2018-08-21: Flamingos – Before and After
I had flagged this image to include with my Monochrome Monday post yesterday, but when I started editing this in Luminar, I was so impressed with the transformation, I thought it would make for a good before and after post.
These flamingos were far away; I had the Panasonic at full 400mm zoom and they still are really small, so I shot this mostly as a proof image. With a digital camera, there is little downside to snapping a photo or two even if you don’t think they will be great.
At least you have a record of what you saw, and it might actually turn out okay. Needless to say this isn’t getting printed to hang on my wall, but it is a great example of how far you can recover a rather drab image.
As I said, I brought this into Luminar planning to include it with my black and white shots, but all it took were a few sliders to bring to colour and texture of the image back to life.
I saved a split shot with the before and after (I really like this view option, I find it much more helpful than toggling before and after on and off). You really get an idea of how flat and lifeless the image was out of camera, and how much detail and colour be recovered.
I edited this in under five minutes, so it definitely wasn’t a big time investment to play around and make this image the best it could be.
2018-08-20: Monochrome Monday
I was inspired by my post yesterday on white balance to continue editing images from my time at the Skelton Coast in Namibia. Given the flat light in a lot of the images, I thought black and white edits might be a good option. I am quite happy the way the turned out.
All of the images from my time at the coast were shot with my Panasonic FZ1000, which I have mentioned before is a great and capable camera, but sometimes the quality is a bit lacking when comparing to the files I got out of my Nikon or that I now get from my Fuji. But these were shot at the start of a long trip and I thought it would be wise not to subject the Nikon to blowing sand, given its terrible habit of picking up dust particles. So, I’ve done the best with what I got that day.
2018-08-13: Monochrome Monday
I’m a little later than normal with my Monochrome Monday post as I have been playing around with using the MacPhun (now Skylum) Tonality plugin with Luminar. I must say, I am really enjoying using Tonality again!
Tonality was my go-to for black and white conversion when I was using Lightroom and Photoshop. I found I could dial in the vision I was imagining much faster than using other black and white methods. Now that I no longer have Photoshop, I am glad I have a way to integrate the plug-in back into my workflow when I want to.
I’ve started watching some Luminar videos on YouTube by Jim Nix, and one of them really resonated with me today. It had nothing to do with the image or the edits he did, but just the concept of revisiting old work to re-edit photos, to experiment with new software, filters and combinations of tools to keep your creativity and interest peeked. A lot of that is why I am enjoying this theme so much, as the lack of familiarity with the software has caused me to think a lot more critically about what I want to achieve, so I can figure out how to do it, but it has also allowed me to just open random filters to see what they do, sometimes to great result, sometimes awful. If you are interested, you can find the Luminar video by Jim Nix here.
Now on to the images for today.
For this giraffe image, I did an extra step to start, and from Luminar opened Topaz Studio and then the Topaz Remask plugin. I find Remask is excellent for complicated situations like these tree branches against the sky. The sky was very grainy, and I wanted to apply some noise reduction, and I thought that would be the best way to go. I shot this image with my Panasonic FZ1000, which is a very capable little camera, but I do find skies are generally quite noisy regardless of the ISO. There was also a lot of airborne dust so it could have been that rather than a limitation of the camera. After I created my mask in Remask, I ran the noise removal filter in Topaz Studio and sent the image back to Luminar, and then onto Tonality for black and white conversion. If Luminar had an option to adjust luminosity masks so I could isolate the sky, I would have gone that route and saved some steps, but right now its not an option.
Things were much simpler for the next two images. I edited both using the Tonality plug in, though I am sure I could have arrived at similar results just using Luminar. As with most photo editing programs, there are a lot of different paths to get to the same place. It’s all about what works for you.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my selections for the day 🙂
2018-08-12: World Elephant Day
As you all know, I am just a bit partial to elephants, so I wouldn’t mind if every day were elephant day. But today is officially World Elephant Day, so it’s a great opportunity to share some images of my favourite animal.
