Skylum Presentation of Luminar AI

[Music] um i'm josh i talk a lot i'm also the president of this whole weird bunch so that gives me some excuse i guess um well awesome yeah uh so i'm i'm really excited to hear about skylum that's your cue i don't know welcome i appreciate y'all being here this is awesome great it's a this is um you know innovators right and people doing something different and making the industry take notice um and so we're lucky to have them here to come talk to us so i will shut up now and y'all go ahead and do your thing great well you're the main star of the show is uh mr benelli there but i'll give a few opening remarks uh my name is kevin i'm located in san diego most of us are working remote of course uh these days um i've been with the company about eight years and and i have seen that us lean into that innovation over the last uh eight years we used to be a mac only software company and uh we were kind of following the traditional path of of creating you know specific tools for specific uses you know denoising erasing stuff intensifying details got the bright idea at some point to kind of merge all those things together into a standalone product and we called it luminar but luminar has evolved as well again in the early days the first few versions were very much like a lot of the plugins and traditional photo editing tools that you that you guys are familiar with and i kind of liken it to to the tool wars right every every upgrade cycle you have to come up with some some new stuff and and generally it's just a twist or a little extra thing that you may have seen in other applications um you know we get a lot of feedback from customers about what they want to see but about about 18 months ago we we decided to to sort of start with a clean sheet of paper so luminar 4 is what i would call the last of our traditional photo editing tools it's got some ai smarts in it actually some quite nice tools in it but luminar i kind of took a different approach it was more focused on you know results versus the process and how do you get to those end results as quickly as possible uh benelli's going to give you a great demo i don't want to steal his thunder he's our director of education um just from a housekeeping standpoint i'll answer some questions uh in the chat if you haven't they're kind of utility level questions but i'll certainly feed them to to him and cut in every once in a while to make sure everybody gets there gets the questions answered in an appropriate way so i guess without any further ado uh benelli take it away my friend hey you guys thank you so much for having me here um the most random from the photoshop world days we missed that to where we could all get together and just sit and talk um a lot of times especially like in the vegas ones cabacy myself and a few others would just find a spot sit there and people would sit with us and ask us a ton of questions ranging from photography to photo editing to how to get new clients what's going on in the industry so it was great now with zoom coming along that took that little group of people and oh man it just expanded to the masses and so out of something bad i feel came something good but you're still missing that one-on-one interaction with people so that's what i think we're missing and hopefully we'll get back to that real soon all right well let me dive in and share my screen and kevin do you see luminar yep okay and you should see my presentation now right perfect all right so um here's what we're going to do what you're going to learn today is understanding the role of ai unique adjustments in luminar ai enhancing efficiency and creativity together and integrating with our ai into your existing workflow and i can't stress that enough our goal isn't to replace lightroom or photoshop if that's your workflow and you're used to it stick to what works for you and then gradually take some of the tools that lightning doesn't have that luminar has very strong and they'll apply it as a plug-in things that take forever in photoshop like portrait retouching is a breeze in luminar so if you're used to doing majority of your work starting in lightroom continue with that use luminar as a plug-in if you are ready to make the leap to where it's strictly a standalone program you're able to do that too all right now skylab was founded in 1998 with no outside capital meaning they we control our own destiny they have proven leadership we have over 130 employees worldwide we have a very strong r d engineering and qa teams over 60 people focusing on innovation and of course we have a huge global community of photographers and the in the program comes in 11 languages now why luminar especially luminar ai it's the first image editor fully powered by artificial intelligence and i'll show you how that equates to what we're doing traditional photo editing is outdated and slow i can't say how many times we headbutt with the engineers like why are we doing it like this we're used to doing it like this and then they win and all of a sudden you see what they did you're like oh that makes sense now and it's really cool where their vision where their vision is create mind-blowing photos in less time and our goal is to focus on results not on the process my goddaughter called the other day she's taking a photoshop class and the traditional abc we had to go through all the steps and she said uncle rob where do i download the grunge brush like what the heck the grunge brush you know so you know it's one of those things if you don't have that grunt brush the rest of the tutorial is not going to work so it took us a good 15 to 20 minutes to find the brush the teacher called grunge brush i mean there's a million a million of them she didn't explain that properly but that's traditional editing where it's linear whereas aluminum you can start anywhere it doesn't matter where you start you'll end up in the same spot all right now we're going to go through some of our tools that are for landscape and travel which from hearing uh what josh said is kind of the bulk of the group there's atmosphere ai structure ai there are tools in here of course you can replace clouds or replace the sky with it enhance the color harmony uh the super contrast tool you're absolutely gonna love because you're able to focus on the highlights the mid-tones and the shadows so for those that are extremely controlling a lot of these ai tools also have the advanced sections of the tool to let you take control it's much like a tesla you know people think tesla drives themselves what they do to a point you still have to be in the car you still have to take control over it and then for the portrait people body ai which is phenomenal since covid came um i did i did one on me i showed my son this was me before kovid and then it shrunk my body me after kovid and so uh my kid looked at that and thought yeah you must love luminar now um we could change the colors of the eyes and enhance the eyes the face ai you're absolutely gonna fall in love with it does everything with the face with sliders which means you can create templates with it and it's intelligent enough to know the next image is a different face so it takes your suggestions and applies them a proper properly to the next image accent ai is going to be our best friend that's an improved color detail tone and depth of an image and coming in 2021 is bokeh ai all right so let's see what the i can do let me get the luminar all right so i'm going to start because you guys are a bunch of landscape photographers let's start with this landscape here now i mentioned that luminar the roots of it is ai now we could just jump right into the edit panel and start doing all of our editing here but if you really want to take full benefit out of the ai technology you start with templates and what's really cool about this is it automatically analyzes the image and it notices there's water in the scene there's land there's a landscape in the scene so it gives you suggestions on what it feels what templates will be good how many lightroom presets do you have and you have to go through a million of them to find the one you want here we have the the built-in ones we went painstakingly through and taught it how to analyze the image so i can look at water and let's say i come down here and one click look at this before and after you'll see up in here this is changing color it's um it's processing it let's go to cold oh i like that one too before after i'm just hitting the visibility icon if i don't like these templates i can come over here and what's neat about all this by the way is once i apply a template it automatically overwrites all the other ones for me so like in lightroom for example i did this the other day i hit a preset they put it on when i went to another one well it added to what i just did if you keep doing that over and over again eventually it muddies it up so um i like this one right here dynamic results so before after i mean these are things you would do on your own so let's see what it did if i hit edit i come over here to the tools i go to the very top now what's neat about the tools is they're broken down into segments you have essential tools so these are the the most common tools we photographers are going to use this is our digital darkroom then if we want