18-55mm IS lens, Canon 80D, Cee's Black & White Photo Challenge, Lens Artists Photo Challenge, made with Luminar, Photo Editing, Photography, What I Am Working On

What I Am Working On: Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By

Sometimes photo editing is really difficult and I’m not even talking about the actual editing, I’m talking about the editing software itself. I’ve crashed out a few times on a few different software applications, but this time, it’s Luminar 3. I’m back in business again. I’ve learned a few things and had a few things I already knew reinforced. The most important thing that I already knew is to backup your work. Please do this. Because I do this, my Luminar 3 crash was not utterly devastating. When considering how to approach your backup, I would advise you whatever software you are using, to make a high-quality jpeg version of your final edit. This is in addition to the backup of your drives that you are already doing.

What I learned is that Luminar 3 is not currently capable of handling a large library. In my subsequent research on how to rethink my approach, I found this Matt Suess video to be a really good starting point. In the video, he offers a few options of how to work around this library issue. I would recommend watching it and then considering which variation you might want to apply or modify for your library set-up.

This crash was a complete drain on my creative energy and time in general. I keep track of the time I spend on photography and this past week, this crash took 11 hours of work time to fix. This does not include the backups I ran of my drives. Hopefully, the fix will hold. As of the writing of this post, it seems solid.

This photo is my first edit under my newly revamped set-up:

ISO 200 f/11 1/200sec 55mm

This photo has a total of four layers. The first was some basic edits, a crop and details enhancer. The second was a Luminar Look applied called Camden Fade. It is an analogue film style look. The third was my black and white conversion layer. I applied a blue filter within the black and white conversion and then increased the yellow luminance. The fourth layer includes a filter called the Orton effect and a vignette.

The original file is this one:

ISO 200 f/11 1/200sec 55mm

This is a file that I very possibly will be revisiting. I like the black and white edit, but I also think the color edit alternatives here are interesting.

Do you like this particular interpretation? Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge, Bricks or Stone and Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Monochrome.

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36 thoughts on “What I Am Working On: Technical Difficulties, Please Stand By

  1. Sorry to hear about the issue you’ve experienced with Luminar. I’m lucky in that I have never experienced anything similar in Lightroom or Afinity – probably because the latter doesn’t have a library function in the first place! 😉 I don’t tend to use lots of layers either as most of my work is documentary in nature rather than artistic. Glad you’ve got it back up and running 🙂

    I like your B&W – suits the image very well 🙂

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  2. That’s a very scary story Amy and some excellent advice. I went the extra step this year and subscribed to Backblaze which is cloud backup software. It took forever to do all of my drives and my Mac but now that it’s done it’s self-maintaining and fast. That’s in addition to my backup drives. Backups are tedious but critical.

    Your image is lovely, I much prefer your edited version.

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  3. I do like your edit, although the color version sets an alternate mood, which is nice as well. Sorry to hear of your lost 11 hours. Technology is great but when it isn’t…hours go down the drain. I agree with you about backing up. It’s hard to know how many backups (and in what format) will last the longest.

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  4. I am a Luminar user as well. I use Lightroom 6 for my catalog (not the subscription version) so when I found the Luminar catalog to be less than useful, I fell back to Lightroom. I keep a backup of all my photographs on a USB hard drive and I use an online backup service as well. With redundant backups, one online, I feel pretty protected and so far I’ve not needed to use either backup set for anything except the occasional accidental deletion of an image.

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    • Sounds like you have a good system in place. At the moment I am using Bridge for my catalogue and then edit in Luminar. I really like Luminar in terms of editing, but the library feature is problematic at this point for anyone with a larger library.

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