WORKING WITH LAYERS IN LUMINAR 4 - How To Use Layers To Create A Composite And Improve Your Editing

in this video guys i'm going to demystify layers for you we're going to take two images combine them into one composite and we'll walk you through exactly how i do that in luminar 4. by the time we finished this video you should have a really good understanding of exactly what layers are how they work and how they can benefit you in your photo editing to help you understand exactly what layers are i've got a no expense spared high-end graphical demonstration for you so here you've got this amazing picture of a tree what you'd like to do is actually combine it with this lovely photograph you have here of the sun and some mountains you may have this as your base layer you then import this layer over the top of it so it sits there one on top of the other and this is where the magic comes in using masking we can actually reveal the layer underneath we take a mask to mask out the background i told you this was high end which we take a mask to mask out around the tree and that reveals the photograph underneath that's the basic premise of layers and then you can edit this separately to this and that gives you a whole heap of control over your image for example you've got your two layers which is your new composite you can add another layer well this might be an adjustment layer where we're playing with the color balance and just giving it more of a warm hue man this is a quality example let's get rid of this so by working with layers basically your creative options really open up to you by having elements of your image stacked one on the other you can control each individual part of your image let's dive into luminar 4 now and hopefully things will start to make a lot more sense to you as we work through this example okay guys you can see two images here that i took within the space of a couple of minutes of each other basically we had this one here where we had these amazing white deer and they were really interested in what was going on with me and my camera and within a very short space of time they basically lost interest and headed away over the hill down here i feel that the shot with the two deer looking at the camera as lovely as that is with the deer i feel that it lacks the drama of the sun bursting through from the top right here bleeding into the scene and we've got the valley here which just tells a little bit more of the story of where we are so if we can combine the two into one image then we're on to a good thing so first things first let's come out of our library module here and let's go into the edit tab what we need to do to start with is just get this image looking pretty good as it is and this is going to be our base plate for us to overlay the two deer on top of so let's just do a very quick edit on this let's use ai accent and just see what that's doing for us as always luminar's ai is just really helpful in getting us in a good place pretty much straight off the bat let's add a bit of structure to this as well now what i'd like to do is actually increase the structure probably more so on the deer themselves than actually all of the background so i'm going to use a mask on this so masking is a really critical element when you're dealing with layers and layering so understanding this is really important so basically we've said edit mask currently we can see straight through the mask there is nothing masked so what we're going to do is actually use a paint tool to just paint in this effect just over the deer for now and as you can see here in this small little icon here we have a black mask which is hiding things and whatever's white reveals what this particular tool or particular layer is doing it white basically shows through what is on that effect or layer so i've painted that in at 50 opacity what i might now do is just drop that opacity a little lower and we're going to repaint the structure effect into more areas of the photo so just through the valley here let me click and start just painting through this little area here we're going to go over the deer as well because currently they have 50 percent of that structure applied to them but let's actually just add a little more so they really stand out there we go paint over them again and i'm just building this effect up so now you can see the mask it's kind of black white and gray black is hiding white is revealing and the levels of gray in between just control the opacity of the effect so if we turn this off and on you'll see that we're getting a little bit of structure through the valley here and a lot on the deer themselves so they're really popping out now which is great so let's click done and let's come over to this tab here now this is our layers tab we're going to click that and currently we only have one layer which is our base layer so we're now going to add a new layer by clicking this button here now we can either add an adjustment layer which will change the look of whatever's underneath it or we can add a new image layer and that's what we're wanting to do here so we click that and we just navigate to the photo that we want to add as a new layer which is white d01 and now we have this photograph layered over the top of the other one and if i decrease the opacity from 100 as i start to pull that down you will see the other layer revealed so this layer with deer the two deer is on top of this layer underneath and now we're going to transform this layer so that the deer are aligned where we want them so using the hand tool we can actually grab and move this layer and we can also come to the corner and rotate it as well we can scale it bigger and smaller as well if we're doing anything weird when we're scaling it like this what you'll need to do is actually put the ratio lock on first so let's reset it i'm going to put this lock on here and that keeps the aspect ratio of the width to the height consistent so as we scale it now you'll notice that our ratio and proportions are being respected so what we're going to do is just match the angle of the hill here and you can see that i'm just getting the grass to kind of marry up i'm going to mask out a lot of this edging so it all blends in a lot better more seamlessly let's click done and now i've brought this back in i've decided they look a little small so i'm actually going to go back into layer transform grab the handles and just increase the size of this a bit as well i just want these guys to have just a little bit more impact let's go with that hit done so to get this as a believable composite there's a couple of things we need to do one would be to create a