to get creative here are creative tools portrait tools and then the professional tools where you want more control over what we're doing so i'm going to come up here the enhance ai right accent ai that is going to be your best friend and like i said that one tool automatically improves color detail tone and depth that took over this tool here you've seen this in lightroom so this is one of the quote traditional tools and we kept it because our customers are asking for it they want this that one little tool up here took we took over all of these tools here all right or settings if i come down again those i'm noticing a little dot so on this dot here structure ai this is one of those human aware um tools if i had a person in the scene it would know that there's a person and it doesn't affect the skin tones it'll make everything around you sharp but if there's a person there it respects the skin tones and it doesn't over um add structure to the skin and i'm going to go to an extreme just to show you so here's an extreme and if you want more of that hdr look you could boost it up here so that right there you could look at that as a detail we have details down here you can look at it as another tool for details now the difference is which structure ai any of the ai tools i give it an amount let's say 47. now the cool thing about this is it says all right which structure we're going to look at all the dark pixels all the bright pixels we're going to measure them and we're going to enhance them so it gives the appearance of it being sharper that's what it's really doing well i put 47 down so if the net the next image comes along and i apply this template to that image it'll analyze the image in you know sorry 47 was the strength that he went up to however this particular image doesn't need that much enhancement so it knows enough what it needs based on that 47 and it'll go up to that 47 to make the image look great details on the other hand is more of the traditional tools so let me just crank it all the way up i'm gonna go overboard all right so i totally went overboard sharpening this so on the next image if it doesn't need sharpening it'll do it no matter what because with the traditional tools over here it takes those numbers and it applies it to the next image even if the image doesn't need it it'll still apply it that's where the ai tools come in handy because they analyze it for you and apply it all right now here's the atmosphere ai we're gonna add some fog to this scene but we're gonna layer the fog now watch close i'm going to give the amount 100 notice where it is right over here it's using 3d rendering look at that so it's bringing the fog across so it's bringing the fog into the scene now rule of thumb this right here looks good with the fog because there's already fog up here in the scene you know if i tried to apply this let's say josh we're doing a concert photo shoot and i tried to apply the fog onto the purse up in the concert it's to look totally fake because it's not it's it's not meant to be there it's like adding a night sky to a daylight photo you know we have to know when to place the proper tools but with um with the atmosphere ai look at this before and after i mean to me i just think that's incredible now so that's our part of our ai technology now i'm going to come down to that super contrast i talked about so i could focus strictly look at this just on the highlights and then balance the highlights mid-tones there we go and then shadows look at that that's kind of a one-stop shop in and of itself i love this exactly uh um i did get a question from from berlin about um the templates and whether you can stack templates or whether there's a a way to use multiple templates on a single image so on that you wouldn't want to um and i'll tell you why the the templates are designed to make so now i created this look out of this template i can always come back and let's well you saw what i just did so we we changed the original template was the dynamic result one so instead of stacking another template on top of that we can add more tools to this now from here i can come down save it and then over here is where my tools or my templates are saved here's what we just created i'm going to rename it um let's say dynamic results i'm going to version two so now i knew now i i know i use the base i used a pre-set template as a base however i'm adding my own twist to it now i just made that my own template now i made that mine if i were to send that off to somebody any tool that i've used in this the settings even let's say if i replace clouds or if um i added like say birds to the scene all of that goes with it so you don't have to hunt for them all right so that was one question do you need a fast computer so the answer to that of course with everything is why not we do have on the website if you look which is really cool here help user guide oh that user guide is where that right there i'm only saying because we're the ones who wrote it and developed it that right there is where you're gonna find all your answers so the goal is for you to never have to call support you call support when something doesn't work not how to so with the user guide here i'm gonna click on it for now but you click on it and it gives you every setting that you're working on it tells you what it's doing if you are wondering well with the templates how do i save my templates or where are my templates stored all the information is right there in that template and it's living it's a living breathing document meaning that i could change where we could change it on the fly we can add videos to it if we wrote something that you don't understand and somebody says hey i really don't quite understand where this is heading we could rewrite it on the fly and it's right there built into your software all right and and i'll uh i'll add that you know of course it's searchable and all that but if the term blood sweat and tears means anything to anybody on the call that user manual has a lot of blood sweat and tears from that man right there i mean it was fun i shouldn't say it was fun it was um it was definitely a challenge but now that it's done from an education standpoint i can see where a lot of the instructors can easily reference that right away and give the answers to their students so in there yes it tells you exactly what you need for your system requirement the minimum maximum if you have 16 gigs of ram you're doing very well i mean like an i7 you'll be fine so yeah don't worry about that um where was the other question and kevin thank you kevin put the link in there to where it is good and that's it all right great all right let me get on to the next one go back to the catalog all right so let me come back here for a minute and let's do okay got it right here i'm going to jump right into um enhancing eyes enhancing eyes with ai with no masking all right this i absolutely love uh josh you're gonna go nuts over this and actually i will use her um her eyes are a little bit darker got it it's before and after good we didn't enhance it yet all right so instead of jump well i can't jump into the templates which i will and let it come up with one and sure enough it's going to come up with some suggestions let's say i did this one give it a second and again you'll see this right up here illuminating that's a nostalgic one i'm not a fan of the too much of the the the grit yeah so this is filmed no wonder so that was under the film the film collection i'm gonna come over here's some experimental stuff zoom out give it a second look at that so before after i see a little glowing effect all right so i like all of it but let's say this is not my cup of tea so what i can do is come down to the portrait tools here's easy portrait tack sharp i'm going to click on that and again if you see this illuminating it means it's processing it all right there we go ready before after so we're off to a good start now let's go to the edit panel and i'm going to jump down to portrait and here's face now from here eyes i can enhance the eye just with one slider and look do you see the movement with it and i can even bring a little flare into the eyes now she has darker eyes so before and after you're going to see the change but not as drastic as you would with somebody with blue or blue eyes look at that before after and then let's see you can come down we can enhance the mouth the teeth and here this is so cool watch this it knows right where the face is so if let's say i'm photographing and i forget to bring a reflector or bounce some light into the person's face this is a good time where we could use the face light normally i'd have an intern or an assistant off to either camera left or right bouncing a reflector into the subject's face so i have that separation well if you don't have that then you're able to [Music] bounce it using the face ai tool let me come back in here i'll answer the questions in just a moment let's grab i'm gonna come back up here for a second and let's see all right kevin what i'm going to try to grab is another image hey v while you're there uh josh asked if you can apply the settings that you just uh applied to that young lady on multiple images okay and so since you're browsing her catalog here so i have her here right um to kind of finish this off