The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI

By Jeff Carlson

Skylum’s Luminar AI is a great solution for both professional and amateur photographers who want to quickly create stunning photos. Luminar’s advanced AI-based tools and templates eliminate hours of traditional editing tasks, whether you’re applying automatic tone and color adjustments, replacing dreary skies with more dynamic ones, or retouching portraits to smooth skin, remove blemishes, and accentuate flattering facial features. For those who want to dig into editing, powerful tools give you full control over your RAW and JPEG images, including advanced features such as masking, dodging and burning, and cloning and stamping areas. Luminar AI also works as a plug-in for other applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, and Apple Photos, allowing round-trip editing and seamless integration with workflows you may already have in place.

Luminar AI is deceptively deep, and in The Photographer’s Guide to Luminar AI, photographer Jeff Carlson helps you discover Luminar AI’s best features to take full advantage of the program for all your photography needs. From importing your images to editing, managing, and exporting your files, Jeff showcases the power, precision, and control of Luminar while teaching you to work quickly and efficiently. In this book, he walks you through real-world landscape and portrait edits, and covers every tool and feature with the goal of helping you understand how to make Luminar improve your images.

In this book you’ll learn all about:

• AI editing: Luminar AI’s many AI-based tools eliminate hours of traditional editing tasks. Improve overall tone and color using just one slider, and enhance a sky using another without building masks or layers. Realistically replace the entire sky in one step, even when objects like buildings or trees intrude. Luminar identifies people in photos, allowing you to smooth skin, sharpen eyes, brighten faces, and perform other portrait retouching tasks in minutes.

• AI Templates Luminar recommends templates based on the content of your photo, and has scores of other templates to apply quick fixes and stylish looks. Templates are also a powerful way to save your own editing adjustments, saving you time and ensuring consistent results across dozens or hundreds of photos.

• Expert editing: Take advantage of Luminar’s many professional tools to bring out the best versions of your photos. Enhance the look using tone controls and curves, dodging and burning, and tools built for specific types of images, such as Landscape Enhancer, Atmosphere AI, Supercontrast, and Color Harmony. The Erase and Clone & Stamp tools make it easy to remove unexpected objects and glitches such as lens dust spots. Luminar’s RAW editing engine includes real-time noise reduction and advanced color processing and sharpening
tools, all completely non-destructive and with the ability to step back through the history of edits.

• Advanced editing: Luminar AI's Local Masking tool is one of its secret weapons, which can be used to combine edits and effects. Most tools can also have their own masks, giving you control over where edits are applied within the image.

• Creativity: Open your imagination with Luminar’s creative tools, which range from adding glow, texture, and dramatic looks to incorporating sunrays and objects into augmented skies. Learn how to use LUTs (Lookup Tables) in the Mood tool to bring the look of simulated film stocks and creative color grades to your work.

• Luminar Library: Organize and manage your photos in a central library where your source images can reside where you want them, whether that’s on your hard disk, a network volume, or in local cloud services folders such as Dropbox or Google Drive for remote backup.

• Luminar plug-ins: If you already use other applications to organize your library or for photo editing, such as Adobe Photosh

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rocky Nook
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781681987897

Jeff Carlson

Jeff Carlson was born on the day of the first manned moon landing and narrowly escaped being named Apollo, Armstrong, or Rocket. His father worked for NASA-Ames at the time. His granddad on his mother’s side was a sci fi fan whose library included autographed copies of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Both men were strong, early influences—and in the high tech 21st Century, it’s easy to stand with one foot in reality and the other in thriller novels. Jeff is the internationally bestselling author of Interrupt, Plague Year, and The Frozen Sky, hailed by Publishers Weekly as “Pulse pounding.” To date, his writing has appeared in fifteen languages worldwide. Readers can find free fiction, videos, contests, and more on his web site at www.jverse.com.

Book preview

Jeff Carlson

The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI

The Photographer's Guide to Luminar AI

Jeff Carlson

www.rockynook.com/the-photographers-guide-to-luminar-ai/

Editor: Maggie Yates

Project manager: Lisa Brazieal

Marketing coordinator: Mercedes Murray

Layout and type: Jeff Carlson

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ISBN: 978-1-68198-787-3

1st Edition (1st printing, August 2021)

© 2021 Jeff Carlson

All images © Jeff Carlson unless otherwise noted

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Many of the designations in this book used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks of their respective companies. Where those designations appear in this book, and Rocky Nook was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. All product names and services identified throughout this book are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no intention of infringement of the trademark. They are not intended to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this book.

While reasonable care has been exercised in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein or from the use of the discs or programs that may accompany it.

Printed in Korea

For my father, Larry Carlson.

About the Author

Author and photographer Jeff Carlson writes for publications such as DPReview and Macworld, and is a contributing editor at TidBITS. He is the author of the books The Photographer’s Guide to Luminar 4, Take Control of Your Digital Photos, and Take Control of Apple Watch, among many other titles. He co-hosts the podcast PhotoActive and leads photo workshops in the Pacific Northwest. He believes there’s never enough coffee and does his best to test that theory.

