Luminar 4 Review

Hey, what's up, guys, professional outdoor photographer, David Johnston here for Outdoor Photography Guide. And today I wanted to review Luminar 4 from Skylum Software, a software that you can use to take your outdoor photographs from basic to advanced and professional-looking edits. So there are a couple of things that I wanted to show you about using Luminar 4. And I'll just share my screen with you right here. The first thing I wanted to show you is how easy it is to organize your photos. You'll see, I just took tons of photos in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and all over Tennessee. You'll see they're divided up into folders. I love this feature because it allows me to say, "Okay, this was shot in 2019." Well, these are also divided up into separate folders. So I can click down on 2019 and scroll through March, April, may, June, July, August, September, October, November. This helps me know when I took these photos. And if I think back, I'm like, "Well, I think I was there in October," now I know for sure with the month. Also, if I'm scrolling through these and I just don't know which ones to edit, like there are tons of photos here. It's so easy to scroll through these and be like, "Okay, well, this looks like it may be a favorite." I can hit the one key on my keyboard and it'll show up as a one-star. Or I can hover down here in the bottom corner of this image and click the little heart that's showing up on it and know that's a favorite. Once I do that, I can either come over here to my Favorites tab and click on that. And all of my favorite images will show up. You see the images that I just selected right here. Or if I've starred these and organized them out that way, a great way to do it is coming up to All Photos. I can click All Photos here and go to one stars or above, and that sections those out for me. So there are tons of ways that you can pick and choose how you want to organize your images. But organization is great, how do you edit your images, and how good is their editing software? Well, that's what I wanted to show you right now. And to do this, all you have to do is select the image that you wanna edit. I'm gonna be editing this photo of just an amazing fall color morning with mist settling down here on a lake. And I'm just gonna go to my Edit tab up here. and you'll see my histogram come up right away. And then I have all these options over here on the right-side of the screen. Various ways to look things up. Number one, you can actually still access your Library. If you go to Show Filmstrip, you can see all the images over here in the Library. You can do that by clicking the View panel. You can also have access to tons of different Looks or presets that they have. So I'm just gonna go ahead and remove those, Hide, and I'll do Hide my Looks Panel. And that'll allow me to just have a full screen here to edit with. Number one, what I wanna do is remove this dust spot down here that you can see. I'm just gonna zoom in on this. And I'm gonna go to some tools over here in the Canvas tools section. I'm gonna go to Clone and Stamp. I just wanna remove this real quick and allow myself to have just a pristine piece of water down on the bottom of this image. So to do this, all I have to do is select the source of where I wanna clone this out of, I'll select right here. And then I have a brush come up. I'm going to lower the Opacity of this brush. What I love about this is there a tons of features within Luminar that you would find in advanced edits if you were using something like Lightroom and Photoshop. In this a lot of those are smashed into one software, so you don't have to worry about switching back and forth. It makes for much faster edits. So I'm also gonna reduce the size of this brush, and then just paint in this dust spot that I had right here. And since I lowered my opacity of that, it may take a couple sweeps of just getting this out, but this tool is super powerful. I think that's good just for this example, I'm gonna hit Done. And once that is finished, I'm going to actually show you the Layers panel. So what we've just done is we have our base layer here. And then we have a clone and stamp layer here. What's great about Luminar 4 is using these layers. Now, you use layers in other softwares like Photoshop, but again, here it's all in one software where you can make your basic edits and your advanced edits all in one. So all I'm gonna do is add a new layer. I'm gonna add a new Adjustment Layer. And that's gonna allow me to use my basic edits down here. Now, you don't have to use the layers if you don't want. You can just go in and start your basic edits and go with the flow there. But that's just showing you the power of some of the things you can do here. So basic edits, really, I'm just gonna zoom out, and I can easily just adjust basic things that I would have in other softwares. But I really enjoy the way this has, number one, sliders that allow me to adjust things, Smart Contrast. These are just like your basic sliders that you can use. And I'm just gonna make really quick edits here. But the power of Luminar 4 really comes in when you get