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Filters are how you can adjust the exposure, color, contrast, and style of your image in
Luminar. The proper use of filters can significantly improve your image. Each filter
is designed to solve specific problems or enhance an image in a particular way. Be sure to click
the Info (i button) in the Filters Catalog to see helpful descriptions.
Applying a Filter
In order to adjust an image in Luminar, you’ll need to apply a filter. There are several ways to do this for an image. You can choose the workflow that fits your personal style.
At the bottom of each filter you’ll find:
Essential Filters
The essential filter are some of the most frequently used in Luminar. These filters perform core adjustments that are useful for most images.
Accent AI Filter
This filter automatically analyzes your image and instantly corrects it. Under the
hood, more than a dozen controls are in use. This effect tends to yield naturally
beautiful results with one simple slider. The Accent AI Filter can substitute for many
traditional controls like shadows, highlights, contrast, tone, saturation, exposure, details
and others.
Boost – Controls the overall amount of the filter effect applied to your image.
AI Sky Enhancer
The AI Sky Enhancer allows you to get beautiful skies almost instantly with artificial intelligence and a single slider. Luminar analyzes and detects the sky in an image to improve the texture, tone, and colors of the sky itself. The filter can recognize sky in most photos as well as distinguish between water and other elements in a photograph. It also detects the objects in the foreground and their edges for perfect masking.
As you move the slider, AI Sky Enhancer performs the necessary improvements, selectively adjusting brightness and contrast, saturation and vividness, alongside recovering the details and improving the textures of the sky and clouds. The AI Sky Enhancer is designed to work with most photographs of skies and works from blue hour in the morning to the blue hour in the evening. The filter is not designed to work with night skies.
Just like a professional photographer, AI Sky Enhancer treats different images differently. It applies a custom set of adjustments to a sky in a photo, depending on the look of that particular sky. This means that a blue sky will get a treatment far different from a grey sky, and a sunset sky will be enhanced differently from a mid-morning one.
Black & White Conversion
The B&W Conversion filter converts a color photo to black & white. It also
contains a number of controls to manipulate the monochrome look.
Structure
This tool allows adjusting of image detail and clarity. Using this tool you can get a classic HDR effect with great detail or get a smoother picture with less detail. This is the main tool to increase contrast of the image and visualize more details in the image.
Tone
The Tone effect is a precise way to adjust overall brightness and contrast. It helps to provide tonal balance and a unique signature style to your photos. Tone is one of the most important filters to give your photos the necessary look. This filter is similar to the Develop filter. However you may have only one instance of the Develop filter in a recipe, you can have multiple instances of Tone.
Note
This tool allows you to highlight key points in the photo, making it more interesting. A slight edges shading always provokes the viewer's eye to consider the lighter central part of the photo. For a realistic picture, don’t lower the Amount below -50. As a rule, this effect is used only with darker shading. Highlights are rarely used except for some vintage looks.
Foliage Enhancer
Enhances the colors of foliage and greenery automatically, making them more vivid and natural. A good choice for nature and lush landscape images.
Polarizing Filter
On a camera, a polarizing filter can provide more color depth and cuts atmospheric haze, resulting in richer, bluer skies. The same holds true with the Polarizing Filter in Luminar. The effect will produce deeper blue skies and more contrast in clouds. With a light touch of this filter, almost any landscape image can be improved.
Сross Processing
Reproduces a color cross-processing effect once commonly used in developing film to create unnatural color and interesting contrast shifts.
Dramatic
The Dramatic filter is a creative filter that lowers saturation and increases contrast, helping to achieve a gritty cinematic look in your photos, similar to the darkroom technique “Bleach Bypass.” It is often used in stylized fashion shoots, urban images, or grungy athletic portraits.
Fog
Allows you to add a strong softening or blurring effect to part of your photo, simulating the high humidity weather phenomenon commonly known as “Fog”. You can add Light Fog or Dark Fog to an image and adjust its intensity with the Amount slider.
Golden Hour
Use the Golden Hour filter to bring warmth, softness, and golden glow to all of your photos. Simply dial in the amount of warm toning using the Amount slider and use the Saturation slider to introduce an even more overall color vibrancy. Quickly emulate the magic that happens just after sunrise or just before sunset.
Grain
Emulates the structure of analog film stock by introducing a random, stylized grain into your image. Keep in mind that grain and photo noise are different things. Use grain to give your color and black & white photos a cool analog feel.
High Key
Emulates the look of a high key lighting set-up where the main light source slightly overexposes the subject. This produces bright high contrast images. Often used in Fashion & Beauty photography.
Hue Shift
This filter lets you roll the hue in a photo for subtle or dramatic changes. A little is perfect to eliminate unwanted color tints while a big adjustment is perfect for dramatic style.
Image Radiance
This filter provides for an overall “dreamy” look to your image by softening image luminescence, and increasing contrast & saturation. It can create a dreamy, fantasy look for photos by increasing contrast and adding a creative glow, prioritized to the lighter areas of the image.
Note
At a low setting, this effect will give the image more contrast and can increase color in the image. Use the Smart Colorize slider for better control.
Matte Look
This filter can give your photos an aged look with flat color and high contrast. This works well for both landscape and portraits to change the emotion of your image.
Orton Effect
The Orton Effect allows enhancements to an image that includes glow and focus which produces photos that are sharp and blurry at the same time. This is a great way to add a unique look to your photos.
Soft Focus
This filter emulates a soft focus lens effect or diffusion material placed across your lens. It is perfect for adding a creative glow to portrait and wedding photos.
