PHOTO EDITING WITH LUMINAR AI FOR BEGINNERS - Simple tools, powerful results.

hi guys anthony turnum here and welcome to another episode of anthony edits your photos in the last episode i featured this photograph here in the top left from hillel and i showed how we can apply texture and actually move objects inside luminar ai but he sent me five other really good photos that i didn't even look at so in this photo editing tutorial what i want to do is look at each of these photos and see how we can use luminar ai's powerful tools to quickly make enhancements to these photos [Music] one of the reasons luminar ai is so popular particularly with people just getting started with photo editing is that it's amazingly simple to get really good results but what i want to do in this video is show you how you can create some really nice results but do it very quickly so we're not going to go too deep with each photo but we'll look at some key tools for each photograph so let's kick start things with this bird here of course inside of luminar ai we have access to all of these templates which can immediately enhance your photos but i always like to take things a little deeper and show you guys how we can actually create an edit from the ground up so let's come into the editing section and the first and most powerful tool that i love to look at is accent ai let's grab this slider and just start bringing that up and if we toggle that off and toggle it on straight away we can see that this has made some great improvements to our photo so toggle it off toggle it on we might think that's a little bit too much so we can just ease it back just a little bit and whenever we're editing any photo it's really important just to have an idea of what it is we want to achieve and this photo i think is a good example of an image that really doesn't need too much doing to it we just want to enhance it as much as we can so in this image i feel that all we really need to do is bring out some nice contrast on the bird itself and perhaps lose some of these distracting elements around the edge of the frame so my eye is caught by three particular elements this one here in the top left this one here and this little white tuft here so i'm going to remove this one here and i'm just going to crop out these two at the top so let's grab the composition tool and i'm just going to bring the crop in slightly so i lose those two top elements we can reposition our crop so the birds further on the left or potentially on the right it's up to us and when we're happy with that we'll just close that tab down the crop's applied and now we're just left with this little issue here to get rid of i could use either the erase tool to erase that or what i like to do just for a little bit more precision and control is come down to the clone tool here that will always take you back to your original image and then basically we can click anywhere on the photo and that means we're going to be able to paint whatever this is sampling over a new area so i'm going to take from here and click and just paint over that little element there and just like that it's gone i'm certainly not going to clean up this whole picture but there are other elements that i could just use this technique to clean up so i can just click and sample from a new area and paint that over areas that i think are just a little bit too distracting so that is exactly what i'm doing here and this approach of cloning items out you can take that as far or as little as you want in another episode of anthony edits your photos i actually removed a couple who has stood right by a bridge that were was right in the way kind of ruining the photo and so if you want to see that i'll link to that in the top left of this video right now but in terms of cloning you've got the idea i'm just going to leave that there i think and if we want to see what we've achieved we can come up to luminar's really great tool little before and after tool here's our before here's our after and so as i toggle that on and off you can just see how easy it is to clean up your photo okay i feel like i want to bring out more detail in the bird but not the background so there's a couple of things we could do if i scroll back up to the top here we've got structure ai which is a really great tool if i apply this and i'll put it on full intensity basically we can see we're bringing out loads and loads of structure throughout the whole image now obviously all of this background is pretty ugly and distracting i don't want that look throughout my whole photo but i like what it's doing to the bird if i toggle it off and on and i just look at the bird i think it's just bringing out a nice bit of contrast to our bird so one of the great things with any of the tools inside luminar ai is they all come with a mask so you don't have to apply the effect to the whole image so what we're going to do is use our mask which is this little tool here add mask and using the paint brush tool what i can do is actually just paint this effect in only where i want it and so i'm just going to roughly paint over the bird because this is a video where i i said i just want to get through some of these edits and do them relatively quickly i'm not going to be too precise about things like my mask so if i toggle this off and toggle it on you can just see that that now affects the bird i feel like the background that this guy sat on isn't particularly dynamic and so what i might like to do is maybe bring up the reflected blue from the sky here so i can come into the color section and i can either crank up the saturation throughout the whole picture or if i prefer i could reset that and then just come down into the blue section in the saturation here and just grab that and as i push that to the right you can see that we're just increasing the saturation of the blue only and in the name of getting through the edits as quickly as possible and just showcasing you some of luminar's more useful tools i'm going to call that done so let's look at our before and that's showing us our original file minus the crop we do have the crop applied to that but let's look at our after there we go before after so i think that edit is a nice enhancement and we've kept things in the realms of believability unlike