I don't think that this software is trying to downplay the importance of good composition. Luminar Neo is available for pre-order at this link, and there are some 45% off Black Friday discounts. I'm impressed with what I've seen so far and think it's going to be a win for many editors who can find a better use for their time than removing dust spots and electric wires. There will be many other features in the release version of the software, coming out sometime this winter. These three new features in the upcoming Luminar Neo are very powerful and seem to work mostly as advertised. Still, the potential is easy enough to see. The software isn't complete even the GUI will be changing. This isn't a regular review rather, it's a preview. It took one click to do most of the work. So, I was thankful for the editing time Luminar Neo gave back to me by turning what would have taken 15-20 minutes into one click and a few seconds of clean up. It just slightly missed a small portion of the power line that was just in front of some trees, but I cleaned that up in five seconds with the manual eraser. Even a power line that was in front of a small mountain was removed. I gave Luminar Neo an image with power lines crisscrossing it, and with one click, they were gone, with one slight glitch. I can spend a lot of time removing power lines from my images. it doesn't work all that well because the results aren't very realistic, but I'll bet the Skylum software team could do it. Landscape Pro has a feature that does this and lets you drag a sun icon to where you want the light to emanate from. I'd also like to see the ability to relight from the left or the right. I can use a mask and adjust lighting, but not the relight feature. If I want to light something in the middle ground of a photo, I can't get relight to do it. There are other ways to achieve the same effect, but none that are this powerful. It's a game-changer because it's fast and under your complete control. It can truly relight an image, giving you a completely fresh look with a portrait. I'm not a portrait photographer, but I saw a demo of how well the relight feature works with portraits. Using the relight controls, I could manipulate the lighting and slightly warm up the picture. Below is a drone photo I took that was in very low light. The more I used it, the more I could see how it could easily fit into my workflow. Some of this can be done more traditionally with gradient masks, but I like the flexibility this relight feature offers. The feature also includes the ability to warm up parts of the image, and using depth cues from the image, you can warm up the foreground, background, or both. That allows you to be very selective about what parts of the image get highlighted. With Luminar Neo, the relight commands let me bring up the level of the foreground and lower the level of the sky. Normally, I would bring the highlights down to preserve the skies and open up the shadows. I opened some drone images taken in low light. Of course, it makes a mistake, you're just a click away from a selective erase and restore tool that can fix any AI missteps manually. In the Skylum demo we saw online, it left faraway birds in the sky while removing sensor dust. One of my images had an airplane flying over, and Luminar Neo knocked out the dust but left the airplane alone. I felt the AI software was very smart about what to remove and what not to remove. I keep my sensors pretty clean, but I did find some old raw files that had some sensor dust. For my testing, I worked on a brand new MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM and an Apple M1 Max chip. We were told to expect a few glitches, and the speed would not be representative of its performance on Apple or PC hardware. I want to preface my comments with a caveat. I could open images, let the new features do their work, and then export the edited file as a 16-bit TIFF, then continue editing in Photoshop or the current Luminar AI. The software we received for early testing included just those features, so it was not a complete editing solution. The features I tested include a relight feature, sensor dust removal, and power line removal. This week, Skylum got some reviewers together online, myself included, to get a briefing on three particular new AI features in the upcoming product, and then turned us loose with an early beta so we could see how it all worked.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |