Portrait Editing Tutorial using Luminar AI, Easy Beginner Friendly

this video is sponsored by luminar ai hey guys irene here welcome back to my youtube channel today i'm gonna be editing some of my portraits using luminar ai so if you're not familiar with luminar ai and skylim the company that makes luminar it is an editing software specifically designed to make your editing a lot faster and easier it uses artificial intelligence to do some really cool things like one click skin retouch a sky replacement eye enhancement uh it's great for both beginners and professional photographers and i really love the fact that you can use it as a plug-in in photoshop or lightroom that's what i'm going to be using it today as a photoshop plugin to show you guys what my personal workflow is and how i personally incorporate luminar ai into my retouch so let's just get started we're gonna start with this recent self portrait and if you're interested to see how i took it i will leave the link to the behind the scenes video in the description first step i'm gonna do is duplicate my background layer so i can go back to the original one in case i don't like something and then i'm gonna go into filter skylum software and luminar ai one of my favorite things about luminar ai is that it's very straightforward there's almost no learning curve to it everything is very easy to understand it took me probably about a day to figure everything out here and the first thing you're going to see is their templates the artificial intelligence is analyzing the picture and recommending you some of the uh pre-made templates that they have so let's see it's recommending me the monochrome template here's the elegant matte low-key lighthouse uh the templates are pretty cool if you're not sure what to do with your images you can kind of browse through different ones that they have i personally don't really use the templates because i'm very particular with how i added and i find this feature to be more so for beginners rather than professional retouchers but it's definitely a cool option to have here so i'm gonna go back to my raw image and i'm going to go into edit so here you're going to see the different panels that they have essentials creative portrait professional and local masking again i love the names of everything it's very easy to understand i know if you compare to photoshop where things are called like luminance and hue saturation this in comparison has things like color details denoise or sun rays dramatic mood toning matte uh skin body it's very easy to understand what you're going to be doing i'm gonna actually start with the erase this is kind of like a healing brush or content aware fail on in photoshop so i'm just gonna mask out this area right here and press erase as you can see it took that out and actually did a pretty good job matching uh with the background it's the before and after next i'm gonna go into light and i'm gonna lower the exposure just a little bit uh use the smart contrast which i actually really like it truly is smart because it adjusts just the contrast without um you know making your image look muddy or less desaturated and then we have black and whites really like this one as well very straightforward let's make the blacks a little bit darker and the whites a little bit brighter to make the image more contrasting then i'm gonna go into portrait and do some skin softening so we're going to go into skin ai and apply maybe like 40 45 that looks good so you'll see on some of these panels you have this option right here to just toggle between on and off just to see what that specific thing is doing so here i'm only seeing the skin adjustment what i like about it is that it still leaves a lot of the texture in the skin but softens up and it's super easy it is literally just one click i do notice that sometimes it goes over the borders like here look at the hair it went a little bit over the hair and softened that as well i it i actually kind of like it in this case it looks kind of nice but if you don't want that you can use the masking option right here if you click on the mask you can now just paint over the areas you want to be softened so i'm going to make the opacity 200 and i'm going to start painting it on let's just do it here and then i went a little bit too far in some spots so i'm gonna just delete it around here okay that looks great so now if you see it's only applying it to the area that i masked off that looks awesome and the hair is still very sharp you can also use this skin defect removal i've noticed that it works really well on some obvious defects on the skin uh but some of the smaller ones it doesn't really recognize like here i still have a little tiny guy here and it didn't take it out um so it's not my favorite thing but it works pretty well it works okay uh okay now let's do some color stuff i'm gonna go back into the essentials and i'm gonna use the black and white uh it's kind of a new thing i just discovered here in luminar ai and i really love using this for color correcting i'm going to convert it to black and white and then i'm going to bring just some of the colors that i want back so i'm going to bring just a little bit of red a little bit of yellow a lot of green and a lot of the science and then with the luminance i'm gonna make the red darker yellow darker let's bring in a little bit more of the red and yellow yeah look at that so this is the before and after i think that's a really cool way to color tone your images again i just discovered this like recently and i love the way this works now i'm gonna go into pro and i'm going to use the super contrast love this tab over here so we have highlight mid tones and shadow