Web: jeffcarlson.com

Instagram: @jeffcarlson

Twitter: @jeffcarlson

Table of Contents

Introduction

How Luminar AI Differs from Luminar 4

How to Read This Book

1The Luminar Studio

What Exactly Is AI?

The Luminar Workflow

The Sidebar

Edit Tools

The Histogram

Templates

Compare and Quick Preview

Zoom/Full Screen Preview

History

The Catalog

The Info Panel

Strategies for Speeding Up Luminar

Handling Luminar 4 Edits

2The Paths to Luminar

Edit a Single Image

Edit a Photo from Another Application

Edit a Photo in the Luminar Library

Add New Photos to the Library

3Landscape Walkthrough

Evaluate the Photo

Try a Template

Recompose the Scene

Get Luminar’s Opinion

Adjust Exposure

Punch Up the Tulips

Add Drama to the Sky

Draw Attention to the Reflection

Enhance Details

Before and After

4Portrait Walkthrough

Evaluate the First Photo

See What Luminar Will Do

Start with Good Overall Exposure

Enhance the Eyes

Smooth Skin and Apply Touch-Ups

Correct Skin Tone

First Photo Before and After

Evaluate the Second Photo

Edit Tone and Color

Enhance the Skin

Enhance the Face

Apply Spot Touch-Ups

Second Photo Before and After

5Templates

Apply a Template

Create Your Own Templates

Export and Import Custom Templates

6Editing Tools

Editing Tool Fundamentals

Understand the Histogram

Essentials Tools

Creative Tools

Portrait Tools

Professional Tools

Automating Edits with Photoshop Actions

7Local Masking

Mask Fundamentals

Create a Mask

Paint Mask

Radial Mask

Gradient Mask

Work with Multiple Masks

Texture Mask

Add a Watermark Using a Texture Mask

Create a Composite

Dodge & Burn Better with Local Masks

8Luminar Catalog

Use Catalog Shortcuts

Favorite Photos

Sort Photos

Filter Photos

Search for Photos

Work with Albums

Remove Photos from the Catalog

Locate Missing Folders and Edits

Sync Adjustments

Back Up and Restore the Catalog

Work with Multiple Catalogs

9Sharing Photos

Save to Disk

Share to Services

Open in Other Applications (macOS)

Introduction

We think of photography as images, the photos on your camera or computer or phone or wall. They’re slices of time, sometimes memorable, sometimes iconic or dramatic.

That’s how I saw photography for a long while, when I was learning the choreography of shutter speed, aperture, light, composition, and all the other technical aspects of making photos. But images are just results.

Photography is experience. It’s waking up at 4 a.m. when you’d rather stay in bed, pulling on the pile of warm clothing you set aside at arm’s reach so you could dress in the dark and not wake anyone else, and then driving to a stunning location and hoping weather and luck are with you as the sun rises.

It’s waiting in one spot in the forest for the fog to drift enough that shafts of golden light cut through and illuminate dewey moss on old-growth trees. It’s spending time with someone, chatting and learning while also suggesting movements and expressions to make a portrait that reveals more about them than you both expect.

And then, after the pixels are saved and the memory cards unloaded, photography becomes the experience of editing and refining those images. Too often this part ends up taking longer than you expect, and far too often it leads to frustration with tools and commands and searching online for techniques you didn’t know you needed to know.

This is where Luminar AI can dramatically improve your photography experience. In just a few minutes you can adjust a photo in ways that take hours in other photo editors, because the AI core of the app works a few steps ahead of you.

Did that early morning sunrise result in a mediocre sky? Luminar AI knows where the sky exists in the image and can improve it with a single slider, bringing out color and definition that aren’t immediately apparent. Do you need to retouch the images from the portrait session and apply the edits to dozens of similar shots to turn them around on a tight deadline? Luminar AI identifies the features of the subject’s face and can make improvements—brightening eyes, adding color to pale lips, smoothing skin, removing blemishes—in minutes. It can then sync those edits to the rest of the set, automatically knowing when the model moves in the frame from shot to shot.

Yes, photography is also the images you post online or frame for your wall, but from capture to editing, those experiences are what make photography worthwhile.

How Luminar AI Differs from Luminar 4

If you’re coming to Luminar AI from Luminar 4, you’ll discover quite a few differences. Skylum created Luminar AI from scratch as a fresh start, putting the AI engine at the center of the machine. In some ways, it’s a very different beast than what came before. However, spend a few minutes editing in Luminar AI and you’ll find a lot of familiar touchstones. For instance, most of the editing controls carry over, as described in Chapter 6.

Here are some of the big differences between the two versions:

True to its name, Luminar AI includes more AI-enhanced editing tools. Skylum says that Luminar AI has been engineered from the ground up to put its AI engine at the center of the app.

Luminar AI cannot read catalogs created in Luminar 4. If you set up your photo library in Luminar 4, this is a problem, because it means your edits remain locked in that version. I get into more detail in Chapter 1.

