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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One of the ways Luminar differs from other photo-editing applications is the absence of a long toolbar taking up a portion of the screen. The tools that affect the shape of the image and that fix specific areas are stored in the Canvas panel (Figure 1-10). (I cover the Canvas tools in more detail in Chapter 6.)
FIGURE 1-10: Instead of a lengthy tools palette, as found in other applications, Luminar concentrates its tools into a single panel.
Click the Canvas button in the sidebar to access its tools:
•Crop & Rotate: Use the Crop & Rotate tool to change the image’s composition, specify other aspect ratios, and straighten the shot. On the Mac, you can also flip the image horizontally or vertically or rotate it in 90-degree increments. Crop also applies to the entire image and all its layers. Press the C key to quickly activate the Crop tool.
•Erase: The Erase tool removes areas of the image and replaces them using algorithms that calculate the result. It’s great for erasing objects like stray power lines. In situations like that, the software can handle the task so you don’t have to do it manually with the Clone & Stamp tool. Press Command/Ctrl-E to switch to the Erase tool.
•Clone & Stamp: A common method of making touch-ups is to use the Clone & Stamp tool. Let’s say you need to remove some dust marks or fill in a patch of grass that stands out; you can define a nearby area as a source and then stamp (copy) the pixels to fix the spot. Press Command/Ctrl-J to switch to the Clone & Stamp tool.
•Lens & Geometry: This collection of tools can fix distortion, chromatic aberration, fringe issues, and vignetting caused by some lenses, as well as changing the overall shape of the image.
History
Editing a photo is never a linear process for me. I make some edits, change my mind, go back to an earlier version, try something different—you get the idea. In some applications, you can undo a set number of times, and if you close the document, that history is gone the next time you work on it.
Not so in Luminar (Figure 1-11). It keeps track of all your edits, from the moment you open the file the first time. To step back through your last edits, choose Edit > Undo, or press Command/Ctrl-Z. To go to any previous edit, click the History menu in the toolbar and scroll to that point. Any subsequent edits are no longer applied. As soon as you make another edit, the ignored actions are deleted.
FIGURE 1-11: Return to earlier actions by selecting them from the History list.
The Library
There are a few ways of getting photos into Luminar for editing, as I detail in Chapter 2, but my favorite is the Library for one simple reason: convenience. If Luminar is your main tool for interacting with your photos, it helps enormously to have them all in one interface.
Unlike some applications that want to consolidate all images into one central location, Luminar can peek into whichever folder you choose to store your photos and make them appear in a gallery interface that lets you quickly identify them visually (Figure 1-12).
FIGURE 1-12: Using the Library lets you browse your entire photo collection without leaving Luminar.
Select a photo and double-click it, or press the spacebar to switch to single image mode. The Library panel in the sidebar reveals source folders you’ve added, any albums you create, and shortcuts to favorites and edited images. To return to the gallery view, click the Gallery Images mode (
The Luminar Library isn’t a full DAM (digital asset manager). You can assign star ratings and color labels, flag or reject images, and sort based on those criteria, but that’s it. Support for IPTC metadata and text search are planned for the future.
Even so, I’ve wanted a library in Luminar for quite some time, and even this bare-bones version makes it easy for me to sort and cull photos in preparation for editing the ones that stand out. See Chapter 10 for more details on how to use the Library.
View Photos in the Library
With the beginnings of a library in place, let’s look at how to navigate your photos in Luminar.
The library appears as a grid that you can scroll to peruse your photos. Change the size of the image thumbnails by choosing a view from the menu at the center of the toolbar: Small, Medium, Large, or Largest (Figure 1-13). You can also click the – and + buttons next to it to switch between them, or choose View > Zoom In or View > Zoom Out.
FIGURE 1-13: Change the size of the thumbnails in the grid view.
To view a photo larger, select it and double-click it, or press the spacebar. That presents a view where the image takes up most of the window with the sidebar at right, the Filmstrip at left, and the Looks panel at the bottom (Figure 1-14). (In the Windows version, switching to this view automatically selects the Edit panel.)
FIGURE 1-14: View a single image, but keep the library close by in the Filmstrip at left.
Any of those elements can be hidden using the toolbar. Click the Hide/Show Looks button to toggle the Luminar Looks. Go to the View menu to set visibility for the sidebar, Filmstrip, and the Current Photo Actions strip at the bottom of the window.
The Info Panel
Press the I key or click the Info button at the top of the sidebar to reveal information about the image you’re viewing: capture date and time, size in dimensions and storage, СКАЧАТЬ