a bit well you know what this really thanks thanks for bringing that in i should have finished this off and again you can see it working i'm going to use the vignette tool now the uniqueness about this vignette tool is i can tell it where the center point is i'm going to go to an extreme so you can see it look at this so i could choose where i want that center point to be so if i want it right here i can come in adjust the roundness of it and then feather the daylights out of it good and once i have it set then i'm going to dial back some of the amount because if a person looks at this and says wow that's a great vignette obviously you went too far um so you want to make it to where it's drawing attention to her and if i need to ready for this look at this i can add inner light to her so now when we look at it it's before and after so we like where that's at and let me just jump up one more good i like that right there all right so now that let's say we have this set we could come down here and save it as our own template or what we can do so this has the luminar blue around it i'm using the shift key and i'm just selecting these images here right click adjustments synchronize so now this right here that has the that's highlighted it'll apply the same adjustments all the way across the images now if i'm going to control z it for this particular image i'm going to stay right where it's at this will give more of a dramatic look to it i love everything we did with it however i do want to make it black and white now if i use the template with all the changes we made here it's going to overwrite the template but the cool thing about luminar is it's non-destructive so if i click on the history tool everything we've done is shown up here so at any point i can go right back to the original or let's say before the vignette or i can stop it right before that vignette tool is applied or i can take it all the way back to the very beginning so the history tool is very powerful that it makes sure that we keep the image as clean as possible to where if we decide to go back and re-edit it we have that option so i'm going to come to black and white one click oh look at that i like it catalog i'm pressing ctrl or i'm sorry um deselect there we go i'm pressing ctrl a to select all of them all the images and because this is highlighted right click adjustment synchronize and now the rest of them will be converted to black and white to match this all right so that's how we that's how we um can apply a mass or one of the templates that we've edited we can apply it to a batch process i'm watching a zoom thing on photography say again please so can i call you later okay okay oh that wasn't for me okay so let me get back to back to here um now you guys have already seen this in other apps uh let's see and again so so i'm gonna go right right straight to the tool just to show you where it's at so here here's our composition ai now what's neat about composition ai is i have the option when i click it for it to apply a crop for me so it's going to look at this and say okay well what is the most relevant part of the image and it does a really good job at cropping it you know for me i can double click and accept it's cropped once i do i can come back and in this case here here's the perspective i can click on that and sometimes i'll look at an image and i think it's straight and i'll just click uh the perspective and it automatically straightens it for me and i'm looking oh yeah that's right it was off that that's just my way of checking to make sure you heard that judge's ai cropping so i'm going to come back again and i'm sorry the reason why i'm laughing is we we we worked with another group that were visually impaired they were close they were blind and i made a comment yeah sometimes when i'm out shooting i have a hard time with the horizon line sometimes it's crooked and the guy jokingly said yeah anything we feel and it went right over my head i had no it didn't i didn't even think about it until the very end of the uh presentation and i realized why he thought that was the funniest thing ever but yes so here we are with the composition ai one click and there we are straightens it out all right so we have that set we go back to here um hey hey vanello we did have a question um from jim he was asking do the sharpening and noise reduction functions in luminar ai eliminate the need for separate sharpen ai and noise reduction ai programs i'm pretty sure he's talking about the topaz yeah well yeah keep in mind you okay me personally again it's not because i work for skylum ai sky replacement is so much faster and easier in my opinion in luminar than it is in photoshop when it comes to a painting effect i could do some painting in luminar but not it's not meant to do that i use texture overlays i would use topaz paint to paint my images so you have to look at it from the perspective of you being a carpenter how many hammers does a carpenter really have he just doesn't have one size fits all you have to decide which image or which works best for you sometimes you'll you'll love the results that we have here sometimes you'll love the results that maybe topaz has but again those are tools that are at your disposal all right yeah and i i would i would just jump in uh a little bit and you know they're not necessarily an apples to apples comparison you know our our structure ai uh which is human aware and it has a few other smarts to it it's even though the the end result appears to be sharpening it's actually a different technique than the traditional sharpening tools the noise reduction ai our noise reduction is not ai powered that's not one of the tools that we we chose to kind of infuse with machine learning so if the topaz tool works works fine for you you know use that i think things like eliminating the need for those are those are pretty definitive statements and and i would never go on record this as uh you know gee i'm the sales guy and i'm saying that what am i saying no what i'm saying is you know there's a tool as in your kit for everything yeah hey remember we're all photographers first first and foremost and that's what i love about the ceo and um dima who's the co-founder and the developer along with ivan they're all avid photographers a lot of the skies you see dema actually took um and when you're with these guys they always have their camera with them and they're they're have they have a thirst for knowledge with photography um and i'll show you a little bit later on how you can replace the color of an eye while they were watching one of my demos and i showed how you can replace the color of an eye by painting in a color effect and they said i don't know that goes against everything we teach we don't want you to have to paint something in let's create a slider for it and boom we have iris ai to where you can change the eyes and i think it's the coolest thing ever so not only do they have the brains but they also have the vision and listening um to the things that we need all right all right kevin since again the these guys are a group of um landscape let's see all right sorry josh so here's easy landscape scenic and water let's go to scenic for a moment and here's a fast fix look at that before after uh let's say simple well that's nice too how about a pleasing touch that was nice good so after a while you'll start to use some of these templates like clean life for example not on this one sunset for stream so i'm gonna go back to the one i liked earlier here fast fix all right so i may click the heart icon and now that's one of my favorites and it'll appear right over here as one of my favorites so now i can come back in and start my my edits with my favorites all right clean light usually work but for this image not quite sure why it didn't but i'll stick with fast fix here's that it and i know actually ai look at this i know it needs a huge boost of it and so if i were looking at this image i know joshua and i like as a portrait photographer i hate to say this we're kind of um we're kind of blessed to be able to shoot in the studio and tether it to a computer and you take a picture you look at the computer if you don't like the results we reset the scene unfortunately you could carry that stuff with you but i'm sure if you're hiking up all this these mountains after a while that that heavy laptop is going to be a nuisance so in this for this particular image i'm going to come back to the catalog for a moment and look at the raw so that was shot iso 200 16 millimeter 4.5 at one 125th of a second so in this case here i probably would have blue i probably would have bumped it up to like 400 iso just because it appeared a little bit too dark so that's something we would fix in camera but since we didn't we could fix it here now while i'm at it i can come back over here and i can try to adjust the sky enhancer here if it's not doing it for me that's when i'll come down down to ai or sky ai and i can select my favorite sky now this is where you guys being part of a photo group that's way too much you guys have to decide you know are you going to allow somebody to replace the sky or does the sky have to be their sky you know is it something they took or is it something like obviously that's a total fake so you have to look at what we're doing and