So Many Tools, Dan, Do I Have To Use Them All?

Of course not.

We can all tend to fall into that trap.  There are so many sliders, extensions, conversions, and what-nots in every editing program and Luminar Neo is no exception. It's ease to go, "if I use them all, I'll get a really good finished image". Wrong. If you use them all properly, that's often true. But there are some very intuitive, and simple tools in Neo that will give you an excellent result, and it won't take you more than a couple minutes.

I did a test. Here's the beginning image, taken in the evening, just after sunset.  I wanted to lighten up the foreground, and bring up the pink in the clouds.

©Daniel Gauss/Shot On Site

Ordinarily, I'd use a large part of the Luminar tool box to get the result I'm looking for, but in this test, I wanted to see how few tools I needed.  So here's a screen shot of the edit history: 

A couple steps don't show up here. First, I cropped the image to 16:9 to get rid of some of the sky, foreground, and some of the edges. After that I went into Develop, where I selected the Adobe Standard Camera Profile for Fujifilm X-T2 raw files. Made a slight contrast adjustment, brought down the highlights a smidge, then made a one-click optical correction and I was done with the Develop tool.

I noticed one of the houses in the foreground was a little distracting, so I used the Erase tool to get rid of it.

Then, I used the first key tool: The HDR Merge Extension. I simply dragged the catalog image to the HDR Merge box, (it's primarily used to merge several exposures of the same image, but it works great for single images as well!), pressed "Merge", and the AI did the tone mapping and spit out a giant TIF file which looked exactly how I'd hoped it would.  I could have called in done then and there, but there was one more AI tool I needed to really pop those pink clouds: Enhance AI. (PRO TIP: In a pinch, this is often the only tool you need for a great looking photo).

I was done, so how many tools was that? Five. And it took probably 2 minutes from start to finish. 

Ope! I forgot the last tool.. I used the Layers tool to add a .png file of my initials in the lower right corner. So 6 tools.  And here's the finished product:

©Daniel Gauss/Shot On Site

So, the moral of the story?  If you're in a time crunch, or you just don't want to sit hunched over your keyboard, staring at your monitor on a beautiful day, there are tools here that can get you the result you want in just minutes.

You can now get Luminar Neo, and all the extensions, plus some sweet bonuses for ridiculously low prices during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales period. Use the discount code: DANGAUSS at checkout for an additional $10 off. 

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