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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

Time of Crows - smoothen a texture & a freebie

Hello,
time for a new tip regarding the use of textures. Sometimes I produce textures that are rather very grungy, which is fine, but there is always the danger that these overpower a picture quite easily.
In cases that I want to use them but want to avoid them to get too dominant I simply rotate them and use lower opacities while processing.
Before I get to a step by step discription, here is the image I did texturize:


Time of Crows


Texturizing the picture

One of the textures I wanted use on this picture has a really very strong grunge look: 

 
Peeling Paint





Whenever I like the general features of a texture, but think it's too strong I use it on several layers and low opacities and rotate it in 90° steps to make the existing structure/texture smoother. This has been better than using a blur tool, because I still have the texture's structure to work with.

You can download the texture here:

Crumpled Paint texture download


Photoshop Layers 




As you can see I ended up using two textures several times. The first one Never Ending Tale I chose, because I liked the colours. I found out that to use only the Multiply mode at a high setting overpowered a lot of the fine twig structures. I could keep them the way they were by using Darken and then Multiply - this way I didn't have to do a elaborate selection.
I was able to reduce the strong and powerful texture of the Crumpled Paint texture by rotating it twice clockwise and by using Overlay at 10% insted of 30% once.
Adding a bit more subtle texture and brightening the picture was achieved with the last lighter texture as well as with the curves layer.

That's all.

Please have a look at my textures & overlays available here:


Thank you for reading and  have a nice weekend!

Dirk





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