Remove Objects and People from your photos with Luminar AI

in this luminar ai photo editing tutorial i'm going to share with you how we can remove these people here and how we can use some of luminar's ai and slider-based tools to enhance the whole photo and then we're going to dive a little deeper into how to use local masks to really bring out the best in your photos let's get into it [Music] thanks so much for all your positive feedback on sending through imagery for me for the anthony edits your photos videos but this is the one that we'll be working on in this particular video this was sent in by john millington and he wrote to me saying i've just watched one of your photo recovery videos and was very impressed with both your editing skills and power of luminar well thank you very much john do you think you could improve this image of ashness bridge in the lake district ideally by removing the people who decided to have their lunch on the bridge at just the wrong moment how that's just really inconsiderate of those people they should have stayed hungry i've tried several times using lightroom with no real success john so let's have a look whether we can use luminar to get rid of these people and then what we can do in terms of an edit for this particular photo before you start editing any of your photos i always think it's a good idea to actually visually analyze the photo yourself before you start relying on ai to do anything and as john has correctly pointed out the people really are a big eyesore they don't need to be there on that bridge but there's other things such as the branches these little twigs coming up in the foreground they're very distracting they're distracting breaking through the line of the bridge here and that's the sort of thing that ideally if you can in camera capture it with a better frame so maybe if john had taken a couple of steps to the right that would have put this particular branchy area out of shot on the left or by coming forward by another meter or so perhaps the camera would have actually been level with these branches and the lens would be photographing beyond the branches so they wouldn't actually be in the shot in the first place and this is a personal thing for me but i will always if there's people there i will just wait until they're gone or we look as though they're close enough that potentially we could just say to them hey guys any chance i really want to get a shot of this bridge is there any chance you could just maybe shuffle over to the left just really quickly and normally i find people are very obliging if you approach them with politeness and with kindness and if you can do things like that and get things much better much cleaner in camera it's going to save you a lot of trouble in post-production i know what camera gear i'm using but sometimes i forget what my particular settings were so sometimes it's a good idea to have a refresher just by looking down in this bottom right hand corner here by clicking on the i icon there and that just enables us to get a little bit more information as to what john photographed this with so he's on a canon eos m iso 100 so we have should have a nice clean file in terms of limited digital noise we're at 24 millimeters now not that that's going to affect how we edit the photo but it just helps particularly if you're a new photographer just to get a sense of okay what what does a 24 millimeter lens look like what's that going to do to my photos we're shot at f16 so we should have a nice amount of sharpness right from the front to the back of the image and the shutter speed was 1 25th of a second that is a long shutter speed if you're hand holding but if you've got stabilization in your lens and in the camera body it's not so much of a big deal or if you're on a tripod that's irrelevant but if i zoom in here we can see that we're pretty sharp in this image just needs to render as you move around the screen but that's a really nice level of sharpness right from front to all the way in the back of the image okay so let's start our edit and let's start by seeing if we can't get rid of these people here we could jump into the arrays tool and see if the eraser could just get rid of these people but based on the fact that they're taking up such a large area here for the ai to try and recreate road bricks the shape of the bridge i think it's going to be too much of a tall order for it to do it we can zoom to 100 but i'd like to actually come in even closer let's go to 200 and rather than go with the erase tool i'm actually going to go straight to what i actually prefer which is the clone and stamp tool and if you haven't used this tool before let me just explain quickly how it works basically you click on an area that you want to sample and that puts a little dot there and now we can basically steal from this part of the image here and then begin to paint it where we wherever we want to basically and if you want to re-sample you just hold the alt key or option on a mac and then just begin painting from there you can always just keep re-sampling from different areas and that's a good idea as well you don't just want to click in one place and start sampling and then paint everything from there because that repetition that you'll be creating in your duplicated area that's very very visible to the human eye we're very good at spotting patterns and that will just smack of somebody who's used the clone and stamp tool straight away or even if people don't know what tool would have been used they'll spot that there's something fishy going on so for just removing those two branches there if i just show you before and after we've got rid of those and although by no