seeing what actually matches the scene into a sunset uh let's see and and for you uh event photographers or wedding photographers uh you know sometimes you you might be in a situation where everything's perfect except for the sky a real estate is a great example do you want to show the the house image with the gray sky and it's all dark or do you want it to be on a sunny day and what a lot of photographers we talked to do is they'll go out to that same location and take a very natural but pleasing sky image there and they'll use that to replace the sky so it's not a it's not a sky image that's taken in norway or you know wherever it's it's a sky image from that very same location just on a different day so you know your mileage may vary your your moral compass may may tilt one way or the other but um you know we're giving you the tools to to to do it and josh did say the general rule is taking the same location by the same camera time not withstanding all right okay that's what kids are for for the gear slipping um okay so if i do come over to light you can use the camera profile and i do know notice that these do make a huge difference so this was shot with a uh a canon 5d let's see camera faithful okay that's pretty cool so from here like i said we went from this kind of a dreary day to something like this and i again i can continue with my editing free freelancing here picking the different tools to bring out what i feel the image should look like and again all of that is subjective i do want to come over here and show you oh perfect perfect all right so here's an image with a girl on the rock now kevin and i took this shot in las vegas you don't see kevin but kevin let let it illuminate kevin is way in the background and there was a flock of these birds and i yelled crocodile and cue the birds kevin ran through the birds the birds jumped up i yelled to her action and she acted like she was reaching for it i can't tell you how many people believe that so so that's where when is it okay to add stuff like the augmented seal when is it okay to have that stuff you know maybe not for competition unless it's a creative competition but what if this were there a wedding and there's a bride and groom and it looks like the bride and groom are commanding the birds that's a cool feeling it tells a story but as photographers we have to know when it's real or when it's memorex oh no we have to know when it's real or when we know we can add stuff here to it now i did add the birds to the sky um but you know what i want to do is let me let me start from the original and actually i want to see something i want it's um okay go to same so i'm going to go to the folder with the images because i like that one quite a bit let's see while we're waiting for that to load um we had a we had a question from clay about uh naming files to keep modifications to a single image organized okay and just in general how do we can you explain how the folders and catalogs work yeah star ratings love love love what i'm about to tell you with that all right so let me come up here a little more i'm looking so this is a nice um this photographer uh did a really good job at capturing a good set of images all right let's see um here i think she's acting like a bird let's let it render if you're noticing some of the lag you know we're pushing the computer to its limits you know making sure there we go making sure we're able to broadcast and run the program let's see here she is dancing all right that's what i like all right so let's start with this one here now from here i'm i couldn't i can't start with the cropping first and then going into our routine what i want to show you is it doesn't make a difference where you begin because let's let's say like in photoshop if you came in and you started with a cropping first and let's say we don't want this to be a portrait we want this to be um a landscape shot so i locked it in now i cropped it the way i like it i come over to the template and let's see the suggestions it's giving us let's see blockbuster we're killing orange oh damn teal and orange looks pretty good and by the way if this is too aggressive for you you can always come down here look at this and dial in the amount and it'll adjust all of them at the same level i'm going to leave it here for now all right so i like where that's at let's say um we're going to come over we'll do that vignette again maybe that amount that amount i don't i don't want this to go and said that a mount slider down at the bottom where he could uh dial in the effect to taste uh i think that's one of the unsung heroes of the of the program a lot of times uh we we do get customer comments that are that our templates or our presets are are overcooked or they're they're over the top and that's because we're trying to make something that works across the widest range of images once we teach people about the amount slider it's it's a game changer because those those templates that were once oh that's way too much now become you know at 75 percent just perfect and so that's been kind of a philosophy of the of the engineering team you know uh since since we started luminar yeah i mean how many times have you you did something late at night oh my god that's incredible you go to bed you wake up the next morning you look at it you're like oh my god what the heck was i thinking you dial it back 15 to 20 percent like oh that looks good now um so that's what that feature down there is really good at well and it doesn't and it doesn't actually only work for templates imagine following down a workflow of multiple edits on an image uh and and every one of them looks good but additive they are maybe a little over the top again very easy to move that that slider back so it's not only for templates even if you went straight to the editing module you could still dial that that back and it dials things back proportionally okay all right so and now here like we said we can bring out the shadows mid-tones and of course the highlights all independently we have that with super contrast here now um i had oh i know what it was all right so now what i'm going to do is this i want this bottom half to be darker than the top half so here's where the local basking comes in i'm going to add a basic mask to this and let's say we bring down the exposure now this is a global change it's going to make everything about it it's affecting the entire image that's okay for now all i care about is these rocks down in here well now i can come over here to the mask make sure i have erase or paint i'm going to use paint and let's do a gradient mask i'm going to draw the ground up so wherever you see red that's the mask itself so that's painting the effect onto the scene and there i have it let's see if i can show before here we go i can turn it on turn it off and what's really cool is every tool i stick that back the majority of the tools have that layer mask on it so the majority of the tools have a tour you could decide if you want to apply um a mask in that area all right so now that we have the set let's go to the augmented sky and here we are and i'm going to stick with those birds so here's a set of birds small uh let's do two okay and then number one must be like the massive ones and did i select it i'm still doing it up there the other way up there let's bring it down here we are and i can enlarge them so i can make the birds look like they're closer to the subject by making them look larger or smaller by making them away now we talked about the masking it does a really good job at knowing there's a person here however sometimes like this right here as good as it is it may get caught up well this is where you can do that mask again i want to erase at 100 opacity let's say it's all around her so it's it's going to erase these birds here on her arm and let's say down here and when i zoom out boom there we are all right so he said we can add augmented make this automatic reality but you have the option of resizing it and of course masking it in or masking it out and there we have it here but all the tools once we start adding them in have those in there all right so we have that i could just uh interject a little editorial comment i think the the ability for every tool to have its own mask is is again one of those nuances those unheralded killer features um you know you know instead of relying on a thousand layers in photoshop to do every little thing you want to do with with luminar it's so direct and easy oh i want to sharpen that you just grab the shoe grab the sharpen tool or the structure tool and and paint it in where you want oh i want this part of the image that maybe the background to have film grain great apply the film grain you can do radials you can do gradients or you can do freeform painting but the ability to do to apply that for each tool is ridiculously powerful and not obvious it's like once you kind of grok it you'll use it all the time but until then you're like well you know why don't we have this or why don't we have that but man once you get that that concept you'll be using it for selective editing you know till the cows come on all right now that brings us up to using it as a photoshop or a lightroom plugin all right so here's a good example let's say kevin and i go out and we photograph um let's say