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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

Frosty Morning - Selective Texturizing

Hello,

today I have chosen a photo of a very frosty and cold winter morning from last year. It is a suitable example of how I texturize my pictures these days. I more & more use Photoshop's opportunities to selectively apply my textures using layer masks, different blending modes and gradients.  To keep it simple and for you to better follow what I have done, I have limited myself to essentially three easy techniques in this photo (usually it is a lot more work....)

The final result:

Frosty Morning

Creating a Vertorama

To create this view I stitched these two pictures in Photoshop and created a vertorama. Here are the two photos before I combined them in PS:



FM 1
FM 2

The vertical panorama that was the start for my further processing looked like this:


What I really like about stitching photos is, that you get a very large photo to work with. This is about 25 mp large!


Processing with Textures

There is no colour to speak of (and this is not a b&w conversion!) and the sky was just plain white or the clouds were not discernible. So I wanted to add some structure to the sky. Browsing through my texture files I came across my Light Grunge texture that I wanted to have for the sky:


Light Grunge




I selected only the sky and the bright parts of the tree tops and erased the rest of the texture to get some structure to the featureless white sky.

Next I chose my "overcast" texture, because I hoped to brighten the middle part of the picture, especially the trees and the bushes.
Overcast
As this texture provides a vignette ( a brighter middle) I was satisfied with the effect it had by using only a blending mode (overlay). I didn't have to erase any parts of the texture - so sometimes selective texturizing can be achieved simply by chosing the right blending mode and texture.

But the picture still looked a bit dull to me and I wanted to have some cold blue/green hues as well as a subtle vignette. Instead of adding a colour gradient I thought of achieving this by using a texture. My eye fell on another one from my texture pack:

paper & stone

Tone & texture seemed perfect for a vignette.  So dragged it on to my picture and added a layer mask. I chose a soft brush and erased (painted away) the middle of the texture. (Please take a look at the layers)

Next I had to balance the green tone of the whole photo and added a colour layer. Finally I enhanced the contrast a bit and the picture was almost done. I couldn't resist to add two birds using brushes. Once again I am indebted to the brushes that Shadow House Creations provides:

Bird Brushes

Please check the copy of the layers to see how I blended everything and if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me.

Layers Frosty Morning



As mentioned before, the textures I have used are part of my Build your own texture pack .

Thanks for reading!


Comments

  1. this blog is just great! thank you so much!

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  2. I have never heard the word vertorama! Wonderful tutorial!

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