means is that a perfect clone and stamp that i've done so far that just shows you the technique that we're going to use if you want to use a slightly bigger brush you can do that and just start painting look see you later guy you should have had your lunch somewhere else pal and then we can sample from the top of the bridge line there as well paint over his head and because we have no end to the bridge here painting over this bit that's going to be a little more tricky just painting over who i can only assume is his wife but we'll we'll give this a go we'll get rid of her first we're going to deal with the feet in a minute i'm going to make a much smaller brush and that will allow me to create more of a hard edge on the bridge let's just get rid of her there and again i'm going to go even harder with the edge of the brush here and that's just going to allow me to kind of create a false edge okay so we're heading in the right direction and then if there's areas that you're not very happy with you can just go back over it from somewhere else if i wasn't doing a video on this i'd probably be spending a little bit more attention on this and doing it with just a little bit more care now if you want to move to a new area on your picture you just hold the spacebar key and that allows you to then click and drag the picture around with the clone and stamp tool you can just take things as far as you want to so if you found things like the little odd leaves that were scattered around were a little bit distracting visually you could remove those if you want to but we're just going to kind of leave it here i think hopefully that's given you a good understanding of how this tool works and that is enough of a demonstration so let's just leave that there he says as he carries on removing annoying things that are visually distracting okay let's just zoom to fit to screen and now i've zoomed out you can see that this darker bit of brickwork here is kind of repeated so i think we need to actually sample from somewhere completely different and just get rid of one of those and if you do it with a soft enough brush things just blend into each other and you know that's good enough for the purposes of this particular photo that's good enough and once you're happy with it just close the tool down and that is then applied and we can look at our before with the people having their lunch and then they're gone before and after although i didn't do it here i would recommend just trying the erase tool first because for less complicated objects it normally does a very good job so for example i mentioned getting rid of leaves you can use the erase tool and i'm sure that would 99 times out of 100 do a perfect job for that but for this more complex removal that clone and stamp tool is perfect because it gives you the control to actively select where you want to sample from and the elements of the photo that you want to replace the people with so if you guys have watched any of my videos before you'll know that one of the first things i like to do is jump into the enhancer ai section and just grab the accent ai slider and just start cranking that all the way to 100 not that i'm necessarily going to be using that 100 strength i just think it's a really really powerful tool for fixing a lot of issues with a lot of photos so by pushing it to 100 you can see what that tool is doing it's working on contrast color localized contrast exposure all sorts of things and for people who are absolutely brand new to luminar ai i would suggest you don't even need to dive into all the other tools basically this one slider accent ai is going to save you from a multitude of sins with your photography so in this instance i find it's actually making things a little bit too busy in this photo but i do like it to give us just a little bit of a kickstarter so let's put it at 39 and move on i'm not going to worry about the composition because i actually think this is actually quite nice frame if we look at the direction of the water here running to the bottom right of the frame that's quite nice you've got two trees either side you've got one here on the left one here on the right that's creating a nice frame and we've got the sky or the interesting component of the sky nicely framed here you've just got this darker element at the top which is basically just holding this brighter part into the frame so i think john's done a nice job of the composition so we'll move on the light panel is really important so let's jump in here and have a look what we can do for those of you who are under the misconception that luminar ai is completely artificial intelligence driven and that's all it does yes it does some amazing creative things with ai and other tools but at the very heart of the program there is still a very powerful raw editor so all of these sliders that you see here and then if i extend these ones white blacks and curves this panel here this is what is at the very heart of programs like lightroom and other raw editors it's extremely powerful you don't need to understand it all to get good results but the key ones are the color temperature which for the most part modern cameras get the color temperature pretty accurate but you can take things in a more creative direction you could make the decision that you want to cool the image down and make it look like it's colder or you may want to warm things up and enhance the oranges that are present in the photo but i actually quite like the color balance exactly how it was so if you ever move sliders and you think i want that back where it was before just double click on the little dot and that will return it to its starting position the exposure is