into their artificial intelligence or AI tools. So what you can do with those is go to something like AI Enhance and the AI Accent slider. And what this does is it does several edits all at one time. So I can slide this up. And I can see that it's adjusting my highlights, my shadows, my contrast, my saturations, all in one sweep. This allows me to make professional edits, but also make them extremely quickly, which is what I want anyways, 'cause I wanna get back in the field and shoot more photos. So I have my AI Accent up. I can go to AI Structure. This is basically like adding more detail, contrast, and clarity into this image. So I can slide that up some. And the artificial intelligence is really gonna be working with objects within your image that it's designed to work on an edit within that artificial intelligence. So I can go to things like Color. I can increase my Saturation and Vibrance. Here's another tool that I found extremely helpful, and that's their Advanced edits on some of their main edits or basic edits. And what I like in this is I can go to Advanced Settings and I have all these different colors down here that I can work with. So I have reds. I can adjust my red saturation and luminance here. You know, I have tons of orange in here. I can adjust that saturation and luminance, really making those fall colors pop. Saturation and luminance on my yellows. And I do have some greens in here. I'm gonna just adjust the hue on my yellow a little bit more, and then green again, saturation and luminance, just gonna make that pop and bump that up a little bit more. So with other edits that you can make, like Landscape Enhancer is a great tool to use for outdoor photographers because we're outside so much. You can Dehaze an image. I can add some Golden Hour effects to this, make it a little bit more warm. Foliage Enhancer is great for images like this with a lot of fall color, you bring out a lot of those colors and make them pop a little bit more. Now, we can also go into things like Creative edits. And Creative edits are like Sky Replacement. If you take a photo of your own sky and you wanna put that over on top of a different one, say if you take a longer exposure for your foreground, but take a quicker exposure for the sky, you can work those in and adjust those with AI Sky Replacement. You can do like a Mystical look. That would be great for this image because we do have that fog coming up on the bottom of the screen and really impacting the image overall. We can make that look a little bit more flat, a little bit more foggy, if you will. And speaking of fog, I can even come down here, and I can choose between Light Fog, Dark Fog, and increase the amount on that if I want to, something like a five. I can also go to Pro edits here. And Pro edits are really gonna help me with Advanced Contrast. These are gonna split up the contrast and the highlight, shadows, mid-tones. And I can just click through these and know that I want a little bit more contrast in all of these sections and categories. Another thing that I really like is using masks in Luminar 4, and you may be thinking, "Well, masks, that seems a little bit advanced "and I don't know if this software can handle it." Well, it can and it does very easily, very quickly, and very professionally. So I'll just show you. I'll create a new layer up here. I'm just gonna go to Add Layer, Add New Adjustment Layer. And I'm gonna come to here to the basic edit. So the Essential edits. And I'm going to go to Color. And I'm just gonna increase my Saturation a little bit more. And my Vibrance a little bit more. Now, this may seem a little bit overdone for some of you in your personal style, but what I like to do with edits like this is create a mask with them and I'll show you how to do that. I can go to Edit Mask and I can either Brush in this effect. I can create a Radial mask of this effect, a Gradient Mask of this effect. With an image that may have like a brighter sky and a darker foreground, you can use a gradient filter on that and have a mask of just that effect, say, if you were doing a lower exposure. what I like to do is use a Luminosity Mask on something like this, creating a lot of color. But a Luminosity Mask is basically going to apply that to just very specific parts of your image rather than the whole thing. So it makes it a subtle edit, but a professional one. And you don't have to go through like panels. You don't have to go through all these menus and tools like you would in other softwares. This is just right here in your main editing screen for you to click from and create a professional-looking edit with this. So guys, here's the final image that we have. I'm gonna click on the Before and After, and you can see, sliding this back and forth, what an amazing job we did with these edits, showing you how to use Luminar 4 for your outdoor photography to create fast, professional, and easy edits for you as an outdoor photographer to improve your photos. So is Luminar 4 a viable software for outdoor photographers? I say a 100% yes. I've never found a software that's as fast and as easy to use as this one is to create very professional results.