this edit i did in our last episode of entity edits your photos where i took things in a really creative direction i'm just showing you how we can enhance a photo in a much more natural way okay let's move on to photo number two now i really like this image and you may really like the fact that this guy here is sat against an undistracting pure blue background that's really nice but for this one i'm going to actually introduce a brand new sky into this image and you'll see just how easy that is with luminar so if i come into the sky ai and i come to the sky selection panel here i've got access to all my skies now when you buy alumni you won't have access to all of these skies after much scouring and research over the internet i've purchased what i believe to be one of the best if not the best sky packs around because it gives you so many new and unique options and that's great if you're dealing with skies and replacing skies on a frequent basis you really don't want to be limited to what ships with luminar so i'll put a link to this skypac if you're interested in getting hold of this it comes with 300 high resolution skies and it's excellent value and as far as luminar ai goes in its masking if i just click any one of these luminar will do a quick calculation working out where the mask is and drop that sky in immediately and while the default calculation that luminar does to create the mask to drop the sky in normally gives you a really great result if you want to fine-tune things uh you've got all these options here so for me at the moment i feel like this is just a little bit too bright and saturated so what you could do is potentially grab the atmospheric haze slider bring that to the right and that's just going to knock back that intensity of the sky into something that feels much more believable now while this bright blue background which is great when you're dealing with sky replacements for real estate and architecture things like that i want to create something a little bit more dramatic for this one so i may try something a little bit more like this you do need to be careful when you are replacing skies because if you're replacing a sunset sky with an element that was shot during the daytime which this was oftentimes it's hard to actually get that balance of believability no matter how good the masking is but what you do have to help you along your way is actually the scene relighting option here and so if i take that away that puts this back to its original state the foreground but if i push it all the way to the right what that's going to do is actually take color elements from the sky and actually start to introduce those into the foreground so that's a really useful slider it appears that we do have a slight fringing around the bird and if i zoom in you can see that it looks like we do but as luminar ai renders the close-up version you can see that it is actually really really minimal and we do have options with the mask refinement to actually fine-tune that and just create a tighter mask but again i'm not going to dive into all of that in this particular video because the fine details of how the tools work is not really what this video is about again this little guy here i feel sat right in the middle of the frame i don't feel it's a very dynamic composition so i'm just going to grab my composition tool and as well as bringing this tighter in around the bird another thing you can do with this tool is you see how our horizontal line here is not actually perfectly straight and horizontal what we can do is click outside of the crop and start to rotate this handle and so now we can actually make sure when we let go that that line is actually horizontal and we can move this around we get a lovely rule of thirds grid over the crop so that we can do things like put our bird on this intersection third point here we could bring him over so he's on this one or even bring it up here so we get more sky in the shot i think for this one i'm going to go with something like that i know i said i wasn't going to dive into too many details here but i do feel like that sky is just not sitting quite well enough for me in terms of believability so i may actually just bring the atmospheric haze up slightly and i can play with the warmth as well and that's going to introduce either orange or blue tonality so by taking this more towards the blue by reducing the warmth it feels like it sits better with the original shot of that bird if we feel like the clouds are too much in focus which they are a little bit we can use the defocus amount just to start blurring that background as well let me toggle this off well we've got the pure blue in the background and toggle it on again and now we've introduced a whole new sky you may not like this and you may also think that ethically that's not the right thing to do actually switch out a sky from how the original was but i'm just showing you what possibilities are out there if for example i don't like this sky which i'm not really a big fan of in this particular photo we can just switch it out for something else try something different so if i look at our before a bright blue sky now we've introduced this purple hue so you're free to just go through and choose any sky that you feel looks better or would better suit your image i feel that introducing a blue based sky is much more believable than the sunset that i was playing around with before so it's entirely up to you what you want to do but even just the introduction of a sky like this i feel enhances this photo because it's just adding a little bit more visual interest into the scene rather than that very flat one wash one hue sky okay let's look at our before and after before and after it's a subtle change if you want to take things further we can grab the accent ai and crank that up a little bit and that's going to help bring out a bit of detail on the bird and i always love using this slider i always find sometimes it's a little sometimes it's a lot but by applying some of accent ai you will normally enhance your photos so before and after the accent ai so before and after all our changes cool i'm happy with that let's move on well hello there little turtles let's see what we can do with you the first thing we need to do is actually