a powerful slider because that helps you to brighten or darken the photo but again i think our exposure is pretty good what about smart contrast if we start playing with that oh yeah that's pretty cool there's quite a lot that you can do in here but just for now all i'm gonna do is just reduce the highlights down because i feel like this area just through here above the bridge and into the sky is just a little bit too bright all right let's move on now before i go any further with editing this photo i just want to go on record saying that i'm editing this in a more creative way and the way that i'm editing it is not the right way to edit the photo it is just one way of editing the photo and the way i edit this right now might be very different to the way that i might choose to edit it tomorrow and that's one of the reasons i love using luminar is because it gives you so many creative options and it's so easy to go one way or pivot and go completely different direction and because it's all slider-based and non-destructive you're not going to wreck your photo if you ever want to go back to the beginning if you ever want to go right back to the start you can just do that through the history panel and if you're not sure where that is that's this little icon here click history and we can jump back to any of the changes that we've made so far but one of the concepts i like to apply when i'm working on any of my photos is trying to err on the side of simplicity i find visual complexity just a little bit chaotic and so looking at this photo it's quite busy there's a lot going on so i'm asking myself okay how can i simplify this and one of the things i'm thinking is we've got an autumnal scene in the lake district very beautiful but we're kind of in that point between the yellow and oranges and the greens still being present what if we were to send the greens more into those orangey tones so if we come to the color section and we can come into the hues and actually actively grab colors like the green and we could push the greens more towards yellow we can push the yellows and take that more towards an orange so if i go all the way you can see exactly what it's doing to those yellows there so i don't want to go too far with it but i'm just trying to harmonize the color palette a little bit and now by doing that i've got more of an orange blue color harmony going on so if i turn that off and i turn it on you'll see that we've just neutralized all those greens we've sent them more towards a yellow orange color palette if you do like the look of this photo editing software and you don't have it yet by all means save yourself some money i have a discount code which is at sky 10 and if you use that with the link in the description below you'll save some money and also i get a very small commission which helps me to keep creating free content for you guys so anyway let's press on with the editing from here what i'm thinking of doing is actually adding a little bit of creative entry creative interest if you will by using the sun rays filter as if the sun is just out of frame but it's kind of bleeding through these brighter bits of clouds so let's see if we can do that with the sun rays filter so let's open that and let's crank the amount up because we actually need to see something to work with and now we can come place sun center and just by dragging this little dot around you can see what we can do we can move it and we can actually take it outside of the photo itself so if we had the sun here it's just not going to look believable so basically by pushing it up out of shot and then using the mask which is accessible for just about every tool we can add mask and now we can just paint this effect in where we want it so basically we can start to paint across here let go and because we're painting with 31 opacity we're only getting 31 percent of what we just created so we can crank that up a little bit more and now you can start to see that that effect is bleeding into the photo and if you've gone over areas you don't want to you can switch to the eraser and we can crank the opacity of the eraser quite high because we want to remove that because we don't want any of those rays appearing where it's dark we want it to seem like they just sort of appearing and poking through this brighter bit of cloud here now we'll click the eraser again drop the opacity and what we're going to do is create a nice big fat brush here and we're just going to feather this off here just so it's softer in the transition now i don't really like the look of the beams that are coming through and that's where we can come and play with the settings so i might want to increase the number of sun rays and i think that's quite a cool thing to do you see those changing there and what we can also do is actually randomize the rays so you can have a play around with that until you get to a look that you actually like with the rays coming through yeah let's just go with that that's all good and one thing that i like to do is add a little bit of the mystical filter and if i push this far too much to the right you'll see exactly what it's doing now i did get an email from lee connell who sent me this photograph here and i would love to look at that photo for you lee in another video tutorial but for now one of the things you asked me was about the orton effect and you said that the autumn effect that's inside luminar you weren't particularly impressed with the results and i have to agree i don't think that the autumn effect filter that's built into this is particularly authentic to the original orton effect but i do actually think that the mystical filter actually gets closer to the autumn