I won’t get into a discussion on elephant population numbers, conservation challenges and the like. There are many people and groups far more informed than I that are providing that type of information. I’ll simply say that my opinion is that no one needs ivory except an elephant, and the poaching of these magnificent animals is an absolute tragedy that needs to be stopped.
I’m sure I have said this many times before, but if there was only one animal I could spend time with on an African safari, it would be the elephant.
I’ve kept with my theme for the month of August, and have continued to learn and explore the Luminar editing program and all of these images have been processed using the software. Two things I have noticed over the past week:
1) I find the spot removal tool does not work very well for larger dust spots on blue sky; it leaves behind visible traces of the spot removal that are almost more noticeable than the initial spot. I have found though that the clone stamp tool does an effective job on the larger sensor spot removal. The majority of these images were shot on my old Nikon D610, which had enormous issues with sensor spots, so this is a feature I rely on quite heavily for working on older images.
2) The luminosity mask function is quite limited on the current software version, offering no opportunity for adjusting the luminance values to dial in the mask. I use the luminosity masking function a lot when editing with On1 Photo Raw, especially as an effective way to isolate the sky to perform specific adjustments. The standard masking options also feel a bit more basic than the ones that I use with Photo Raw. For images that need that type of adjustment, I don’t think Luminar would be my first choice as a raw editor.
I’m finding that most of the editing is start to feel natural using this program, now that I have gotten a feel for what the various filters do. But coming from Lightroom and On1 Photo Raw, I’m really used to the automatic lens profile corrections, and having to manually enable and adjust that is something I haven’t yet gotten used to doing as part of my workflow. Generally speaking though, I am finding it an enjoyable program to use.
On to the images 🙂
2018-08-08: Wordless Wednesday
2018-08-06: Monochrome Monday
My Mom was looking for some elephant images to hang up, and originally thought she would like a sepia tinted photo, so I worked on this edit for her in Luminar.
In the end we decided a colour image would look better in the frame that she had, but at least I had another opportunity to do some editing of my very favourite animal.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead!
2018-08-05: Processing with Luminar
As I mentioned in my July in Review post, this month I am going to be exploring editing images using Luminar 2018. When I was still using Lightroom and Photoshop, I used the MacPhun plugins quite a lot (especially the Tonality plug-in) so some of the interface and working of Luminar feels familiar, but I really wanted to take a deep dive with the program and get proficient is using it and develop a workflow around it.
Just to get this out of the way, I don’t have any affiliation with Skylum, the makers of Luminar or with any of the creators of the resources I may mention or share links to. Luminar is one of several editing programs that I use, and any links that I mention are from my searches online for Luminar editing tutorials and resources. I’m including links to them in case someone else may find them useful.
In terms of resources, the most logical place to start is direct with the developer. There are loads of videos on the Skylum Youtube Channel from Getting Started videos to tutorials that deal with specific processing situations such as landscapes and portraits. I watched a few of the Problem Solving, Core Skills, Quick Knowledge and Inspiration videos when I first got the software to give me an overview of where to find things, and have just watched a few chapters from Anthony Morganti’s Mastering Luminar 2018 as a refresher, since I only used the program once since purchasing it. Over the coming week I’ll post more resources as I work through them.
I decided to work on an image that didn’t need a lot of work, just some basic refinements including removing dust spots, cropping, adding some detail and contrast, and adjusting the tone of the sky.
I sent this image to Luminar from On1 Photo Raw, selecting the “Edit the raw file option”.
The settings I used in Luminar for this image are below:
2018-08-01: Wordless Wednesday
2018-07-30: Monochrome Monday
Hopefully no one is getting bored of leopards, after having a few posts in a row featuring my favourite cat.
If you missed the post from yesterday, you can check it out here, with lots more images of this beautiful cat.
Wishing everyone a fantastic week ahead.
