther basically becomes a big black blob and that is because to increase contrast we take the shadows and they get pushed more towards black and we get the highlights and they get pushed more towards white creating more contrast between the bright and the dark components of the photos but because our panther exists purely in those shadows and blacks basically we're crushing him down to a black object so what we're going to do is actually go the other way and reduce the contrast and that's going to increase the contrast so we can double click to reset that and already it's looking better as it was and this time what we're gonna do is grab that contrast slider and push it to the left so by doing that the rest of the photo looks really bad but now we can actually see a lot more detail in the black panther himself and that's great but we have brightened him up so by playing with some of the other sliders here hopefully we'll be able to get the best of both worlds where we're adding the detail in but we're keeping to his rich black look okay let's toggle that off and on and keep our eye on the panther only so off and on okay let me paint the mask on the panther and i'm going to actually pause the video and just do that because you don't need to see it again but how much time could i have saved if luminar ai actually allowed me to reuse that mask over and over again i've gone in and roughly painted a mask over our panther again so let's have a look at what this effect does for us there you go we've kept his lovely rich black but we've added contrast by doing the strangest of things and reducing contrast so here's our before on our panther and here's our after with all that lovely texture and detail so now it's time for my favorite bit of all the before and after okay let's come up to the eye tool here let's see where we came from and where we got to and if we look at that original you can see it's very tepid washed out those grasses are a big distraction over our panther and now we have a richer much punchier more powerful image and when i have finished editing i normally find i've pushed things just a little bit too far and that's why i love this slider in the bottom right because we can reduce the effect all the way back to the beginning apart from the cloning that will always stay constant but we can increase the slider and just wiggle that back and forth keep an eye on our photo until we find we've hit that goldilocks sweet spot where it's not too much not too little but just right and when we're there we can just hit export save the photo to disk call it something meaningful keep our quality nice and high and press export to be honest while we did the editing heavy lifting inside of luminar ai i don't think that was actually the hero of the piece here i mean maybe the black panther's the hero of the piece but in terms of the software i think it's gigapixel that actually enabled us to do this particular edit because if we think back to that original photo that i was sent by the time we cropped it down to something much more impactful we just didn't have the resolution inside of the file to do anything meaningful with it so like i say if you're someone who needs to enlarge your photos something that was shot on a small megapixel camera or something that you've had to crop in tightly on gigapixel ai does an amazing job of enlarging it since i did my last video where i featured it a couple of cool things have happened one is you guys expressed a lot of interest in it and the second thing which is really exciting is i've been in communication with topaz who make the software and they were impressed with my last video and they said hey we'd like to offer you a discount code that you can provide to your viewership so if you guys want to get hold of any of their really powerful ai tools so gigapixel ai that we featured here sharpen ai which is in its own right an amazing piece of software d noise ai you can save 15 using the link below and the discount code which i can't remember put on screen now and so use that link if this is of interest to you i think they do a bundle for all of their software where you can save a little bit more and the discount code should apply to that as well and if you guys want to be featured in anthony edits your photos send them through to anthony edits your photos at gmail.com but please be aware guys i'm getting so many requests nowadays for my time for answering questions things like that i just can't get back to everybody but going forward i'm going to be prioritizing my channel supporters and channel members as my way of saying thank you to those guys so if what i'm doing is helping you guys you can help me just by supporting the channel for less than a cup of coffee each month just helps keep me going keep the power and keep the lights on all that good stuff anyway thank you so much guys any questions leave them in the comments below and i'll see in the next video there should be one popping up around my head right now so click on that one and i'll see you there cheers

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 9,755

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: rlrTRSaPtKw

Length: 29min 43sec (1783 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021