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Luminar Neo - My First Impressions

Mystical Woods - move mouse over  for an before / after     In December of last year I was asked whether I'd like to take a look and try out the photo edit software Luminar Neo. So I was provided with the program and the extensions pack. At the moment there are seven extensions available, I installed four of them that I thought could be useful in my workflow. These are Noiseless Ai, Upscale Ai, Supersharp Ai and Magic Light Ai.  Until I was asked to try Luminar Neo, I had not heard of the program, but the opportunity to partner with Skylum and make some additional money convinced me to take a look. That means: This text contains affiliate links. What is Luminar Neo? Skylum's Luminar Neo is a photo editing tool that makes editing your photos quite simple. Many of its features are enhanced by artificial intelligence that lead to sometimes stunning results and are intuitive and easy to use. LUMINAR NEO - special offer until 28 February 2023 Lightroom and Photoshop plugin I almo

Early Spring Day Recipe

Hello -
after shooting a lot outside in the snow or trying to take pictures in dense fog with occasional drizzle enhancing the blurriness of my pics, I browsed through my archives and found a shot I took on a sunny day in early spring a few years back.

Let me start with a before & after of the final result:

Early Spring Day


I wanted to get a vintage look with light almost pastel colors without losing the wonderful fluffy cloud so I first had to do something to keep the clouds that way.

Preparing the File

Instead of a lot of dodging & burning on the clouds I decided to make a HDR (picture 2) image from a single RAW-file that I wanted to blend with the image I exported from Lightroom (picture 1) to retain the clouds. I used a layer mask in Photoshop and erased the lower part of the picture with a soft brush.
(Please see layers)


The before picture o the mouseover is the result of blending these two versions.

Applying textures
The textures I used are all from my build-your-own-texture-pack. This time it took quite some while to find the right textures. Because I wanted light & pastel like colors I couldn't use too grungy textures or textures with strong colours & contrasts. I found two that kept the light (Soft Melt & Light Fabric) while the others added the vintage look (Backside Paper)  & a subtle green tone (Paper & Stone).

Please check out the layers to see how I achieved the look:


The combination of the blending modes Multiply and Overlay helped too keep the light of the overall picture, so I only had to make minor adjustment with the final curves layer.

That's all it took.
Thanks for reading!!
Dirk

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