we're in the grand canyon and we decided that we want to make each of these um post posters telling us exactly where we were there we go like this one right here view from wherever we were all right or if you want this right here is the same size let's go two foot right here yeah well let me get to that there it goes so this right here i believe is the 16 by 24. so it's a 16 by 24 prime and if this if you wanted to use it for competition it gives you enough to where you could touch the edges without damaging the the print itself so let me just show you how i used photoshop to create this right click i want to show in my explorer here it is right click and open with photoshop so that's my way of using luminar as a visual browser so now i know where my stuff is i'm going to bring it in let it open up into photoshop i should have photoshop open earlier and this the part that's pretty cool all right so let me shut this down so this is how i created it made a 16 by 24 print because i wanted this the inside to be a two-thirds so right out of the camera the dimensions are exactly what you want so with windows let me hide the i want to hide the um um the the ruler and grid the grid options where is that oh view so under view don't show the extras all right and if you notice i have a really cool little silver border going all the way around all right now i'm going to hide that and this right here that was a final print this right here is a smart object and the smart object is going to make us be able to use this as a smart filter so this right here so if i were to shut everything off you would see that's what i'm left with all right so we made that into a smart filter or a smart object if i double click on it now it opens up my image this is where luminar has been added all right so luminar has been added to this i click on it so it's have to run luminar again it'll go out to luminar find the settings that i added added them to it and bring it into here so let's give it a couple seconds for that that's one thing i don't like about photoshop's smart objects and the smart filters is if you make a change to that filter effect turn it on and turn it off it has to re-render itself so boom it takes my changes i made applies it boom pulls it back in now what if i want to change that image right click i want to replace replace the contents and we're going to come over here under my photography let's see i believe i put it under i did this last time too kevin didn't i coffee shop here is luminar as a plug-in and i absolutely love love love this image that was taken by mark and i got this from unsplash and now i place it in now since i replaced it it's going to run luminar for me i don't have to remember which plugin or template i used i don't have to remember any of the settings it's going to do it automatically for me because i saved it as a smart um filter it goes in checks it out applies all my settings to it and then boom it comes right back in just to be clear v you don't have to click the apply button there in the upper right right exactly so if you were if you were using this as a plug-in then of course you can apply something with all the other ones here because we're using it as a template i don't have to now i'm going to resize this now unfortunately since i resized it guess what's going to happen it's going to run the it's going to run the filter it's going to run it again typically i have that set ahead of time but it's going to run luminar again and do the routine while it's doing that clay asks what system am i using i'm fortunate kevin to to get the surface microsoft surface studio can you guys see this accounting was using it why would accounting use this this incredible piece of um gear so after finagling with mandy i got to take this over this does have 32 gigs of memory it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card and i found out later that really it is a very powerful laptop so it's borderline desktop laptop so it is i could run adobe premiere um i could run a lot of different software with it it's not as fast as a desktop but i like how fast luminar is going with it all right so yes accountants love computers so notice how it saved it now watch this here the old image is still there but the moment i hit ctrl s or save it when i come back boom it replaced it and everything looks identical so if we had a dozen of these because kevin made me stop each of the way to shoot we have 12 beautiful shots you can put up you can put them around um one center piece and that could be your trip to yosemite all right so all right so that's again how you could use photoshop with luminar any questions on that before i close it that's fantastic you make a bunch of the demotivational photos quickly yes and my favorite let's down before he destroys it all right my favorite one is the uh is the bear in the middle of the stream and the salmon is jumping right into his mouth and it says sometimes a journey of a thousand miles ends very badly [Laughter] kevin all right um you know what while i got you guys here here with a portrait um i'm gonna go off script a little bit kevin and i i can hear you i love it when you do that i love it when you yeah only because i've been working on this all day not all day but this is one of the the images i worked with earlier today now let's make sure i have it yeah this is this is probably a good time to plug uh the coffee break if if you guys uh know vanelli you know he's an is an energy monster and twice a day we do these uh these short 15 to 20 minute coffee breaks one on on youtube as a live stream and one on facebook and uh benelli along with our other educator angela uh just put out tips and tricks on how to use luminar effectively it's completely free it's fun to log into and check out i do it a lot but if you see the term coffee break that's usually uh got either benelli or angela's name behind it and they're really fun to watch if you get a chance thank you kevin all right so this was my very first shoot with a model well this is one of her first shoots too uh wendy i love this shot here yes she has one green eye and one blue eye now if we were to photograph her let's say and you're gonna see both eyes i would either opt to buy contacts to make it match um if i don't have it i'll show you how we can fix it so let's check this out real quick i'm going to do a real quick edit uh blockbuster um you know what let's see let's see okay that looks good i like killing orange with her there i actually did a lot now i'm gonna come over to the edit and i don't have to be precise but i want to be just i want to show you this here's that face we talked about the ai i could what she doesn't need i could slim her face in but i like where her face is now there's the light here's the eye enhancer now look what's really cool about this you see that let me get a little closer it knows it's going inside the hair look at that that's number one if she had a lot of dark patches under her eyes look at that i can bring that out a little bit here's what we may need to do let's change our eyes to green look at that and i could bring it back or keep it full uh let's come underneath and i want to add a little lens flare under her eye look at that now this eye here is looking a little a little strange well both of them are now because that lens flare about there good visibility right about there so i'm looking at this and because let's zoom it out there we go that looks good and because of the way this is shaped i could come in and use that brush at let's say 10 opacity or 15 and just erase a little bit of it now it looks good all right so we have that set but that's not what i wanted to show so i wanted to show you how we can do all of this but let me get back to that skin which in a moment really don't need to do it but i want to show you where it's at good so now i have this set here's what's really cool about this local masking i want to add texture to this so i'm going to load a texture and i typically have a folder in my in my pictures folder called underscore assets because that shoots you right to the top and then from here i have a bunch of textures and let's see the one i added here we go rough texture now we're going to take that let's just put it to 100 so this is what we're really seeing right if i click on the advanced tool i want to desaturate just a little bit good i like where all that's looking now i can come over here and use an overlay so if i use soft light here's hard light here's soft light let's use soft light look at the painterly effect i'm getting from the side however i don't want it all the way on her face like this so what we're gonna do is bring it back to zero i know i don't want zero let's say right about 70 all right i like about 70 so i can come in here erase set the opacity see 70 percent i bet you should have been 30 yes i was right so it should have been 30 so let me just paint back in some of that here there we go so now i can go in and if i don't like like this texture right here is a little too strong for me i want to erase it and and i just and by the way if you see that's why i'm going to use the pen that's when um these these drawing tablets come in oh i like it like that all right now i have it set i can come back and continue to add remember we we talked about uh structure ai