Feel Free to Augment Your Reality

Dogs,2003,  and a Bridge, 2021 ©Daniel Gauss/Shot On Site

 

The folks at Skylum Software, just released a buttload of new extensions for their Luminar Neo editor. Some practical (I'll get to those in a future post), and some fun and creative. Background Removal AI falls solidly in the latter category. Take the above image for example.  If you've got your readers on and can read the small print you'll see the dogs' picture was taken 19 years ago at a dog camp in Asheville. The bridge was shot last Thanksgiving at the Nature Conservancy's Iron Bridge Conservation Area northwest of Silver City, New Mexico.

This screenshot from the Luminar Neo desktop shows the steps (though not in process order) I took to get from there to here... upper right is the original Nikon D1H raw file from 2003. Bottom right is the background removed, with a single click and a bit of fringe work around the ears, Bottom left converted to a png file with a transparent background, where it is then ready to be inserted into another background. Notice that I needed to flip the dogs so the light direction was consistent. Also a single click. Spent about 10 minutes total. Obviously more can be done, but I wanted to get the news out.

I used a couple of the other new extensions when putting this image together, including NoiselessAI, to remove digital noise in the dog image caused by the small 19 year old Nikon sensor, and UpscaleAI, to increase resolution for the same reason.

If your interest is piqued, hit the links at the top of the post, or the vertical ad on the right sidebar. If you're buying, don't forget to use the discount code: DanGauss to potentially save $10.

Fine print:

Posts may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of these, I may receive a small commission at no increased cost to you. Thanks.

The Value of An Evolving Editing Program (to me, anyway)

When  Luminar Neo first launched last February, it was a very good editing program, but not a great

editing program. It had a lot of useful tools, but it was also missing tools... tools that had been in previous iterations of Luminar: LuminarAI, Luminar4.  

                                                                                                                                                                Gradually, over the next few months, with free updates, improvements and additional tools were added. But the best was yet to come!

Fulfilling the promise to build a fully functional edit platform, to rival the best of the competition, the Luminar team began to drop the first of the "extensions", those being HDR Merge, and NoiselessAI, both of which you've seen on these pages. November will bring 3 more: UpscaleAI (which I teased in a previous post), AI Background Removal, and Focus Stacking.

(The fact that Skylum/Luminar can keep the doors open, and the updates and improvements coming all year long while working in the war zone of Kyiv, Ukraine is nothing short of miraculous!)

But I digress. How do I, Dan Gauss, find the evolving Luminar Neo so gosh darn valuable? Well, you already know I edit nearly every current image with Neo. But I've got literally thousands of old digital images, going back to my days as a sighthound event photographer beginning in 2003. And even thousands more on negatives going back to the very beginnings of Shot On Site Photography in 1994, and beyond!

With every new extension tool, it becomes possible to make nearly every old image in my compendium to look far better than they ever could have looked with the editing tools back in the day. A case in point:

Race Day Morning.2008 NOTRA Nationals, Boswell OK
©Daniel Gauss/Shot On Site

This is an image I found yesterday morning while assembling an order for images from this event*. I don't remember taking it, and if I ever saw it back in 2008, I don't remember it. Anyway, I pulled it off the disk and ran it through Luminar NEO. The original wasn't bad, mind you, but it was helped with a few tweaks. I'm looking forward to getting UpscaleAI next month. I'll take this 2MB original JPEG and see what it looks like at 32MB (or bigger?)

So, if you're like me, and have hundreds or thousands of old, small, digital images in need of improvements in color, or exposure, or resolution, you'll want to give Luminar Neo a try. And there's no better time than now to try it (risk free, of course). Special pricing and a bonus gift! Click the ghost in the right hand sidebar, or this link

*Yes, old Shot On Site friends, your old images (from 2003 on) still exist! They're still on my Photoreflect website!, and I still get orders to this day! Not all, mind you, but images from every major lure coursing event, race meet, breed specialty, open field hunt, ASFA II are there.  The regular weekend lure coursing and race meets have been removed, but never fear, I still have them on disk. Just email me: dan@shotonsite.us

And remember: if you do order images from "the olde dayes", they will now be edited in the latest and greatest Luminar software!

Posts may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of these, I may receive a small commission at no increased cost to you. Thanks.