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Winter Edit With Texture Overlays in Luminar Neo Including Two Free Textures

 Last January we had some days with snow and people were rushing out to have some fun with it before all melted away, which is often the case were I live. I took my camera and went out into the falling snow and saw some people from my neighbourhood with their kid sleighing down a small hill nearby.  Here is the finished edit of the scenery: Enjoying A Winter Day RAW - Edit in Luminar Unedited RAW Image -  I started with the Enhance AI tool. I set the Accent AI value to 32 which was enough and brought out lights and contrasts, which I found helpful with this monotone snowy image. -   I changed into the Develop module where I enhanced the Exposure always keeping an eye on the Histogram because with snow you quickly run into burned out highlights.  - I also decreased the Highlight a bit and added more blacks. Especially reducing the lights is helpful, because I found that blend modes such as Overlay and Soft Light work better when editing with texture overla...
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Workflow - Creating a BLUR-Scape

Hello,
Today I'd like to demonstrate how I usually create my blurry abstract seascapes and forests. I am totally fascinated by soft smooth surfaces, so a few years ago I started using Photoshop's motion blur tool and the radial blur to soften parts of my photos. If properly used this goes beyond the shallow effect and can add to the overall feeling of a picture. Hopefully I achieved this with some of my works, but it is sometimes a quite difficil undertaking.

To show you how I technically achieve this, I chose the following photo of a rock on the beach of Puerto Naos on the island of La Palma:
Please move your mouse over the picture to see the before/after effect!


Square Rock Puerto Naos


   
Preparing the original file

The original RAW-file was quite dark, so I had to some adjustments in Lightroom. I also played around with the colors and was quite happy with the slightly muted vintage tones I got. Before I exported the image to Photoshop, I made a square crop and still wasn't quite shure what to do with the picture.
Manipulate it by adding clouds, grungy textures, birds....?
Instead I opted for smooth water, because I didn't like the water's texture.

Blurring the water

 It is quite essential to achieve an exact selection of the area that you want to blur. In this case it was easier to select everything around the water than the water itself. I am lazy, so I used PS Quick Selection tool. After adjusting the  selection (soft borders / round edges) I inverted the selection.
Now I had the water selected and hit "CMD J" and got a new layer (no 3 called "water blur") with only the water.





I went to filters-blur-motion blur, chose 0° angle and the highest blur setting and the water went from fine ripples to smooth surface.
Unfortunately this didn't do the trick, although I used a layer mask to cover the non-sea parts.
The blur didn't cover the edges of the rock which looked quite ugly:


I had the idea to copy the backgound layer and applied the motion blur on the whole picture. As I only wanted the water to be blurry, I again used a layer mask to show only the water and finally got what I wanted.

 Texturizing

I felt that the picture could use some additional textures to make it look even more vintage. Tones and structures of two textures from the Spring Release Texture Pack seemed to be perfect for this. As you can take from the layers picture I had not much to do until I was satisfied with the result.
Only one layer in Multily mode and the other in Overlay to get more contrast.

I finished the whole with some light and contrast adjustments using the curves tool.

That's all!
Thanks for reading!
Dirk




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