being human aware well it's not going to affect the skin it's going to affect the texture around her look at that boost it up just a little bit and now i just created a painterly effect without having to go through an actual paint there we go and feather it a bit and there we have it that's super cool how about have you ever seen this one yet did you kevin no i i just put something in the chat that you're really off script i love it before and after i mean how cool is that and and again it's something i i did this for her and she ended up putting it i made it epson gave me a good shout out to epson thank you a long time ago epson gave me their huge 9800 printer that thing was incredible yes they gave it to me for free but it was like 700 to replace all the inks whenever it ran out so it was very costly so i with their permission i donated it to a local school and gave them a year's supply of ink and the posters they made were phenomenal but i made this into a 24 by 36 and printed on that alt like the velvet paper that looked real almost like metal and she just absolutely loved that and that was our very first shoot that we did together and we went on to do a ton of shoots um afterwards but that's a good example of how we could use our creativity with efficiency so i mean how hard was that you saw what we just did it's a simple texture overlay but there it is now would topaz take this to a totally different level for painting yes it would so that's where you decide when do you use a tool like that when do you use a tool like this to me this was a quick no-brainer boom done um you know and i liked where it was at now one other thing i mentioned let me have another and notice what i'm doing here i snuck this in on you there's three ways to use luminar as you've been seeing me use it as a standalone program to where i can add here's a catalog of images i can add a bunch of image a folder of images now what's cool about that and somebody asked earlier we'll use little olive here let me reset it revert to original this was a rescue kitten that we took in all right now look at the name down here well if i right click and i say show in explorer it's going to bring it up and here it is i'm going to keep the name i'm going to just keep that name as is for now but i am going to put olive enter oh okay because i'm editing it there we go because i was editing the actual image itself it's not going to allow me to do that but i can't change let me see if i can do it from here showing explorer i bet you can see the same thing because i started to edit it yep because i started to edit it it's not going to let me change the name but what i was getting at is if i change the name here it'll automatically get changed in here so if you if i were to drag images into luminar you know if i drag them i'm sorry if i drag them into one of these folders from the operating system it'll appear here if i remove it it'll be removed here so there's no more of this oh my god lightroom or illumina are lost by photos and you realize that no you just moved them out of the directory so this is an active directory so we could use it like that where i can add folders of images the second way we could use it and you saw me do that was use it as a lightroom or a photoshop plugin and the third way is just as a single image editor so imagine if josh came to the house and said hey here's a bunch of models that i took i took these photos of um these models and he only wants to add one of them for example let me come over here and we'll go coffee break and let's say he has this on his thumb drive here we go he has it on his thumb drive hands it to me i open it up boom it's on my computer so it didn't move from his thumb drive it's here when i'm done with this right click remove single image editor so now i don't have to store any of these images in my catalog so that's what that's that's a really cool feature so while we have her up i did mention earlier about the cropping and i never finished my thought on that i apologize so let's say we're gonna crop the daylights out of this and i personally like cropping parts of the head all right about here so there's the image let's get to it all right and it's cropped all right template i'm gonna use one of mine that i created for it and i believe it was called uh soulful baby well that's nice but that wasn't the one i used uh dreaming okay that was it dreaming and dreaming three all right so let's say this is the edit we decided to go with oh i like that all right so let's say this is the edit we decided to go with kevin being the rootless art director that he is says to me vinnelli what are you a rookie why'd you cut her head off oh that's my style yeah well it looks stupid i hate it and that's waiting on that's not the way he talks so in the past look at that we'd have to go back through this were photoshop and we cropped in the beginning all those edits that we did over here we'd have to start all over again or if we waited to the end and we cropped it and then we realized oh shoot you know what um i wish i cropped it differently or i wish i added a different look to this so let's say kevin gets his way as usual so kevin gets his way and remember rule of thirds my friend there so here we are he likes it boom he likes it like this however he says to me vanilla you know what though that dreaming one's not cutting it for me that one i like much better boom i can change it and not have it affect the crop that we just did so what i'm getting at is gone are the traditional days of and how many of us have done this in the past remember the old jack um oh jack davis's wow books where you go through there like 15 to 30 steps and they're going through everything all of a sudden you're like here click why does the mind look the same oh there it is kevin you know and then you go back to it and you realize in step number four you forgot to add something to it that's a traditional way of and it's so funny because we're the creative types aren't we the ones that do this squirrel oh squirrel right you're out there you're all excited and oh look at that so why are we doing analytical style editing this is where you could start and end at any position you want the cropping doesn't have to be start in the beginning you can do it at the end or you can start in the beginning and finish off with other stuff at the end bottom line the goal is for this to morph around you to where the ai kind of takes over that says all right we want i want to emulate you tell me what you like and after a while you start doing all this stuff and you start to save little templates and things you just have to come in click click click done and go on to something else all right so kevin we're we're worried about out of time are we now yeah i wanted to say that book uh i don't know why it's on my shelf it has a copyright of of 1993. um actually funny story my uh i don't know how many of you know jack davis he's he's pretty cool he's from san diego my my uh my wife was his ta at a college here in town called platt she went from a fine art very traditional painting you know hands-on type stuff and learned all the digital stuff over at platt and it served her quite well oh wow now jack davis is one of the originals 20 something years ago i give him um of course jimmy d vitale and a lot of them i give a lot of them credit for helping me 20 plus years ago you know um jimmy d's wife helene glassman even kevin ames when he wrote the book the art of photographing women i look at these guys down there my colleagues are tony corbell i love tony corbell when he says to me oh my god vanilla you taught me so much about luminar or about lightroom i can't tell you how that makes me feel on the inside because he did 20 plus years ago took me off to the side and actually taught me about metering in camera where other people were kind of mocking and they just say stuff to me he took the time out of it and to me those are true truly educators and and if you have a chance of taking on an intern or an assistant by all means take them on because they want your knowledge and in return yes they have to do certain things for you to kind of pay their dues all right so here is the uh the coupon code correct kevin yeah so you know we we've got a little uh 10 off coupon code or 10 euro or 10 british pounds off of uh luminara ai if you if you like what you see um if you think it might be a great addition to your toolkit you can pick it up on our website skylum.com and then use that coupon code that benelli mentioned i also put it in the chat you know on the site there so a couple of questions came up uh don asked how much is lunar ai um the right answer is it depends so uh we just uh you know for new for luminar ai we have a one seat or a two-seat version so the two-seat version which means you can load it on a laptop or a desktop is 99 uh this code will get it to you for 89. however if you just have one computer that you work on maybe you're just your desktop you can actually pick up the the software for 79 and the 10 coupon off will make it uh 69 clay asked about scheduled upgrades so the way we do scheduled upgrades we're not a subscription service it's considered a perpetual license so the the way we do upgrades is that periodically during the year we will release support for new camera file formats