contrast i do stuff like this in photoshop but through like a loophole where i use like selective color and levels but here it's just again super straightforward you want to make the highlights more contrasting there you go so i'm going to make the highlights more contrasting and brighter look at that the before and after okay i need to make it just a little bit stronger so you can see the big difference okay do you see how the highlights are now a lot more contrasting and you can see them a lot more i just love uh how this works and then let's do but i'm gonna actually tone it down just a little bit because i wanted to just show you guys but in reality everything that i do here are just very little small adjustments you don't want to go 100 on something in my opinion good retouch is when you adjust small little pieces one by one and then all together it looks good i'm gonna also do the shadow contrast just a little bit here all right that looks great so this was after the super contrast actually i'm gonna do it the other way yeah make it darker okay that looks great so let's go into creative and add a little bit of a matte and again i love how you can control everything so much so there is fade here so you can control how much of a fade that matte has so you can have it a lot or a little bit you can have a contrast to your mat and you can even make it more vivid love it i just love how much control i have over each panel and then again i can toggle between the before and after to see what it looks like there's even a color to oh my god i didn't even realize there's also color toning on this so you can make that matte have a color that's really cool wait i'm gonna make it like blueish oh my goodness wait i just discovered this i love this okay that looks awesome uh let's go back into pro and do just a little bit of color harmony i like to use the color color balance here i'm gonna add just a little bit of blue into the shadows mid tones i'm gonna give it cyans and into highlights a little bit of yellow just slight little different oh my god that looks really good and what else can we do here i think that actually looks really good i think i'm gonna leave it at that and i'm going to press apply all right so here's our image after luminar i think it already looks so good so my next step would be to do some dodge and burn for skin the luminar helped a lot with softening the skin and making it a lot more smooth but to give it that uh more professional touch i still prefer to do some dodge and burn so let me quickly do that and uh show you what's my next step all right so at this point i did some skin retouch that looks really good and i actually kind of want to go back into luminar for some more adjustments so i'm gonna take that background layer actually i'm gonna call it luminar luminar one just so i know that this was the layer when i did the first adjustments in luminar and then i'm gonna duplicate that layer and i'm going to call it luminar2 and then i'm going to go into filter scum software and luminar ai again all right i'm going to go straight to edit again and i'm gonna go back to the portrait so now i'm gonna go into face ai and let's do some stuff with the eyes so i'm gonna do the eye enhancer i absolutely love this feature so look at the before and after it makes the catch lights more intense and just kind of gives the eyes more drama here let's see the before and after and i love that it recognized just the iris itself and makes it a lot faster you know in photoshop to do this i would have to make a different layer mask and then apply a bunch of different things like maybe sharpening and levels and then specifically brush it onto the eye but here it does it all with one click just like with one click and it looks really good it doesn't look fake it doesn't look weird uh i also like the iris flare so that here i'm gonna put it to 100 just so you can see what it does it gives you like a little boost where you would put a reflector maybe um so yeah i'm gonna do just a little bit of iris flare uh let's do just a little bit of dark circle removal here i'm going to put it to the hundred so you can see what it does yeah we're gonna do just a little bit improve eyebrow just a little bit it makes the eyebrow just darker and then for the mouth we're gonna make my lips darker and more red that looks great that's all we're gonna do here and i'm just gonna apply so here is the before and after of the second adjustment in luminar and i'm just gonna give this image some final adjustments and then show you guys the complete image all right so here is the finished image uh let me show you guys exactly what we did here so here's our before this is the first adjustment we did in luminar then the second adjustment some skin retouch with dodge and burn in photoshop some more dodge and burn to kind of bring up some details this layer did a little bit of color matching on the skin some final color toning and a little bit more of the sharpening and let's now see the complete before and after oh my god the before and after it's quite a crazy result and i did the whole thing in about maybe 10 minutes and that's with me explaining the whole thing to you guys as well i think in reality it will take about seven minutes for me to edit the picture from start to finish which is super awesome usually takes me about 15 to maybe even 20 minutes sometimes again depending on the image uh yeah that looks really great and now i'm gonna edit the image from start to finish in luminar without using photoshop just to show you guys what the software itself can do so the first thing i'm gonna do is a really cool feature that everyone loves in luminar ai and it is the sky ai so