effect than the orton effect filter ironically enough so if you're wanting to add just a little bit of more saturation and a soft glow to your photos and i think this does work quite well for landscapes the mystical filter is a really good option so if i turn that off and i turn that on it's just added a bit of contrast a bit of mystical intrigue hence the name and i think that's pretty cool let's have a quick look where we've come from and where we've got to before and after now potentially you could leave that there and say yeah i'm happy with that photo but what i want to do is show you the power of local masking let's fit this to screen and let's jump into our local masking section and what i like to use the local masking feature for is drawing people's attention to certain areas of the photo and taking the attention away from others so in this instance i feel like we're a little bit overexposed on the hillside up here and the trees here so i want to just dull that down slightly i think there are maybe three sort of areas within this photo that are worthy of our attention one is most definitely the river and the water flowing through so i want to increase people's visual attention towards this area i think another area is now what we've created with the sunbeams coming through here so that's another area that i'd like people to look at and the hillside here i think the orange hues within this area could certainly be enhanced and i think they're a worthy element within the photo even this yellow tree here is pretty cool so let me show you a few techniques for helping to guide the viewer's eye let's add a local mask we'll just come to the basic all we need to worry about is the basic masks and the first thing i'm going to do is actually create a mask that takes our attention away from certain areas and so by making things darker that helps by reducing the contrast that will also help by dropping the highlights that will also help and at the moment we're basically creating a flatter version of our photo a photo that's less interesting less vibrant and you'd think why would you do that well i'll show you basically we're going to erase that effect from the key areas and by contrast those areas are going to pop so much more so i'm going to erase it from the sky i'm going to raise it from that hillside there and i'm certainly going to erase it from the bridge and using my left bracket key i'm going to decrease the size and remove it from the water here as well and i wasn't at full opacity so now i can build that effect up slightly more certainly want to increase interest on that tree make sure that we've got full interest on that and if we fail we want to paint in that effect where we've removed it maybe a little bit too much we can just switch brushes again and come to the section where we're going to paint that back in i feel like we might be just a little bit bright under there and if you want to do it with a slightly softer transition and make things just a little bit more believable what you can do is drop the opacity and just build it up with several strokes there we go okay let's turn this off and now let's turn it back on just to get a sense of what exactly we've done and if you feel like you want to change things further you can do that okay the next thing i'm going to do is actually enhance the river itself so let's add another local mask let's add a basic again and this time we kind of want to go the opposite way to what we just did so we're going to brighten things up so your eye will naturally go to the brighter parts of an image we can add some contrast as well your eye will also go to areas of more contrast we'll leave highlights where they are maybe we'll boost the shadows just ever so slightly and let's grab the structure ai and just see what that does okay if i push that to 100 you can see that this is increasing the kind of busyness in the photo i actually quite like what it's doing on the brickwork and on the bridge so maybe i'll come back and add an additional adjustment mask that is a little more heavy-handed on structure if i push the saturation i wonder if we can get any more coloration in the river we can't because it's pretty much a gray running river at the moment but we can increase the saturation just slightly and anything any leaves and foliage that around that are going to show up a little bit more okay so let's get the paintbrush and we're at 41 opacity and i'm just going to start painting that effect just where i want it so you can use the left bracket key to reduce the size of your brush and you can use the right bracket key to increase the size of it and if i keep having little voice cracks do excuse me i had a bit of a shout the other time it's really strained my throat okay let's turn this off and let's turn it on and there you can see we've started to add a little bit more life and a bit more intrigue to the bridge and the river if you feel like you want to enhance the blue element through the sky so that we have more of that blue orange nice complementary color combination what we can do is add another local mask basic again and this time we're going to grab the color temperature and if i start taking this towards the left you'll see that we're pushing more blues into the image i might want to control the highlights not let them get a little too carried away on me and what i'm going to do is actually paint this more bluey effect around the edges and again that's just going to help guide our viewers eye towards the center of the photo so let's get the paintbrush opacity 41 yeah i'm i'm happy with that and now i'm just going to paint by stroking that over the different areas i'm going to paint it over the