analyze our scene visually like just look at it and think okay what do i need to do now the turtles and please don't be a smart ass i'm like well actually they're terrapins or whatever they are i don't know i want to call them turtles the turtles take up a really small amount of the overall visual space of our photo so if you're able to zoom in a little tighter onto these guys definitely do that but hilol may have been at the extent of his zoom and if you want to check out what your settings were when you took photos just come into the catalog section and come down to this little eye icon in the bottom right and then you can see okay he shot this at 300 millimeters so i'm gonna guess that he was using a 300 millimeter zoom and he was maxed out and obviously it's taken in a zoo so this is as close as we can get in camera so i think we need to do a tighter crop and just like the shot that we had earlier with the bird with the distracting elements again i feel like these leaves and the little hot spots they just take our eye away from the turtles so what i think i'm going to do here is perhaps do a little cloning to get rid of some of these hot spot leaves and i'm also going to play with the color vibrancy and color saturation of these orange leaves here just to visually push those back and then i'm going to see what i can do for bringing out detail and structure in the turtles if i zoom in here we can actually see that the original photo is pretty soft and that's quite common when you photograph with a telephoto lens you're more likely to suffer from camera shake than you will with a wider angle so the fact that i'm seeing a bit of blurring here that just comes down to trying to get yourself more stable when you're taking photos with a high powered telephoto zoom you really need to make sure you're nice and stable when you take these photos so potentially resting the lens or the camera on the railing that may have been there in the zoo and then just locking yourself out i even find that by not breathing when i take these photos like just holding my breath just helps to stabilize you and you'll get a much sharper photo but this is what it is what can we do in post-production to try and salvage this image and make it better let's dive into the edit section again and first things first let's use our composition ai tool just to zoom in and of course we can use the ai and see what luminar ai suggests for a crop and there you go it does suggest just a nice tighter crop but i think we can be even more aggressive with this crop if we come in like this we're putting our turtles both on the lower thirds and i think that'll be a nice crop so i'll just close that down and apply it i'm gonna jump into enhance ai and i'm gonna crank this bad boy up now as soon as i push this up you can see that the ai is bringing up all of this detail in the leaves in the background and to be honest that's not really what i want nor do i want all the detail in the sort of rocky area at the front here i just want it on the turtles so i'm going to come over to my mask i'm going to have my paintbrush to paint the mask in and i'm just going to start painting over these turtles now i'm increasing the size of my brush and i'm doing that not by using any sliders but just by using the bracket keys on my keyboard so the left and right bracket keys actually change the size of your brush so i've been really crude with that mask but let's toggle that off and toggle it on and just like that you can see we have a lot more interest on our turtles without affecting the background perfect we can do the same with structure ai as well if i boost that to the right you're going to see that it's bringing in structure everywhere through the whole image and it's doing a really good job of it i just don't want that structure everywhere so what i might do is actually bring it up to a point that i'm happy with with the turtles i'm then going to get my mask and i'm going to paint it in with 100 over my turtles so that i know that they're getting the full effect of that change so they're getting nice bit of structure again let's toggle that out before and thereafter that's awesome but now i may just bring a little bit of it in into the background so you're not limited with these masks to say all or nothing what we can do is change the opacity and i'll bring that down to i don't know let's say 10 and basically we're going to get the same effect that we had on our turtles but applied just with 10 on the background so i am just going to click and start painting left and right over the background and just like that you may have seen a slight change before and after that's quite subtle if you want to go again with your mask you can just do one more sweep so i might just put a little bit up here and look for other areas particularly the dark areas where there's not as much contrast and just paint it into those areas i was hoping to show you guys different tools along the way but i'm really tempted just to dive back into this clone tool again and as it says here click to set the source i'm just going to borrow from a part of the image without too much local contrast so here's quite good and i'm just going to paint over some of those distracting areas and again we can change the size of the brush using our bracket keys so i'm just clicking and dragging so it's just those little hot spots that just kind of visually frustrating me frustrating my eye and my eye goes straight to all of those little hot spots i just want to see cool little turtles these guys need to be featured so let's just do a really quick little clone touch up on this and one of the things when you're cloning you want to bear in mind is not to repeat patterns because our eyes are really good at spotting repeating patterns and that's just going to belie any sense of believability if you've got patterns going on in areas which should be organic okay we can close that down i feel like we're looking pretty good but as i said before what i want to do is control the colors so i can drop back the oranges here behind the turtles and i also feel like this area here the rocks are so bright they are a similar brightness to our turtles so that's competing without our eye our eyes going here but it's also coming down to this very visually