mask so that we're just revealing the two deer here and the foreground element and the second thing that we'd need to do is actually change the color balance maybe the contrast the exposure all of those kind of aspects so that the two shots look like they're a seamless blend the first thing we want to do here is get these guys cut out and seamlessly placed onto this background to do that we need to edit the mask so i'm going to bring the opacity all the way to 100 and click edit mask now we've got several options of how we can edit a mask and i think the best option for this would be actually to use a brush with a soft edge and paint it in so using my bracket keys i'm actually making the brush a bit bigger and now you can see as i start to paint we're painting these guys back in now we're currently sat at 50 opacity again which is good starting place because that allows you to see both layers we can see our deer in the foreground and we can also see through to the background as well i'm going to make my brush a bit smaller and just start to paint over these guys a little more accurately i want to include a fair bit of this grass because i want things to look quite seamless now at the moment this grass is much brighter than the grass that we're painting it on top of but that's okay because we're going to address that a little bit later now when you're dealing with things like grass it's very hard to mask these very accurately so what i suggest is actually just using a nicely feathered brush you can see from the center point there's a black circle and that goes all the way out to a white circle on the far perimeter that is your transition area between 100 and zero opacity and that just feathers off between the two so that's a really nice thing to just softly reintroduce a layer just paint in a nice soft edge and if you want to erase some you just switch over from plus to minus arrays and we can increase the size we could drop the opacity so that we can do this in a much more refined way and just start to paint that back out again now obviously the more accurately you create your mask the better your composite is going to be so what i'm going to do is zoom in on the deer that i'm trying to mask out and i'm going to do that just a little more accurately so the painting out of a mask and painting these guys back in it's quite time consuming so i'm going to speed this bit up and come back to you once i've done that okay so that is my mask done so if we look at our layer underneath and then bringing in the layer that we have currently masked so it's a pretty good composite from a point of view of the masking however the grass here doesn't really match the grass that we've laid it over the top of so let's see what we can do about that and this is one of the great benefits of working in layers because now i can come in and i have all of luminar's editing functionality available to me but it's going to speak directly into this layer here and not affect the layer underneath so for example just as a really simple demonstration if i grab the color temperature and increase that all the way to the orange and the left you can see that it's affecting just that layer that we just introduced guys i really hope you're enjoying this video please do me a favor if this is helping you help me just give me a thumbs up and leave me a comment if you'd like to that'd be awesome and consider subscribing to the channel we do a lot of photo editing here looking at luminar lightroom photoshop all of that if you're just here to learn about layers and how they work but you like the look of luminar as a piece of software i've got a discount code for you if you're interested in getting it and that's at sky10 and you can use that with the link in the description below so i hope that helps you out anyway let's get back to it so i wonder if we can just play around with the settings a wee bit and just get this to kind of match the background a little more so just taking the greens uh pushing it more towards the greens i think that harmonizes a little better with the background let's push the color temperature up a little bit just to warm it up slightly now we can do some other things like grab the smart contrast and increase that that's going to brighten these guys up but it's also increasing the brightness of the grass as well which we don't really want and that gives us a great segue into using an adjustment layer because what we could do is bring an adjustment layer that's going to darken things but apply only to this bit of grass here so let's do that let's come to the layers tab again and let's click the plus icon here and this time rather than introducing a new image we're going to introduce a new adjustment so we're going to change what's underneath this layer here so this is on the top of our stack any changes we make will affect what's underneath so currently that's everything so if i bring the exposure down you can see that everything's getting darker so let's talk to the highlights of the grass here let's bring that down slightly and let's also change the color balance of that grass as well now we're currently affecting the whole image but we're not worried about that because we're going to mask this layer so let's do that let's come back to the layers palette and we're going to edit mask choose our brush and we are just going to paint this effect back in over the grass and unlike the deer that were pretty precise we can be a lot rougher with this adjustment here so now we've painted that mask in just over that area let's have a look at our before and after and straight away you can see that we've actually harmonized that grass and got it to tie in a lot more believably with the scene look i i know that the focus on the grass is different here to what it is here but i'm not going to get really picky about this particular composite it's more about showing you guys how these layers interact with one another so we're at the stage now where we've got a pretty good composite and the image is now ready for finishing we started with our base layer which was just the fields and the tiny little deer walking along and we've taken over the top of it the image of the deer looking at the camera which was a much more compelling image in terms of the deer we then masked out the background of that photo leaving just the deer so we see the deer looking at the camera and behind that is all the nice hills and everything and that sun flare from there just to make it a little more believable we just edited the grass which was a slightly different color tint to the grass that we're putting over the top of we've corrected that and now we're