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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...

Making Silent Running - updated 2019

Hello,
today I'd wanted to show you how I processed the image "Silent Running".




Silent Running



Layer by layer progress video







Processing

As so often with my images this is a misty autumn scenery with tree silhouettes and birds and myself running. Birds and the image of myself I added in post.

I chose textures that are more or less in the colour range of the original image. 
The first two textures worked fine without using blend if, but the foreground was too dark so I decided to lighten it a bit with another light green texture.

Instead of erasing parts of the texture or using a layer mask I decided to protect the light parts of the sky against getting too bright by using the BLEND IF option of the advanced blending section. It is quite easy to get subtle transitions from darker to lighter tones. Please see the screenshot and description for details.



Layers



Blend if - the use of the advanced blend mode "Blend if" is indicated by the two overlapping squares on the right side of the panel. 

The texture Downing I used on this layer is a very strong texture, that was overpowering the subtle fog parts of my image, so I thought that I had to reduce the effect and decided to use "blend if".
How does it work? 



I had to reduce the effect on the lighter parts of the picture, which are situated under the current texture layer, therefore the second option is the right one. If you only slide the small triangle on the right side, you will get a very harsh result. To achieve a gradual transition you have to press and hold the alt/option key and click on the triangle, you can then move its parts in any direction you like and get a subtle effect.

As always - play around a bit until you are satisfied with the result.

Blend if is a quite powerful toll and useful in many ways. I guess I will come back to this in another tutorial.

If you have any questions please ask in the comments!
Would love, if you share this post!

You can find these textures on Creative Market HERE and on my website HERE

Thanks for your attention.
Dirk



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