bright area in the foreground so we will deal to both of those things and then i'll call it a day here so first of all let's jump into the color section and we have the option to desaturate the whole thing or introduce more saturation or more specifically we can talk directly into specific colors so i'm going to grab the orange slider which is referring to most of those leaves and i'm just going to drop that down i can also see bits of yellow as well which i could leave alone but i'm also going to drop those down and i'm going to leave that there and i just want to make sure that we're not affecting our turtles so again i'm going to create a mask but this time i want to take away the effect not apply it in a specific area i want to take it away so this time rather than painting it in i'm going to erase it so i'm just going to come over the turtles here and i'm going to use a smaller brush crank my opacity back up to 100 so i can get it done nice and quickly and we're just gonna paint away from our little friends here and do the same on this guy here and i'm thinking i'm probably gonna need to refine these masks just ever so slightly because you can see that we're getting a bit of bleed around them and so we're reintroducing that orange in the background there so what you can do is just toggle back and forth between the brush and the eraser just to add and remove effects we do and don't want them so we've got a couple of options for dealing with this brighter area down here a quick solution would be to add a vignette so that's a darkening of the corners so if i push the amount down you can see we darken all four corners but one thing i love about luminar ai compared to other software is what you can do is actually rather than being restricted to the center of the frame you can choose your subject so if i click around different areas it moves that vignette so what we could do is actually click just slightly higher than the turtles and as i bring that up you see that's bringing the vignette up here up higher so we could get that in a perfect position so these guys are just highlighted nicely and we're darkening this down now obviously this vignette is far too strong and far too heavy but that's how i like to work with a vignette so you can see exactly what you're doing with your changes and then when you're happy in terms of position for example i can now just toggle this back and forth and just apply it at a point i'm happy with another way to work to add even more control than the vignette would be to create a local mask with a darkening effect and just paint that on down there but i'm happy with what we've done here with the vignette and now let's do our favorite little thing my favorite little thing and that's to look at our before and after so i'll close the tool down click before click after before and after what a big transformation right now one of the fantastic things with luminar is if you feel like you've gone too far with an edit it's not a case of all or nothing or going back into specific tools and dialing each one back what we can do is take the overall look that we've created and come down into the bottom right and just reduce the look of that so we can go this is all off this is all on or do we want to go somewhere in between and we could say we're happy with that because that's a slightly more believable edit than what we had before let's look at our before and here's our after now we nearly forgot but one thing we really want to do with these guys is address that sharpening issue so as i zoom in here you can see that these guys just really are suffering from a little bit of camera blur camera shake so let's jump into the details section and we've got some options here we can increase the sharpening and find a position we like for that and we've also got control over the actual details themselves if you've got a photo which is sharp you probably want to stay away from these sliders but you can certainly add some sharpening which is much more localized and refined but if you've actually got a blurry photo these large medium and small sliders are actually a godsend so if i turn this off and then turn it back on you can see how we are certainly reintroducing some sharpness into this photo before and after and now just like with what we've done before we can actually paint this in just where we want it because i don't want to over sharpen the leaves in the background or even this foreground element here so i'm just going to get my brush i'm going to increase the brush size just so that i can get this done relatively quickly and i'm just going to paint over our little turtle dude here and there we go donatello is done and we'll move over here and deal with leonardo see how he gets on see if he likes a bit of sharpening boom leonardo is sharp right let's zoom out and see our before and after here's our before here's our after okay i think master splinter is happy with that let's move on okay here we have my favorite animal i just absolutely love tigers are they magnificent creatures the statistics on their decline is just so worrying and um just really upsets me but i'm not going to go into all of that we are just going to take this photo for what it is and see if we can't improve it i feel like i may have spent a little bit longer on these first three than i wanted to so i'm just going to show you how quickly you can edit a photo just come into ai enhance crank it up and you're done before after you know that's a huge improvement right just from our before to our after that is such a huge improvement so if you're new to photo editing and you for some reason find all of this other stuff a little bit daunting and it shouldn't be because it's all slider slider-based and you're not going to break anything you can always turn things off and on but basically this enhance ai it's doing so much of the hard work of the photo editing for you all ai based so if you just want to rely heavily on one thing and fix your photos really quickly there you go enhance ai it's going to do so much for you before after okay happy let's move on now i really love this photo i love the colors i love what hillel has done here to capture this guy i think this is absolutely fantastic but again i feel like this guy just needs a little