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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

Gradients and Textures

Hi,
this time I wanted to bring in a new element that I often use, but never discussed or pointed out in one of my previous posts. The use of color gradients in the processing of my textured photographs. I became aware of the importance of gradients during my work for the app Stackables and now use them in my processing of iPhone shots more frequently.
I thought this misty forest scene could be turned into a mystical exquisitely work:


   

I wanted to use textures and enhance the colours which isn't always manageable  with texture only so the idea of using a gradient came into play. I was also keen on using some of my new textures to demonstrate how they turn this rather ordinary scene into something special and magical. 


Texture Choice

I added some textures with grit & grain to the last pack and thought that they would go nicely with this scene adding some kind of "fairy dust" to it. Here are the ones I chose:

G & G Universe

G&G Winter Eve

Shadow Magnets
You'll find this textures here: Mixed Specialties


The G & G textures work best with blending like screen, lighten or color dodge, but can be used with other modes as well (as I found out with the first one)

After applying the textures I got the following result: 


Adding a gradient

As I said before, I wanted to have strong colours but they still had to fit the overall mood and if possible the existing tones of the picture. So some red/orange and some blue should was the target. From my work on Stackables I had some unused texture I selected for this purpose:

Harmony grd
The blue seemed to be going quite well with the blue hues the G & G texture added on the right side and the orange would enhance the foreground.

...and it did.

For a better overview of the processing here is the screenshot of the layers I used:


As mentioned before I didn't use screnn/lighten/ color dodge with the g&g winter eve texture, but with multiply I got a better effect with the other textures on top and the grain was not so obvious, but still recognizable.

I played around with the gradient for quite a while and ended up with 40% Color Burn as the perfect setting.

As always I worked on contrast and colours to achieve the tones and atmosphere I liked best.

Thanks for reading!


Don't forget that there is currently a huge DISCOUNT of 25% on my textures over on my HOMEPAGE  just add the coupon code MAY2014 at the checkout!!

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