with this tool you can easily replace the sky with whatever other sky you want so they already have some presets guys that you can use but what's cool is that you can actually load your own custom sky images so if you have some of these skies that you have shot yourself you can use those and what i also love about this is that you can completely control that sky so you can defocus it so you know the whole image is shot uh in a very shallow depth of field so i'm definitely gonna defocus the sky so that it fits with the picture and i'm gonna make it brighter because the image is quite bright and also i like to add this atmospheric haze uh to kind of make that sky not as dramatic but it depends you know you can make your sky super dramatic if you want to and let me see what other skies do we have here uh this was shot almost at sunset so maybe we can try some sunset ones okay that's not bad [Music] i think i found the one that i like i think i really like this purple blue pink sky i think it looks really really nice with the flowers and everything and it doesn't overpower the picture completely so here's the before and after of the sky and again there's so many different sliders here and that give you more control over the sky and like i said you can uh load your own custom sky images so that you don't have to use the preset ones that they have here okay i'm gonna go now into essentials and do some more adjustments i'm gonna brighten up the exposure on the whole image i'm gonna bring the shadows up just a little bit that looks great maybe do a little bit of that smart contrast i think i need to bring the highlights down just a little bit okay that looks great now i'm gonna use the enhance ai just to bring some more detail into the whole image so here i'll show you guys what it does let me just kind of do it a lot so you can see the before and after as you can see just kind of brings a lot of details back in and i love using it on my shallow depth of field images because it just kind of brings that pop back into the images yeah we're definitely going to use that um what do we do with the color i'm gonna make the green a little bit more teal yes that looks great and we're gonna add a little bit more vibrance just to make this whole image super vibrant and then i'm going to tone down some of the oranges just a little bit there we go with the saturation we can tone down the orange let's actually darken up the greens [Music] just a little bit i'm going to saturate the green some more saturate the blues saturate the magentas and the reds look at that that already looks so much better i also really like this landscape option here uh to add the golden hour as you can see just makes everything like pop and more colorful really beautiful i really love what this does and then the foliage enhancer i also love this so it kind of affects all the greenery and you guys know that i have a lot of greenery in all of my images look at that just kind of enhances all of the greenery and then the haze i love it in camera raw i love it here i always love to dehaze my images um let's go back into the light and bring the shadows up just a little bit more oh let's do the black and whites let's bring the highlights up sorry the other way yes that looks great oh my goodness this picture looks so much different already there's another really cool feature that i like and it's the atmosphere ai that adds the fog into the image it's really cool and you can also do the mist or haze uh we're gonna do the fog so i'll show you what it does look at that you see how it adds the fog right behind her but it knows where the model is so it doesn't add the fog on top of her it's just it's crazy i used to do this effect in a lot of my images um to kind of separate the model from the background i would i used to do it in camera raw and use the dehaze but the opposite way but this is so much easier because it's super smart and just kind of shows you exactly you know it just does it for you so and again you can hear adjust the lightness of the fog and the depth of the fog so it can go like you know on the full image if you want to i'm gonna have the depth set to kind of what it had before so this is the before and after or you can of course mask it out and apply the fog only to the spots that you want but again just kind of does it for you here which i love uh actually i'm thinking maybe this is a little bit too bright huh maybe we should just tone down the exposure just a little bit yeah let's go now into the portrait and let's do some cool stuff let's do the skin let's look at that that looks great this before and after just on the skin uh let's do the skin defects removal and let's go to the face so we're gonna do a lot of eye brightening here this was shot with natural light and it was the sun was going down it was not as bright anymore so this will definitely help me a lot so let's do the eye enhancer oh that looks good we can really enhance the eyes here because they're pretty dark yes that looks great and we're gonna do the iris flare for sure look at that that looks so good and then we're gonna do the lip redness and darkening you can even do a little bit of improved eyebrows and dark circle removal okay that looks great okay so because i want to keep everything just in luminar ai for this portrait let's do some more adjustments let's go to pro and use the dodge and burn so this works just like dodge and burn anywhere else you can make the brush small or big i like to first have the strength uh or the amount at 100 just so i can see where i'm painting and then i can play around with it i'm just going to show you guys as i'm going so i'm gonna paint some [Music] if i paint it somewhere where