Made with Luminar: Increasing the Chill

In a recent post featuring a photo from the Kilmainham Gaol Museum, I talked about the use of color to convey a mood. Today’s post is related, just approaching the edit in a different way.  Here is the original file:

ISO 3200 f/11 1/13sec 21mm

The edits made below were to make this already chilling jail seem colder:

ISO 3200 f/11 1/13sec 21mm

You can let me know in the comments section if you think this is successful.  The first edit was to crop, straighten, and remove the lens distortion from this image. I also dropped the highlights slider. That was all on the first layer. On layer 2 I’ve applied the LUT, Cool Blue B&W, and adjusted the amount to 62. On layer 3 the filter Matte look was applied with an amount of 42 and a fade of 20. Layer 4 has the Accent AI filter and a vignette.

This edit was inspired by the Len-Artist Challenge, Cold.

 

Cheers!

The Made with Luminar Series

This image is part of a project I am calling Made with Luminar. What the images in this series have in common is the software used to edit them, Luminar 3. As with my usual blog posts particulars of the camera settings can be found in the caption below the image. I’ll then explain what other filters and edits have been applied, often mentioning what layer and therefore order that they were applied. The text of these posts includes any Luminar “Looks” that have been applied to the photo. Each look is a series of presets that are applied to the photo. Where applicable I will mention what changes I have made to any of the looks. A full explanation of looks is available here on their website, https://skylum.com/luminar/user-guides/chapter-14-working-with-luminar-looks

You can assume basic edits have been applied. My most common edits are cropping, detail enhancement, and vignette. Specific questions or thoughts on the image are welcome in the comment section below.

What I Am Working On: Working With Color

When it comes to working with color within an image, there are a lot of ways you can approach it. This week I was editing this image, shot at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin:

ISO 400 f/2.2 1/17sec 4.2mm

Shot with my iPhone, this is an image I like a lot and think that there would be many potential editing possibilities. For this particular editing session, my interest was in the red tones in the image, which have a warm almost salmon tone to them. Here is my edit:

ISO 400 f/2.2 1/17sec 4.2mm

To get this look, I dropped all the saturation sliders except for red, that I left at 0. Then I moved the red luminance slider to 60. It’s a matter of personal preference, but I often find I prefer working with luminance rather than saturation when giving a particular color a boost. This edit has been cropped slightly to straighten it. I’ve increased the small details slightly, in place of sharpening, and added a “soft glow” filter set to 18.

So, that is what I am calling my red edit. What do you think of the result? feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge, Red and Cee’s Black & White Challenge, Starting with the Letters K or L.

What I Am Working On: Building Blocks

Sometimes my process of creating an image can involve many steps. The first can be as simple as what is going on around me or what I might be looking at online. For this particular image, I pulled it out to work on because, as you will see in the link at the bottom, Tuesday’s Photo Challenge is stone. The photo Frank used in the prompt was shot in Ireland. So, I thought it would be interesting to also create a stone image from Ireland. Here is the image I started with:

ISO 3200 f/11 1/80sec 18mm

I liked this image because of the story I saw in it, and went about coaxing what I saw in it, out of it. What follows is a series of screenshots of the various stages of construction. First is the overall general edits:

Shows the first basic steps.

I adjusted the whites (up) and blacks (down), boosted the luminance of the reds, oranges, and yellows, then I sharpened a bit by increasing the small details.

The next layer, I labelled “Desaturation layer”. On this layer, using the HSL sliders, I removed the following colors: green, aqua, blue, purple, and magenta:

Where I remove most of the color.

For the final layer, I added my custom made look called “Amy Black and White Pinhole”:

In a minute I would add back in a hint of color.

I have a blog post about creating a saving a custom look here. Then I set about editing that look for this particular photograph, and the end result is this:

ISO 3200 f/11 1/80sec 18mm

I did things like adding the saturation of the reds and yellows back in. I’ve also tweaked the amount of the “Orton Effect” filter and set the vignette in a better way for this particular scene.

Writing out these steps has been an interesting experience as well. It has taken longer to do that then execute the steps, or at least it felt longer. Creating the image, in this case, was pretty simple because the final edit was something that I had already seen in my mind and I had a fairly decent idea of how I was going to go about getting it to emerge.

Thanks for reading this far. Feel free to leave and comment below. This photo has been added to Tuesday Photo Challenge, Stone. If you are like me and enjoy looking at stones, there is a camera installed at Stonehenge, I find it calming and visit a few times a week. The photo from this post was taken at Kilmainham Gaol, a prison in Dublin that is well worth touring.

Cheers!