One of the biggest editing differences in Luminar AI is that layers have been tossed overboard. There are no layers at all. In their place is the Local Masking feature, which can approximate some of the same functionality. See Chapter 7.

Luminar Looks are now Templates, and have been elevated to a significant part of the editing workflow.

The Canvas tools in Luminar 4 are no longer separated out but are incorporated into the other editing tools. For example, Crop & Rotate is now rolled into the Composition AI tool.

For the time being—roughly through the end of 2021—Skylum has said it will continue to support Luminar 4 and release stability and bug fixes. After that, though, I assume the company will focus all of its attention on Luminar AI.

How to Read This Book

Editing photos is rarely a linear process. Some images demand tonal corrections before you can think about adjusting color, whereas others need the opposite approach. There’s no single editing path to follow.

Luminar’s editing tools are also nonlinear, but with a fairly structured workflow. To wit:

In Chapter 1, I share what I think are the most important controls and features that demand your attention right away.

Chapter 2 details the variety of ways to get photos into Luminar, from importing them directly to using Luminar as a plug-in for other applications such as Lightroom Classic or Apple Photos.

Chapters 3 and 4 walk you through editing a landscape and two portrait photos to give you an overview of a typical Luminar workflow. If you’d like to download the images and follow along in Luminar, go to https://rockynook.com/luminar/walkthrough/.

Chapter 5 jumps into applying templates, quick edits that achieve specific looks.

Chapter 6 covers the meat of Luminar AI’s editing tools.

In Chapter 7, I explain how to use the Local Masking feature, which gives you more power over how edits are applied to a photo.

Chapter 8 is devoted to working with the Catalog, detailing how to organize photos, create albums, and work with files on disk.

Chapter 9 is probably the most logically placed section, because when you’re done editing, it’s natural that you’d want to learn how to share your awesome creations.

I fully expect you to read a little, edit some photos in Luminar, refer back to the book for details, and edit some more. The whole point of this book, and Luminar in general, is to help you develop your images into the photos you want them to be.

In a lot of books, this is the chapter you’re likely to skim over, or outright skip, so you can jump right to editing. I’m not judging! I’ve done the same thing. Touring an application’s interface sometimes feels like getting stuck behind a slow driver on an expressway.

That said, think of Luminar as a photo studio (or your photo bag when you’re in the field): when you know where everything is, you can easily grab the lens or filter you need and get the shot you want. If you’re fumbling around trying to locate the right piece of equipment, you can get frustrated and lose focus on the image you’re capturing or editing.

As you’ll soon discover, Luminar has a lot of working parts, such as the Catalog, which organizes your photo collection, and its many editing tools. Many of those parts aren’t visible at times.

Instead, let’s take a slightly different approach. I’m going to point out the essential tools and areas that will soon become second nature to you, in what I believe to be their order of importance. And this is a good opportunity to answer a fundamental question: just what is AI?

What Exactly Is AI?

Remember when Apple introduced the first iMac, and soon the market was flooded with translucent plastic products that all had names starting with i-? We’re now in the age of AI, with companies slapping the diminutive acronym onto all sorts of things to make them sound smart or trendy. In the case of Luminar AI, I’m immensely relieved that there’s substance behind the name.

AI is short for artificial intelligence, which itself is shorthand for software systems that choose actions based on massive amounts of underlying data. To keep this in a photographic context, think about how you edit a photo: you are the one who manually adjusts exposure, contrast, and so on, to achieve the results you want—that’s your own intelligence. With AI, the software examines the scene and applies adjustments based on what it knows about the image.

A more accurate term for AI-driven photo editing is machine learning, or ML, which doesn’t sound as snazzy. Developers essentially teach software about photography by feeding it millions of images to analyze. Over time and with refinement, the software learns to identify scenes and objects, such as people, faces, and skies. When the software can recognize things in an image, it can act on them. (That said, Luminar doesn’t offer facial recognition, or the ability to name specific people in a photo.)

In Luminar AI, machine learning can bypass a lot of manual work on your part. Let’s look at an example. In Figure 1-1, you and I see a woman standing in front of a field of sunflowers. Most photo editing apps, though, see just a collection of colors and brightness values. If we wanted to change the exposure of the sky, we’d have to define that area ourselves by creating a selection or mask, or hand-painting it using a brush tool of some sort.

FIGURE 1-1: You and I can immediately discern what’s happening in this photo, but most software sees only rows of colored pixels.

When Luminar loads the image, its ML algorithms automatically recognize the same aspects of the image that we do (Figure 1-2).

FIGURE 1-2: Luminar identifies objects within the photo, just as you and I do.

Broadly, it can tell that there’s an area in the upper-third of the frame that is likely a sky, a person-shaped object in the foreground, and a grouping of green and yellow shapes that resemble leaves and flowers.

Since the software determined that a person is present, it also identifies patterns that match a face, including two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. If more of her body was visible in the frame, Luminar would also be able to identify that, too.

At this point, nothing is edited. But Luminar’s observations about the photo enable tools that work specifically on those areas.

I can use the Sky AI tool to quickly replace the sky, lighten