Perspective Shootout: Luminar AI vs Nik Collection (Who Wins?)

if you do travel or street photography chances are you've had some opportunities where you've taken photographs of buildings and you get back and look at them and they're just not quite right the perspective is off that's we're going to need to use some perspective correction software and we're going to take a look at two head to head we're going to look at the perspective controls inside of luminar ai and perspective effects inside of the nick collection in this video hi my name is william beam i'm a photographer in central florida i've done a lot of travel photography and i've got a lot of photos of buildings that aren't quite the way they seemed when i was there in person and that's a common thing you go out with your lens you're kind of walking around it may not be exactly an architectural lens it may not be a tilt shift lens you're probably just walking around with something to capture things but you still want to get good results you can do that with perspective tools and today we're going to do a head-to-head look at the perspective tools inside of luminar ai and perspective effects we're not going to go dive deep it's not a product review this is kind of looking at what do the automatic settings and the simple sliders do in each one if you want to get in and get out quick that's what we're going to be taking a look at to see which one works best for us so with that in mind let's go ahead and take a look at our first photo okay i'm going to start off with this building and we're going to start with luminar ai on each photo and then we're going to start off with perspective effects after that so i'm going to go over here to edit in luminar ai and notice that for each of these photos the way lightroom works it's going to go ahead and toss out a tiff basically and you don't have an option for the original you can come over here and choose different types i'm going to stick with what it offers as a tiff that's going to be important when we start working with perspective ai because some of the features inside of there want to use the original raw file or else they won't work and i'll show you what that looks like okay so we're inside of luminar ai you can see over here we're going to go over to the edit mode and there's a couple of things we can do we can take a look at composition and also down here in the professionals we can look at optics i'm going to click on optics first and we're going to look at our lens distortion there's a checkbox here for defringe and we can try and see if we've got any lens distortion to correct and i think on this one there's a little bit of bowing and that just kind of took it out of the way so let's say that's good and we're going to go back over here now to our composition ai and find our perspective and there's really a couple of controls you've got these two little boxes over here that automatically do things for you and there's some sliders that you can work on your own so let's start off with the built-in tools so that kind of gives us our horizontal perspective now let's take a look at our vertical perspective and that's it one of the things that you would expect when you're using tools like this is that you're going to lose some pixels on the outside edge so if you notice down here at the bottom there was a little bit of the street and now it's just kind of right up on the curb and you can see that it's not quite level here you can see the street over here then again this is in an old area havana it could be that the curve is not quite level either but when i'm looking at the arches and columns overall i think it's done a very good job of correcting the perspective what i want to see is how this compares now some of the things i'm looking at are on this crop line over here and i'm seeing a little bit of difference between for this column i'm seeing a little difference with the width here and the width over here and maybe not quite 100 percent level at the top i'm going to tilt this just a bit and that's about the amount of room you have to do your cropping is you can see the crop handles over here but the rest of the photo is cut off there's not a lot of room for us to play around here and that little bit of correction that i did up here at the top may not be exactly what we want over here and it's just kind of like using these little crosshairs and this grid pattern to determine where is the right spot i'm looking at the lines along this area right now and i think that'll do for us so with that i'm going to hit enter to accept the crop and i'm going to click apply to send this back to lightroom then we'll go ahead and take a look at perspective effects all right so we have our tiff over here from luminar this is our original before i go into perspective effects i'm going to make this a little bit larger because i need to get a bit of information and i need to know the file name so i'm going to copy that and once we get inside i'll show you why i needed that information so we'll go here to edit in perspective effects edit with our tiff file all right so this is the user interface for perspective effects we corrected some distortion in luminar ai and i wanted to do the same thing here but the difference is you can't do it from a tiff file you need to have the original file as you can see this message over here shows so in order to do that i can click on auto but it's going to say we need the original image and it'll tell you why i need that and it gives you a bit more information but we're just going to go ahead and say open and it's going to look for the folder where you got your file and what i want to do is come over here to search and click paste that's the file name in travel and this is the raw file it can't do the distortion correction from the tiff that we created inside a lightroom it must have the raw file so now it has that it's done as distortion correction so what we want to do next is come down here to perspective and you see there's a number of controls but again on this little uh head to head we're just using the auto so we'll go ahead and click auto on there and we've got our result and quite honestly this one looks a little bit different you can see we've got much more room on the bottom and you can see the street leading up and you can see our horizon on the top looks very level i don't honestly i don't think there's anything else i want to do to this so i'm going to go ahead and click save so let's take a look at the two of these side by side all right so you can see over here on the right hand side where we don't have much room in the street this is the one we did in luminar ai and over on the left hand side we've got a little bit more of the street this is the one that we did in nick perspective effects as far as the overall crop i can see that there's much more room on the top over here and less room on the bottom down here and vice versa on the next side the overall perspective control i kind of like what i see on the nik side better i like the way it cropped the photo better but i wouldn't throw away this one over here i think i've still got a little bit of a slant which is something that you could correct inside of luminar ai whereas the building is running from this way and pushing back a little bit further on this side not much but just a little bit whereas i don't have any corrections that i'd want to manually do over here on the nik effect side so i would give a slight edge on this one to nick all right let's go ahead and take a look at another photo on this photo you can see we've got a lot of foreground room over here on the bottom we've got our towers that are leaning slightly inward i'm not going to do any uh distortion correction on this photo with either tool we're just going to go ahead and solely do the perspective control so here is our horizontal and then here's our upright i'm going to go ahead and accept this crop because