any bug fixes that come up uh sometimes there's little tweaks and changes that we have to make in the software um but but also we'll we'll include some features uh some new features for free uh you uh benelli mentioned early on that that coming up soon is a is a brand new version of our sky ai it'll include some really cool features like uh having the sky reflected on reflections are reflected on water right including water with ripples so it's i've seen some of this it's really astonishing later on in the year we'll have bokeh ai which uses our depth mapping that he was talking about to under to isolate the foreground subjects from the background and create a really pleasing bokeh in the background so those uh those are examples of free upgrades that people would get when we go to a major version upgrade and this is where we introduce a ton of new features uh probably make some interface tweaks based on you know customer feedback that's that's generally moves away from the update what we call free updates into a true upgrade path and uh and usu you know of course people that have had the previous version of software we can discount on so there was a question about cr3 files that's one of the relatively new file formats that um that that canon's put out um that's a file format that we will support very very shortly very shortly so um you know there's there there's definitely a workaround right now a lot of people are taking their cr3s into uh dng files and then we fully support dng uh so so making that kind of round trip but uh but b and i will go on record uh today saying that uh cr3 will be uh supported very soon awesome and kevin here are some of the resources you can see the resource they put up you can check out skylum.com so skylum has made a strong commitment and dedication to education so they made a strong commitment to it and a dedication to it not just for you the end user but also we work in kevin's part of this project we want to get luminar in every university every uh college and the high schools much like what adobe did the uh mounted mac did with the original um max we we came back from texas we were in houston and they had the largest convention where all the top schools came in and it was so cool they'll just hand out so how much does this cost we're not selling it how many how many computers do you have in your lab 30 okay well we'll put you down and you'll have 30 seeds our goal is to teach and get it into the hands of the teachers to help the students now with that being said we also spent a lot of energy in the support the user manual and here's this insiders at skyline.com that you're going to love we do do coffee break twice a day like heaven said one day one day one part of the day is in insiders the other part is in youtube the insider one is just like there's a zoom to where you can ask questions and we're we're in a meeting not a webinar and you'll be able to ask questions well we start out when we show five minutes of what the topic was on we quickly in five minutes give you the answer to the topic we talked about and then the remainder 25 minutes we end up spending just talking and answering questions that people may have it could be on topic it could be off topic but it's usual it has to be photography related and then of course we're on all of your favorite um social media channels does anybody uh use social media anymore we've got a couple of questions uh that i'll answer here so uh steven asks what is luminarx so luminor x uh is is a membership service it's a subscription service that provides exclusive uh education and uh and also add-ons to to luminar ai that uh that are ordinarily for sale as individual units so for for a low monthly fee you get again exclusive education uh and also things like skies and textures and luts and and you know augmented sky objects and these are all exclusive to the the luminar x membership it's really actually a pretty good deal and i happen to know the project manager in charge of that she's a wonderful woman and has been working for us for uh gosh coming on five years now and so she's really committed to expanding that program uh as the partnerships and biz dev guy i uh one of my goals this year is to bring in more partner deals and and uh and complementary products to the to the marketplace and to luminar x there was a question from jay smith about capture one and v maybe maybe you and i can tag team on this so um so the the official support uh for uh luminar ai is running as a plugin is for photoshop and lightroom classic there are ways to manually install into photoshop elements and correct me here the i there's a way to manually install it as an editing extension for capture one as well is that true yes okay but again it's not supported so don't don't call support and say you know vanelli and kevin said right reported they'll give you they'll give you the instruction sheet to to do it yourself and you know honestly um we're we're committed i mean we're kind of the the outlier where the innovators want to be the tip of the spear for a lot of these things and frankly you know it makes great business sense and strategic sense for us to to play wherever photographers are we know we're going to bring unique tools to to photographers that they love we're going to bring efficiencies to get to a result versus trudging through a process and we want to make that available to people wherever they are i'm not going to promise anything here or you know go off the reservation too far but you know we certainly have things like uh mobile solutions you know on on the on the road map uh we've got support for additional tools um you know i'm talking with a a lot of business partners around the world and so the future of of luminor ai as a platform is is very bright um i will tell you and and i've heard this uh uh in the past not of course from this group it's the first time we've uh we've seen you but um you know people ask about you know can they can they trust an independent software developer you know are we as you know reliable are we as responsive are we going to be around five years from now and and all i can say is you know we've been around since 2008 we've got a very committed group of people and most of them are quite young i i think i'm at 57 i think i'm probably the oldest guy by at least five years of anybody in the company including mr b so so um you know i think the future is very very bright we're committed to the r d necessary to maintain our our innovation reputation on ai and again we'll continue to work with uh with as many partners and on as many platforms as we can and kevin like we mentioned it's a group of photographers but when we were in new york city wasn't it cool that our ceo ann dima the co-founder and the guy who's writing this up is sitting in the booth answering questions and one of the the guys from brooklyn comes over i tell them i'm from new york really where syracuse that's not new york that's how all these brooklyn people act so the brooklyn guy pulled me off and said hey who are the two new guys those guys are really good i go new guys that's our ceo and that's the guy who actually created the software heels no wonder they know this stuff inside and out who's i'm impressed i go wow so you got to work with them i mean how cool is that that's good you get to work with the ceo or the the founder of the company um i mean kevin we've been around for a long time and and i can't remember if i sent tom thomas no you probably have thomas snow with photoshop you're gonna i got a great story about that before adobe bought photoshop the first company i don't know how many mac fans are still on the line here but my first uh job was with uh silicon beach software which is a venerable first indie developer that uh it's just such a great company and uh i think i was employee number seven i was you know 22 23 and um i got a chance to really watch a very small company grow to be a decent size and we got bought by by ultimately got bought by oldest corporation out of seattle um yeah the pagemaker guys exactly right and so we all had you know we had consumer gaming we had a lot of consumer productivity and graphics products including a product called digital darkroom which i thought was the the ultimate name for what we were doing it was a photo editor back in 1988 but all that all that said our reputation had been growing and the knoll brothers actually uh i was just a lowly product manager at the time but the knoll brothers brought photoshop to silicon beach either slightly before or at the same time as adobe and uh it was it was interesting because our digital darkroom product was much more like a lightroom uh style product it was very sort of traditional photography based so you didn't you didn't paint any colors on it you applied tints to things right they were dodging and burning tools and again we're going back to grayscale times right and i i still remember our god don't tell them i said this i still remember our ceo saying uh you know uh we're not we're not that interested in photoshop we've got our own super paint product and and you know the future is gray scale oh my gosh but uh you know adobe would have outbid us anyway but it was fun to see the product uh that early in the game you know it was a obviously pre-release of it and and you know