bit of a contrast boost and that may be all we need to do so for example if i increase the accent ai just like with the tiger if i toggle that off and i toggle that on that is a massive improvement on this photo already but i just want to show you some of the tools and see how they can benefit your photo or at least give you a little bit more creative freedom so what we're going to do here i think is we will make this guy stand out from the background a little bit more and one of the ways we can do that is from a color perspective basically the greens in this guy are kind of competing with the greens in the background and that might be absolutely perfect and there's nothing wrong with that in that in this photo it's a lovely bright vibrant photo and i like it as it is but just for the sake of showing a tool and what you can do let's come into the color section again and we can actually dial back say the yellows and the greens and then we could just paint him back in or mask him out mask that effect from our bird and then he's going to pop out a little bit more but i just want to show you a different way of doing it this time so we could actually do that with the black and white filter because in the last video where i actually showcased how to make a much more impactful black and white conversion and there's a link to that in the top right of this video right now and also in the description below but i've been asked can you control certain elements so it's not all black and white but you still have some color well yes you can so let's convert to black and white just by clicking that button there and then if we want to reintroduce a color all we need to do is grab that particular color slider and bring it up you could do the same with the greens and that is how you can control individual colors within your scene in my opinion it's not a good look it's been done uh quite a bit in days gone by and it was overdone it's kind of it was a fad it's been done just just don't do that even though you can i would not recommend doing that but for demonstration purposes here let me just show you what we can do so i'm thinking about the background only at the moment i'm not thinking about our bird himself like tweety pie can just uh can go do one just for a minute we'll we'll just get the background dulled down and what i'm gonna do is bring back him by masking this effect out of him and that will bring back his original vibrance his original intensity okay so we're going to get the eraser tool and that kind of semi-black and white muted look that we just created we're going to remove it from tweety pie and all the uh cartoon characters are getting a run out today we had the turtles before and now we've got tweety pie maybe i should have referenced tigra from the thundercats before if you guys are of the age that you remember thundercats man do me a favor write thundercats in the comments i know i'm showing my age there but i can't be the only one right okay let's turn this off and turn it on it's pretty subtle but can you see how we're knocking back those bright vibrant greens in the leaves and now he's just singing so much louder figuratively that is not literally it's a photo it doesn't come with sound effects let's look at our before and after here's our before here's our after before and after and now i'm looking at that i'm thinking that our enhance ai is actually bringing out too much enhancement in the background let's look at before and after with the enhance ai so again what we could do just to make him pop out even more is just mask him out so this time we're saying we do want the ai enhancement but only on the bird so now we're just going to paint over the bird again i'm being really rough and ready with my masking guys i'm doing this with my mouse not my wacom tablet i'm not using my toolbox for controlling other aspects i'm all doing this just with a mouse so that you can see that you can do that too now if we look at our before and thereafter you can see that he's certainly popping out for sure we need to just refine that mask slightly but i'm just doing this for demonstrative purposes that's a difficult word to say when you're concentrating with your hand on going around a mask we can combo other tools as well like if we actually wanted to increase the vibrancy of the photo we could do that a little bit just so that our bird's brilliance is coming to the fore just a little bit more we haven't even looked at any of luminar's more creative tools here but what we could do if we wanted is add some mystical we can pop a little bit of that in which is just going to give a slight softening but contrast effect as well toggle that off and on and i'm just going to go back to our black and white thing i know i said i was going to have just pretty rough and ready masks but just this little bit of green just to the side of his face i need to brush in the black and white effect not take it away that was just bugging me just a little bit so i'm just gonna go around there there you go that's just drop that green back slightly there you go guys here's our before here's our after so hopefully you can see just how easy it is to improve your photos using luminar ai the possibilities are seriously endless if you're watching this i'm sure you've probably already got luminar ai that's why you're watching but if you haven't you can get it from the link below and save yourself a little bit of money with the discount code at sky 10. if you would like me to edit any of your photos please send them through to anthony edits your photos at gmail.com and who knows the next episode i could be featuring your work thank you so much for watching guys i wish you all the best hello in india thank you so much for sending these through i know it's a really difficult time for india at the moment and the people there so my thoughts and my love are with all of you as they are with all of you around the world right now stay safe people i'll catch you in the next video bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 8,655

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Photoshop, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, luminar, Luminar AI

Id: F2pULG4EI_0

Length: 31min 21sec (1881 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021