hill in the background just so that moves away from gray and becomes a little more blue i could paint some of that blue down here but i've done some other things like reducing the highlights and i don't really want to do that to the stream but i may with a lower opacity just want to introduce some of that blue just around the edge of the frame it's just going to help hold our viewers eye more in the center of the frame all right let's look at our before okay so this is very much a snap straight out of camera and we'll look at our after and we've hopefully created something that's got a little bit more impact our eye is certainly more drawn to key areas such as the river here we've got a nice bit of interest going on in the sky with some sunbeams coming through and our attention is much more to the curvature of the interest areas from here in the sky down here to the bridge and then through with the river there so our viewer's eye is kind of staying in this zone and by reducing the contrast turning things a little bluer around the edges that just helps to hold our viewers eye in this zone here so again let's look at our before quite a busy photo and not too much going on in the way of having an impactful image in my opinion it's a nice capture don't get me wrong but hopefully for john i've created a more artistic edit as i say i might do this a completely different way if i was to edit it tomorrow one thing i haven't addressed was the brightness value on the hill here so what i might do is just add one more local mask by now hopefully you're getting a feeling for just how powerful these can be and if i push a little bit more warmth into that and we'll just start playing with some of these sliders until i feel like i'm getting something a little more impactful over here certainly by increasing that contrast we're increasing more saturation and getting a little bit more pop and vibrancy to those hills there i might grab the structure and just see whether increasing a bit of structure might help okay maybe just a little bit of that i might just ease that in just ever so slightly and the fact that the whole image right now doesn't look great that's fine i wasn't looking at that when i was making my adjustments over here on the right hand side my eye was purely focused on this hillside just here where i'm moving the brush at the moment because i know that i'm now going to have my paintbrush and i'm going to click and just start painting that in so this effect that we just created i'm currently painting with 31 and then i'll let go and straight away you can see that pop just with a little bit more of that dynamic look to that hill same again one more stroke boom and i might do the same with that tree there that we spoke about before boom i really think that's helping the hillside here because it was just looking a little bit washed out and perhaps the same with the top of these trees here as well they're just looking a little bleached out so there we go we just bring a little bit more life and color back into them as well just to check we're doing the right thing there let's turn that off turn it on okay i'm happy with that now it's very possible i've gone too far with this that often happens when i'm recording videos particularly because a lot of my brain power is actually going into explaining what i'm doing and talking things through and i swear that just takes away from my visual acuity just paying attention to the actual aesthetics of things sometimes but if you feel feel like you've gone too far with things what you can do is always grab that slider down in the bottom right and go okay this was my before minus the people because we don't we don't want to have say 50 opacity of the people luminar smart enough to know that if we're changing the value of the edit that we've done we don't want to reintroduce the people but everything else we can bring back or remove in degrees so we could settle around somewhere around that sort of like 80 mark and go okay i'm happy with that before after a little bit more subtle a little bit more believable i'm happy let's export this so we can email it back through to john okay export and we want to save photo to disk i'm going to save this as a jpeg i'm going to call it john millington anthony's edit we don't want to change the size we'll keep it exactly as it is the color spaces srgb is perfect and the quality that's entirely up to you but i don't really like to save things under a quality of 80. in this case i'm happy i just hit export and luminar will go to work doing all the final computations on this photo and spit it out into a folder for me so a big shout out to john thank you so much for sharing this photo with us i really hope you've enjoyed watching this edit if you're somebody watching this and you've got some value from this video please do me a favor and leave me a thumbs up also if you've got questions please leave them in the comments below you'd like me to edit one of your photos in the next video please share it through to anthony edit your photos at gmail.com and who knows the next video could be dedicated to you thanks so much for watching guys i'll see in the next video

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 21,991

Keywords: Photography, Photo editing, editing, Post Processing, post production, photography editing, Adobe, Photographer, Photo education, Photography education, landscape photography, Luminar AI, Luminar, Remove objects, Erase people, Remove unwanted objects, Artificial intelligence, photo software, photo app, photo editing software, photo editing program

Id: 2pBEOXVerlU

Length: 27min 27sec (1647 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021