hats off to adobe they've done an amazing job at growing the the 800 pound gorilla i'd liken it to the u.s tax code you know you can only understand very small parts of it but you're forced to use it every year we're we're in a completely different uh different space at this point so uh i'm this is clay and i see that josh our president has signed off to put his kids to bed uh patty robertson our vice president i don't see online so it may fall to me to kind of thank you profusely both of you for your time tonight thank you for the adjustment that you made to join us after we had our our big freeze last week we really appreciate you could you come tonight and um put your comments in the um chat thing for the you know thank them for it we appreciate it i want to call on mark to uh tell us how the competition is coming for this weekend and if you've got enough judges mark yes i have judges um and we're in good shape i just need more entries uh i think the frozen weather froze a lot of shutter fingers but for the uh we this this month we sent off the advanced group to a psa judge and they've already turned their the winners in from the advanced group so we want all you uh beginners and our basic and intermediate photographers to send in your images by deadline of midnight saturday right so the advanced class is already submitted and you had uh judging by the psa judge correct correct terrific we'll look forward to that i want to shout out to verlin for also being the first person to suggest uh skylum as our program and that work has worked out really great thank you verlyn if you have other program ideas speaker ideas then make sure that you send it to the club mailing address and we don't actually have we need a volunteer really to be our program coordinator it would be a really stimulating uh role for someone to take on one or two times to to set up new programs we have next month's program set we'll have our first thursday of course as being the critique meeting our third thursday is always a program topic and mark i think has arranged for uh don to be our speaker so i don't know if don would like to say a few words of what you're planning still online i'm done yeah i'd be happy to um i'm going to talk about uh jay maisel and uh when he came out with a book on gesture to try to put things into context i spent a great deal of time really trying to understand gesture and i came up with some ideas and then started putting that into my photography and then people would say how would you know to do that so then i started teaching because i do mostly teaching and lecturing i i don't do too much shooting anymore and so i've got good reviews where i've taught it before so i thought well i'll offer it up they're interested fine if not and i sent uh mark about 40 or so different types of lectures and workshops that i've taught over the years so it's more like i don't know the group very well so it's kind of understanding what people are really interested and needs are and what level do you teach it at um so this will be my first venture into this but i'm looking forward to it oh boy we're looking forward to it too absolutely that sounds like a fantastic topic i mean jay is such an amazing individual v i know you know him as well uh and i'm i just i i had honestly i had to start looking up uh what he meant by gesture you know just to make sure it was clear in in my head and and right on the site here you know he talks about it you know it being the the narrative the expression at the heart of what what people shoot so that's going to be a fantastic it's going to be a fantastic about what you feel more than what you see but it's interesting i always wanted to take a class from him because he's housed in new york city of course and i'll talk a little bit about this so you get an idea because he's like 89 years old right now and doesn't teach but he charges five thousand dollars a week for his workshops you pay for transportation lodging and meals his workshops start every day at seven o'clock in the morning they end about ten o'clock at night um even though i had a son that lives in manhattan i still thought it was a little pricey for what i wanted to spend to be with him but i have got his all his books and i've seen several video type things that he's been involved with and he's an impressive guy and he shoots almost everything inside the burrows in new york city and he can often be found like i might carry an iphone in my pocket he's got his old nikon with a 70 to 300 lens on it and that's what he does all the shooting he's amazing with some of his work so now tom you're not going to use his language though right no i'm i'm kind of you're probably boring because i'm too clean-cut yeah so jay and i um we actually go way back believe it or not i was my former career was martial arts um and jay was in the martial arts back in the 60s so my brother was the undefeated heavyweight champion in the 70s and then i was a triple crown champion of the 80s so the videli name spanned and so here's jay thinking wow you look great for being so he didn't realize was my brother john in that era um and that used to always be hard when you fight this huge guy and he goes oh good luck john you're like oh crap you think somebody i'm my brother um you know so but that's how jay and i actually bonded through the martial arts and of course the photography he took my son out on a photo shoot instead of me i was like what the heck you know i don't know if i was happy as a father or ticked off as a photographer you know and he's ah you're you've still got time and you i want to spend time with him and he took him off and just did this little photo shoot and i thought that was the coolest he came back calling him uncle jay yeah i mean everything was born for me i i read the book i was interested in it exploring it a little bit and i belonged to a faith-based photography group outside of austin and we kind of came together and said you know one of the things we see as a problem globally is that language gets in the way because two people can read the same sentence and walk away with completely different meanings what what can we do to tell a better story inside our photos so i used that as a springboard to say let's let's find a way to add that special sauce to things and how and really it's teaching you how to feel it's teaching you how to see and so i i might i might tell the story if i remember it but i used to run field trips for a couple of years and um we would get back in the car after we were on a field trip and i knew within five seconds somebody was going to say so how many photos did you take today and the person next to him would say i took 500 and he said god don't mind what happened you didn't find good stuff to shoot at i took over 700 so i sit silent and at the end of the thing they say well mr simpson how many photos did you take and i said you know i really don't count them but maybe 75 and they said oh you really had a bad day i said no i spent my time finding four or five things were going to be dynamite i walked around them i laid down i climbed a tree i found the shot that i wanted and you'll just have to wait when we do the wrap up and you judge for yourself because they got the old ansel adam tripod holes one person would take a shot they'd get up the next person puts their tripod there and i'm like i'm not taking that picture everybody's already got it so anyways it it's it's fun's light it's not a lot of technology being pushed at you it's looking at pictures and talking about why why they're maybe different and there are some that are going to be just what i'll call they're all my photos but they're not intended to be in in every case my best photos they're intended to to be able to say something i'm trying to say to demonstrate what it is and sometimes in classes i'll have students i'll i'll just have a table over in the corner with the chair and maybe a flashlight laying on it and say okay now you've learned all about gesture there's that table and chair over there shoot there's gesture and everything i've never had a person pick up the flashlight and use it until i show them that just being able to throw shadows up against different types of walls and things i can do amazing work uh so you can take still lifes and things and you can add something to it that says more than most people so you're not doing happy snappies or drive-by shootings or whatever i call you know call them or just bing i got another one i got another one you really spend time with so we're going to look forward to that that'll be the third thursday i'm going to unless there are any other members who want to make a quick announcement or anything like that about their work anybody i will adjourn the meeting and just remind everybody to go by the coffee shop the west uh west pecan coffee shop downtown flukerfield take a look at the show that's been hung but if we are now adjourned and once again we thank our speakers uh mark kevin leroux and um robert benelli thank you so much from schuyler thanks software thanks folks thank you thank you it's been a distinct pleasure take care have a great night you

Channel: North Austin Pfotographic Society

Views: 2,136

Keywords:

Id: -sBmLih1k6s

Length: 101min 25sec (6085 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021