The Photographer's Guide to Luminar 4. Jeff Carlson
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Название: The Photographer's Guide to Luminar 4
Автор: Jeff Carlson
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Программы
isbn: 9781681984063
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So, what I’m saying is that you don’t need—and I’m not expecting you—to read the book front-to-back, but there is some progression to be found as you encounter the topics. Besides, I fully expect you to read a little, edit some photos in Luminar, refer back to the book for details, and edit some more. The whole point of this book, and Luminar in general, is to help you develop your images into the photos you want them to be.
1 The Luminar Studio
In a lot of books, this is the chapter you’re likely to skim over, or outright skip, so you can jump right to editing. I’m not judging! I’ve done the same thing. Touring an application’s interface sometimes feels like getting stuck behind a slow driver on an expressway.
That said, think of Luminar as a photo studio (or your photo bag when you’re in the field): when you know where everything is, you can easily grab the lens or filter you need and get the shot you want. If you’re fumbling around trying to locate the right piece of equipment, you can get frustrated and lose focus on the image you’re capturing or editing.
As you’ll soon discover, Luminar has a lot of working parts, such as the Library, which organizes your photo collection, and tools for making edits. Many of those parts aren’t visible at times.
Instead, let’s take a slightly different approach. I’m going to point out the essential tools and areas that will soon become second nature to you, in what I believe to be their order of importance.
If you’ve used Lightroom, Photoshop, or most other image-editing applications in the past, you should feel immediately comfortable with Luminar. When viewing or editing, the image is nice and large in the frame, with editing tools in a sidebar to the right, and a toolbar up top. The Looks panel runs along the bottom, offering pre-made, one-click looks.
The Sidebar
“Sidebar” seems like a bland moniker for the portion of Luminar that will get most of your focus, but I appreciate that Skylum didn’t try to jazz it up for crazy marketing reasons. In addition to the Library panel, the sidebar includes the Edit panel, with all the tools for adjusting a photo, the Layers controls, and the all-important Histogram (Figure 1-1). The sidebar also includes the Info View.
FIGURE 1-1: Nearly all of the editing tools are tucked away in the sidebar, leaving plenty of room for you to work on your image.
If you want to eke out some more screen space, you can hide the sidebar by choosing View > Sidebar > Hide. That hides all the tools you need, though, so it’s not something I recommend doing. A better way to get a less cluttered view of a photo is to choose View > Hide/Show Filmstrip to remove the images at the left side of the window. Or, for quick checks, press the tab key (or choose Hide/Show All Panels).
Edit Tools
I cover editing tools in much more depth in Chapter 5, so here I want to introduce the mechanics of how they work.
When you activate the Edit panel, a few tools are already visible, such as the Essentials group, which includes tools such as Light (for adjusting exposure and white balance) and AI Enhance (which does wonders with just two sliders) (Figure 1-2).
FIGURE 1-2: All of the tools for making adjustments reside in the Edit view.
Just below the group name is the current layer, which in most cases is the image’s file name. As you’ll learn in Chapter 8, each layer can have its own combination of adjustments, so this tiny detail helps orient you as you work.
Click a tool’s heading to hide or show the sliders for applying that tool’s edits. Only one tool’s controls are available at a time (Figure 1-3).
FIGURE 1-3: To streamline the editing interface, only the active tool will be visible.
With so many tools available, it would be madness to include them all in a long sidebar list; you’d fall asleep while scrolling. Instead, they’re organized into five main groups: Essentials, Creative, Portrait, Pro, and Deprecated. The last one appears only when you open an image that was edited using tools from earlier versions of Luminar that are no longer current; they still work, but aren’t normally visible.
No More Work for Workspaces
Luminar 3 and earlier used a clever method of working with tools—referred to then as filters—called workspaces. Instead of grouping tools into several main categories, as in Luminar 4, filters could be mixed, matched, swapped, and swiped between workspaces. It was wonderfully configurable—and quite complicated. Several of the filters duplicated tools from other filters as the software evolved.
Skylum streamlined tools significantly in version 4 to remove all that complexity and to be friendlier to folks who just want to get in, edit their photos, and move on to the next thing.
The Histogram
For a long time I ignored histograms—I can see a photo with my own two eyes, after all! But was I really seeing it? After consistently underexposing my photos, both in camera and during editing, I realized that the histogram is more than a fancy colorful representation of the data in the image. Now, I keep the histogram visible at all times. If it’s not already visible, click the More button at the bottom of the sidebar (
FIGURE 1-4: Learn to love the histogram, because it can get you out of some bad editing situations.
In addition to showing how color and tone are distributed in a photo, the histogram can reveal clipped areas that are blown out to white or darkened to complete black. Click the triangles that appear when you move the pointer over the histogram to view those areas. (For more, СКАЧАТЬ