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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

Wild Ocean

Hi everybody,

this time I want to write a little bit about my pic "Wild Ocean" that I took a few years ago on a ferry  from Madeira( Portugal to the island Porto Santo/Portugal. When I booked the passage I wasn't aware that Madeira was expecting a storm and that my trip would be a very bumpy one. As I am not afraid of a little rough sea I had a very diverting time on board of the ferry. I had a lot of fun trying to walk a straight line, but felt a little uncomfortable inside. So I went on deck and began taking pictures.

Besides trying not to stumble and fall I was preoccupied with keeping my camera & the lens more or less salt water free, but  as I said it was fun.

However, these kind of conditions rewarded me with some very cool and dramatic pictures of the Atlantic Ocean  and the islands.

In this post I want to give you a brief glimpse into my workflow, which isn't always that straight forward as the following description might suggest ;-).

Sometimes it's stunning, that it takes years to discover the true potential of a picture. This was just the case with "Wild Ocean".

So, the situation was quite dramatic and I wanted to bring this back into my picture.

These days I usually start processing my pictures in Adobe Lightroom before I go on in Photoshop.
After straightening the horizon I started processing in Lightroom with this picture:




I made my first decision regarding the composition of the pic: I chose a crop that focused more on the rough elements of the sea on the left side and I used Lightroom's gradient tool to darken the upper part of the sky. That resulted in a more balanced and dramatic overall impression:




I could have stopped here, but I wasn't totally satisfied and wanted to add some more roughness to it.  I also wanted to make some slight alterations to the colours of the water and the foam on the ocean.

I loaded this version into Photoshop and added a new layer that I painted white on the foamy parts of the sea. This way I highlighted them. To get rid of the more or less visible brush strokes I added a Gaussian blur set at about 60 % and played with the blending modes. Usually I start with Soft Light but this time it was Overlay at 100%.

Still I wanted to achieve a slightly more rough and grungy overall look so I picked one of my textures from the texture pack one:
Because of its tones and the softy grunge qualities "Pidgeon" was perfect to add the desired roughness to the picture:



I tried some blending modes and finally was satisfied with 30% opacity /70 % fill - Vivid Light.
 

So here is the final result:



I hope you found this small tutorial useful and if you have any questions you are welcome to ask them.
Thanks!

I took a look at this post more than 12 years later and I think it is still an effective edit. This image is still one of my favorites. 

Comments

  1. Un effet très réussi !! Merci pour les explications !!

    ReplyDelete
  2. the result is brilliant. congrats.

    ReplyDelete
  3. WOW!!! I agree, brilliant result, and thanks so much for describing your workflow. I would have been too sick for words; I'm glad you had fun with it!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous22:02

    Great image. I understand changing the opacity of a blend mode but what is the 30% fill.

    thanks, Charlie

    ReplyDelete

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