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 overlays.

 I also went to the Curves panel to reduce the lights a bit and added blue to the black tones

   and yellow to the highlights. 

before/after Develop RAW

Relight AI

I wanted to draw the viewers attention to the people in the middle of the image and 

considered adding a vignette, but this resulted in getting the whole frame too dark. 

I became aware the branches on the left and right of the image are actually the foreground, 

so I played around in RELIGHT AI that only reduced the light on these and did a better

job than a vignette.

Adding Snow Flakes and Textures

Although it was snowing this was barelly visible in the photograph. so I decided to

add an overlay texture that added some visible snow flakes. I decided on this overlay

that you can download  HERE for free

Foggy Snow

I added a second layer and set it to 100% Screen and got this result:

I also wanted a colder more painterly look and decided to add an blue texture overlays:

Skies Texture

Download the full size texture HERE

This I set at 32% Multiply, but found the resulting image too dark now. As one cannot adjust all layers in Luminar Neo as is possible in software like Photoshop and Affinity Photo I had to think of a trick to addmore light. 

I made a copy of the original layer and played around with the blend modes Overlay and Soft Light. 

I finally decided on Soft Light at 100% and got the result I was satisfied with.

before / after editing

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Thanks for reading!