i don't want i can then just erase it not a big deal okay i think that's kind of edge it doesn't really let's darken a few spots like over here all right so now let's move the amount lower way lower okay that looks really great this spot right here still doesn't look that great with dodge and burn we'll use a different option for it we're gonna use the local masking we're gonna add a mask with the basic and we're gonna bring the exposure the shadows up just a little bit because it looks kind of like a shadow and i'm gonna make it less less saturated because it kind of looks like it's more saturated as well that spot okay and now i'm just gonna paint it just on that spot and let's see the before and after okay it's a little bit too bright okay that pretty much took it out almost okay that looks great and now i'm just gonna do some more color toning let's go into the mood and maybe choose a lut that will look nice beijing looks pretty nice i kind of like a lot of purple maybe we'll add that with the color grading oh manhattan looks really nice as well yeah let's do a little bit of manhattan and then i'm gonna go into the color harmony on the pro we're going to add a little bit of magenta into the shadows and then into highlights we're going to go back with yellow and a little bit of oh maybe like the science yes that looks good that looks really good love that and let's do super contrast i love bringing the whites it looks so good in my opinion all right honestly i think this is good i think we don't need to do any more okay so let's see the before and after here's the before and after it's crazy look at the before and after so you really can do a lot of the retouch just in luminar ai for sure and i'll show you another cool thing so we just did all of that in luminar i'm gonna save this as a template and i'm gonna apply this to another picture to show you how quickly you can edit multiple pictures and kind of apply the same preset to them so here is the template let's save it let's name it i know purple okay so now let's open a different picture and apply that so you can go here to my collection and here's the purple that i made so this is what it did to the image obviously this one was more exposed so we can easily fix that let's go to edit and what i like is that you can see exactly what you've done and uh what that preset did so we're gonna just bring the exposure lower here and let's bring just the shadows up and yeah this is the before and after if i zoom in you'll see that it also did that skin retouch and the lips you see it darkened the lips it applied that haze in the background and the sky it saved everything that you done in the previous image and applied it to this one which is super cool so now you have two images that you've edited fully in luminar and uh they both look great okay so here are a few things that i would love to change in luminar uh first one if we go to portrait and in the mouth section you can make the lips more red or darker but what about making them brighter sometimes you want to brighten up the lip i understand that it might not be the most popular choice but i would love to have even more options such as darkening the lips or making the lips less saturated now when it comes to their local masking right now the only mask you can add is with the basic adjustments or texture i obviously wish that they could have add any of these adjustments to be able to local mask right now again it's just the basic ones but maybe in the future they can add more options to luminar uh that would make luminar a lot more advanced i guess and not so much um like a super easy program that they have right now but i think it uh would add even more control over some of the things you can do here and i personally would love to see that my last complaint is that sometimes it's a little bit slow and it takes a second for it to load uh it's not slow to the point where you can't work with it uh it's not to the point where it's annoying but again something that i wish that they uh would improve maybe next time just to make the program work just a little bit faster but that's it for the video uh what do you guys think about luminar ai is it something that you're interested in uh i personally really like it and i think again that it's great for both beginners and professionals anyone will find some kind of feature that works for them and makes their editing a lot faster and easier i've really been incorporating it in almost all of my portraits even if i need just a little boost of like clarity on the eyes or darken the lips really fast i'll open the plugin in photoshop and do it on the separate layer and it it definitely is faster and easier and plus there's some really cool color grading options here that i personally really love i'm excited to see uh what else they're gonna come up with with new updates i know that the bokeh ai is coming which i'm super excited to try out uh and yeah let me know if you guys would like to see more tutorials using luminar ai or luminar 4. i would love to make them for you guys uh give this video like subscribe to my channel and i'll see you guys in my next one bye

Channel: Irene Rudnyk

Views: 88,190

Keywords: photography, model, irene rudnyk, photographer, professional, tutorial, canon, 85mm 1.2, photoshoot, session, luminar ai, luminar 4, sky replacement, skin retouch, easy, begginer, photoshop plugin, artificial intelligence, color correction, one click, preset, eye enhhancement, free freset, photoshop alternative, editing, edit, cool, amazing, faster, landscape, portrait, skin ai, face ai, skylum, review, worth

Id: DGDLlKqv6R0

Length: 30min 6sec (1806 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020