at a point where we're going to create a stamped visible layer which is basically taking all of those layers those three layers and smushing them down into one and now we're ready to use all of luminar's really cool creative tools that we know and love so i'm looking forward just to finishing this image off let's dive back into luminar and see what we can do come to the plus icon in the layers tab again and we're going to create a stamped layer and basically that is going to copy everything that is in this on the screen in front of us right now to one single layer so now we've got our stamp layer we can work on that as if this was its own photograph just starting afresh so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use the really cool erase tool to get rid of this power line here i'm going to give the photograph a warmer look i'm going to get rid of a lot of the greeny kind of tones go for something quite stylized and i'm also going to use one of my favorite filters which is the sun rays filter and we're just going to enhance this light that's bleeding in from the top corner anyway and just imbue it with a really beautiful warm feeling so let's start by getting rid of these power lines up here what you'll need to do is come to the canvas tab here we can use the erase tool we can use clone and stamp if we want to but i really love the erase tool so we'll click that and luminar just gets the image ready and here we go this tool is super simple all we need to do is just paint over the areas that we want gone and luminar's ai will normally do a really good job of actually sorting that out so let me start painting over this you can use your mouse to do this absolutely no problem whatsoever but i've just switched over to my graphics tablet just to get this job done just a little bit quicker so you can see all those power lines have gone in the background quite seamlessly so it's no big drama to erase stuff which is nice but we don't need our stamped layer here because that's not actually really doing anything for us this is the one that had the power lines in so we can just come to these little dots here the ellipsis and we can say delete layer come back to our raised image layer and we're just going to work on this so let's use the temperature to warm things up a fair bit and what we're going to do is introduce quite a lot of orangey tone and then we're actually just going to reduce the saturation so we get the warmth of that but without it being over saturated if we want to we can introduce a vignette so what i like to do is actually pull the amount down quite far and then from there i can choose my subject so let's click here on our deer maybe come up a little bit and now we can just reduce that off to a point where we feel it's a little more believable i'm happy with that and now it's fun time let's go into the creative tab we could do a whole host of stuff to this but we're going to stick with sun rays and so again i like to introduce quite a high amount and then we get to place the sun center and let's bring it over here the nice thing is we can even take it off screen slightly but what we want to do is actually get it to match the rays that are already there so let's reduce that down so that we can see both place the center again and here we can see [Music] we want to just match the angles which is not always an easy thing to do but that's about where our sun should be and now we can play with the look of the sun yeah i quite like the more bleached look there the sun ray length how far do we want to take that yeah let's take it quite far and if we come to the advanced settings which i recommend you do you can play with the number of sun rays so you can either have a lot of rays which would indicate that the sun is plowing through clouds broken clouds but i actually prefer normally to come all the way to zero and it just gives it a much more soft dreamy look and again if we want to edit the mask we can do that and this time i'm going to erase it with not full opacity but maybe something around 20 30 something like that that'll be all right we're going to erase just from a little bit around here i think i know we got the the rays to penetrate quite far down into the picture um and now i'm taking them away but hey it's all part of the creative process let's now warm those sun rays up a little bit as well so sun rays warmth if we push that to the right that will take on more of a yellow hue and i think that's a little bit too much but let's stick that somewhere around that sort of 54 mark happy with that and as a finishing touch i'm just going to throw on a little bit of mystical if i push that to 100 you'll see what this filter is doing just really gives a kind of soft dreamy look to your photo and i feel like this is almost like a almost like a dreamy image in itself you know it's not every day that you see these kind of guys mooching around so with the sun in the background and the the deer here in the foreground i'm quite happy to use a little bit of that from here we could introduce lut which is i'd normally recommend having a little look at least with the luts just to see if there's something more that you can do with your image as a finishing tool i really feel that luts are just so so powerful because they're just so quick and easy to apply so if we take that away and put it on you can see exactly what that is doing and i actually really like that it's just helping to enhance that warm feeling of this photo and now we can look at our before and thereafter so we've taken this image here which i liked when i captured it but we've created something new we've introduced these two guys here and we've given it a really different distinctive look if you stuck with me right until the end thank you so much i really appreciate it i've had a few comments recently from people saying oh your videos are great but man you go on too long i'm just trying to give you guys as much info as i possibly can trying to smash it all into this video for you so i hope you've liked thank you so much for watching if this video has been helpful in helping you understand layers and how to use them with inside luminar 4 please help me out just give me a thumbs up on the video maybe even leave me a comment and subscribe to the channel i really appreciate each and every one of you thank you so much guys i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Anthony Turnham

Views: 13,946

Keywords: Photo editing, editing, Post Processing, post production, Photographer, Photography education, LAYERS, layers, how to, Luminar 4, Luminar 4.3

Id: QhhPrVzlVuY

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020