it's really not leaving us any room to do anything else i one of the things i don't like about the crop is again with luminar it tends to pull off a lot of the bottom so this guy's feet are cut off it's it's a little knit but it's just something that i think this is not quite 100 upright i think it did a very good job over here on this side on this one i think that's still leaning out just a little bit and maybe that is a distortion correction that we could make but i wanted to see how just the perspective controls work overall it's much better than the original so i think i'm happy with that let's go ahead and click apply go back to lightroom and then we'll pick the same photo for perspective effects in this case we're just going to go over here to perspective click auto and we've got a different result i think that as far as correcting the leaning towers it's done a much better job we've got more room in the foreground over here we've cut off the cross up here and i don't know i've got that much room let's go over here instead of doing an auto crop let's see if there's anything that we can work with and this is the thing that i like about perspective effects that we don't see inside of lunar ai is that it'll show you how it kind of warps the photo to make the perspective corrections and the reason is selected this crop is because down here that's the bottom where this little part is being warped in i think we can probably move this up a little bit so we don't cut off the man's feet and we still get the crosses on top and i'm going to apply that it's a bit tight up there we might have been able to work something else out if we were willing to take off you know this side of the building but overall i think i get a better result now with nick because it'll allow me to work with the crop whereas luminar ai you get a very limited display so over here since we can work with the crop tool and we can see the distortion of how it put things together it gives you more choices i think to put together your final result so let's save that and we'll take a look at one more photo all right i'm looking at this you can see we've got some very drastic diagonal lines going on over here and there's a bit of an arch back in here and a bit of a dome up at the top so this is going to be one of the more difficult ones to do and i i'm curious to see what we end up getting i'm trying to decide if i want to do any distortion correction on this or not let's take a look and see what we get before we'll take a look on this side i think i'm going to use that as a little bit of distortion correction here which means i'll end up doing the same thing in nick so let's go to composition let's take a look at our perspective and this is kind of what i was talking about with the crop we're in basically the crop tool with the composition ai but i don't have much more that i can work with in other words there was a lot down here at the bottom that we're not seeing anymore after it's done its correction however look at the lines on these columns the lines are straight up and down and this is an interesting choice up here because that's going into a dome it's a difficult thing to try and do for perspective correction but as far as the perspective of these columns and the doors and over here and these arches on each side i think it's done a great job i would not have cropped it if it were up to me and i still had the room otherwise i would not have cropped it down here luminar ai didn't really give me a choice with that all right to do our distortion remember we have to put in access to the original file and there's this one over here so we'll click open so that gives us our distortion correction and now let's try our perspective and this one i think i like better simply for what we can do with the crop you notice we've got a lot of space down here you can see the step up you can get into the seal there was a little of protrusion over here and the other one when we do our side by side i'll take a look and we're not seeing quite as much of the ceiling we're getting more of i think almost an eye level view in here columns are straight i'm liking this one very much if we were to take a look at the crop this is what happened to the photo when it did the perspective correction so all that data and information is still there we simply cropped it out because as we expand this we can't go beyond the width of what we have down here and this is the view that i'm seeing inside of nick's perspective effects that we're not getting inside of luminar ai and it gives you a few more choices i kind of like that so let's go ahead and apply this and we'll take a look at our side by side so now we can see our two views over here on the right this is the one done by luminar ai if you can remember by the fact that we did not get the bottom of of this little opening right here and on the left this is the one done by nick perspective effects you could have gotten this view the same kind of crop with nick because it gave you the option to see how the perspective corrections changed everything and you could have moved that crop up with luminar ai you didn't have a choice what it gave you is what you got so you didn't really have a choice if you wanted to move it up to this level or not and maybe see more of the dome with nick we could have done that but we i stuck with what it gave us now another thing is the look over here we've got this i don't know if this is a light or a camera but there's a little protrusion over there we could probably go ahead and clean that up if we wanted to with a clone and stamp or a healing brush it was cropped out over here it's still in the photograph it was cropped down so we've got a much tighter crop on the sides using nick than we did over here and i think that's just simply a choice the difference is with nick we could have made the same choice as this we could have raised it up a little bit maybe got a little bit wider but that's the difference and i think as far as doing the perspective correction both are doing a great job the columns are straight over here the columns are straight over here i'd say this one might be bowing just a little bit i think overall nick did a slightly better job but what i really like about nick is the fact that it gave me the choice to alter the crop after the fact and luminar ai did not so that is a quick look at our head-to-head comparison of perspective correction tools in luminar ai versus the nik collection perspective effects let me know in the comments below which one did you prefer do you like the one that luminar just kind of gets in and gets out and everything's done or do you want to fiddle around with things a bit more with some of the controls that were inside of perspective effects we didn't go too deep into the controls in perspective effects or even on the sliders that were available in luminar i just really wanted to take a look at what the automatic controls were i'm kind of doing this as a head-to-head comparison of quickly going in correcting your perspective and then getting out so tell me what you prefer if you like this video please go ahead click the like button that lets youtube know for doing something right and then subscribe you'll see more videos click the little bell notification icon so you get a notice the next time i put one out thank you so much we'll see you again in the next video you

Channel: William Beem Photography

Views: 710

Keywords: Perspective Shootout: Luminar AI vs Nik Collection, perspective correction in luminar ai, perspective correction in perspective efex, Luminar AI vs Nik Collection, photo editing, post processing, photography, luminar 4 editing, photoshop alternatives, how to fix to fix travel photos, how to fix architectural photos, tilting building, william beem photography, luminar ai composition ai, nik collection 3, nik collection tutorial

Id: K2G-hUJ5Nto

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021