
It helped me really achieve that look of dawn and I loved how intuitive it was. I found the asphalt distracting to the perfect expression of interest and curiosity of this elephant. The photoshop part was crucial for removing the road. In the final image, although I used several filters and layers, the two biggest functions I give credit to Luminar 2018 are the Sun Rays Filter and the ability to edit in Photoshop within Luminar. I wanted to see what Luminar could do for me in the way of bringing up shadows and details and creating something that matched the brilliance of what I experienced in the moment. I shot this with my 16mm lens so you can imagine just how closely he passed over the road behind me (it was amazing!) but the low light lead to a dull and shadowy image. I’m also very happy with the results not looking overly processed or overly “HDR’d”.Īnother image I decided to process was this one of a teenage elephant at dawn. Within Luminar I picked their Dehaze filter (which I feel maintains the contrast better than Lightroom’s native dehaze), added a polarizer to really bring out the depth in the blues, and then used the Adjustment Gradient filter which brilliantly allows you to easily set a line for the upper and lower parts of the image and adjust exposure, saturation, and contrast independently for each part.Īll in all it took me about 30 seconds in a program I had never really used before making it score high on my scale for being easy and intuitive.

In this first photo at the Cape of Good Hope I encountered a blustery and hazy day thanks to a nearby forest fire. Here are some examples of processes I particularly enjoyed. Luminar 2018 also has a wide array of filters that when you open them, all seem to have lots of options to fine-tune the filter, which is awesome and again reinforces that you don’t have to have a heavy hand if you don’t want to.Īnother really awesome feature of Luminar 2018 is the ability to access Photoshop and other third party filters while you’re within the app! This limits the number of times I’m saving out an image and processing it (a.k.a. Layers and blend modes are also super helpful for me in my personal style of not liking to “overdo” a filter and preferring subtle effects to overly obvious ones (which I realize is subjective and nuanced to individual perspectives).
MACPHUN LUMINAR 2018 REVIEWS HOW TO
This is helpful for consistent methodology so people don’t have to “re-learn” how to essentially do the same thing but through the language of whatever plugin they’re using. It’s nice to have a tool that has options!Īnother thing I love about Luminar is that it allows you to utilize layers and blend modes just like you’d use in Photoshop. One of the reasons this is great is because we all have different workflows.
MACPHUN LUMINAR 2018 REVIEWS INSTALL
It can work as standalone software where you can open individual (or batch) photos OR you can install it as a plug-in for Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and even Aperture.


One of the major things I like about Luminar 2018 is its flexibility. Seeing as I just got back from an epic journey to South Africa, I had a lot of fun images to play with. I’m not typically one to edit my work with tons of filters and actions, and those that I do use, I tend to use sparingly, so I wanted to see what Luminar 2018 had in store and how much finesse their tools had. Macphun (Skylum Software) just dropped their latest version of their editing tool, Luminar 2018 and I decided to check it out.