Soft Glow
This effect us useful for creating a lighting effect in photos. It is especially useful for bright areas in your image such as streetlights or sky.
Split Toning
A powerful creative tool, Split Toning offers the ability to introduce color toning to black and white images. Toning a black and white image can transform the mood of the resulting image and also help in some printing processes.
Sun Rays
Add a whole new light source to your photo, the sun! You can control its position, the warmth, and amount of glow for a subtle or even dramatic change in lighting. Combine the filter with blending modes for even more control to your lighting.
Texture Overlay
Enables custom images and textures to be blended as a layer into the current image. Textures can easily give your photos new unique looks, especially when you’re trying to achieve a vintage or grungy look.
TIP
If you press and hold the Option key and click on a slider value in the sidebar, moving the cursor to the left and right will let you set the values of the slider with high accuracy. Slider sensitivity is higher than with its normal movement. This allows you to fine-tune to small numeric values.
Сolor Balance
The Color Balance filter is useful to change the overall mixture of colors in an image for general color correction. It can also be used for creative control within different tonal regions of an image.
Color Contrast
This filter lets you choose a color range to which to apply contrast. The color selected will cause objects of that color to become lighter, while opposite colors on color wheel will become darker. This effect can help make flat images pop based on the colors in the image.
Dodge & Burn
Dodge & Burn tools are known as toning tools. They allow for finer control over lightening or darkening an image. These tools simulate traditional techniques used by photographers. In a darkroom, the photographer would regulate the amount of light on a particular area of a print.
1. To Dodge and Burn, apply the Dodge & Burn filter in the Filters list.
2. Click the Start Painting button to open up your canvas.
3. Choose either the Lighten or Darken tools in the top Toolbar to select the desired brush.
4. Use the Size slider in the Toolbar to control how large the brush is.
5. Use the Strength slider to control its impact.
6. If you get an accidental stroke, the Erase tool can be used to remove it.
7. Click Reset if you need to start over.
8. Click Done to apply the adjustment.
9. Use the Amount slider in the filter control group to further refine the global intensity of the filter and blend it back with the original image.
NOTE
This is a tool that is meant to be used creatively and by feeling. It is more about the looks and results than it is specific numbers and sliders. Feel free to experiment as you can always adjust the mask of the Dodge & Burn effect as well as its overall opacity.
HSL
Selectively adjusts Hue (color), Saturation (color purity), and Luminance (intensity) of individual colors in the image for color correction to balance tones and explore creative possibilities. Allows you to create unique looks with selective coloring.
Note
This is a powerful tool for fine-tuning of colors in the image as well as a means for creative image processing. Examples of using this tool:
The sky is mostly blue in photos. Therefore, lowering the brightness of blue colors in the image can cause more dark and deep blue of the sky.
Reducing the tone for some colors (move the slider to the right in Saturation tab), and leaving it for the other can cause a dramatic effect on the selective color in photos.
Raising the yellow color (move of the slider to the right) can significantly improve color saturation of autumn foliage on the photos.
Note
If you choose a custom LUT it will automatically be stored with your saved Luminar file or embedded into any custom preset that you create.
Microstructure
Improves the sharpening of your image in small areas of fine detail and texture. Advanced parameters allow you to fine tune this subtle yet dramatic effect. Use this tool to get some creative, HDR-like effects.
Photo Filter
This filter simulates color filters that traditionally are attached to a camera lens. Professional photographers often place glass filters in front of the camera lens to “cool” or “warm” a picture, or to add special effects. These can also be used to accentuate complementary colors, and add creative toning to your photos.
Split Color Warmth
This filter can be used to selectively enhances cool and warm tones in your image. Allows you to get increased color contrast and vibrancy or create creative toning effects. You can separately adjust the Warm Colors and Cool Colors. Drag to the left to reduce Saturation in a target and to the right to add more in.
Bi-Color Toning
This filter simulates a traditional glass bi-color filter. It uses two colors and a soft transition to tone the image. This is a good choice for enhancing seascapes and landscape photos.
Brightness/Contrast
This is a basic filter which adjusts the overall lightness or darkness of an image (brightness) and the difference in brightness between areas and objects (contrast). This filter is easy to understand and works well for new users. For best results consider using the Tone or Develop filters.
Top & Bottom Lighting
This filter allows selective adjustment of lighting for the top and bottom parts of the image. Controls permit shifting the transition area, rotation angle and blending gradient. This effect is widely used in landscape or architecture photography with a distinct horizon. The effect flexibly and separately controls the brightness and other aspects of the top and bottom of the image. This enables you, for example, to lower the brightness of the sky and raise the brightness of the foreground. Thus, your image can be significantly improved without resorting to creating layers and masking.
Whites/Blacks
This filter is a simple way to adjust the white and black point of an image. This gives you finer control over the contrast in a photo. Drag a slider to the right to brighten a zone and to the left to darken.
The use of filters can be significantly extended with blending modes. Each filter supports the use of its own blending mode, which allows for very complex combinations of results. Blending modes are both a mystery and a source of great design power. Each blending mode controls how a filter’s results are blended with the image below.
Applying a Blending Mode to a FilterTo access Blending Modes for a filter
How do blending modes work? The simple answer is, it depends. Your response is likely, depends on what? Simply put, the effect achieved by blending a filter varies with the contents of the original layer and the filters applied. A blending mode compares the content of two and enacts changes based on the content of both.
Here are the modes supported by Luminar:
Note
To get the most from blending modes:
Download the full Luminar 2018 User Guide for Windows in PDF Format
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