In this tutorial, Angie Birmingham walks viewers through a complete post‑processing workflow for a red‑fox RAW photograph using DxO PureRAW 3 and Luminar Neo. She begins by opening the RAW file in DxO PureRAW, explains the processing options (optical correction, output format, folder destination, and naming), and sends the processed file directly to Luminar Neo. In Neo she demonstrates a series of adjustments: reducing highlights, lifting shadows, tweaking smart contrast, applying a radial mask, boosting structure to enhance fur detail, and using Color Harmony with masks to warm the fox while subduing the green grass. She then removes the fox’s ear tags and collar with the Clone tool, fine‑tunes highlights with an inverted mask, and finishes with an AI‑assisted crop. Throughout she shares her reasoning for each step, offers visual before‑and‑after comparisons, promotes her upcoming Caddo Lake Fall Photography Workshop, and encourages viewers to purchase Luminar Neo at a discount. The video serves as a step‑by‑step instructional guide for wildlife photographers looking to polish RAW images with modern AI‑driven editing tools.
Chapters
Hello and welcome. Hello. So we are going to edit another image using Luminar Neo and DxO PureRAW. All right, so let's head on over to Neo. Oh, but wait. First, I want to remind you of my Caddo Lake Fall Photography Workshop, November 9th through the 12th. During this workshop, we will be on a pontoon boat both morning and evening for sunrise and sunset. And during the day, I have a couple adventures planned for everybody if they want to go. One is an old army depot out there, Caddo Lake area. And here's a photographer from last year out taking some pictures of the wonderful old structures with trees growing out of it. And then one of the other days we will head over to the state park and we'll go capture some birds. And some images of the beautiful Beautiful fall colors of the cypress trees. Alright, so let's go on over to Neo where we are going to photograph— not photograph, we are going to edit this beautiful red fox. But first, we're going to send this image over to DxO PureRAW. So I want to show in Finder, right-click, and once you got your image, you right-click and open with DxO PureRAW 3. Then DxO will pop up. From there you just hit Process Now. Kind of goes through a little checklist what you want to do optical correction-wise, if you want it as a TIFF, a JPEG, or DNG. I don't recommend the JPEG because then you won't be able to really edit it. And then your destination folder, I have it going to a DxO folder in the original file. And then file renaming, I don't have it rename the entire image, I just have it add DXO RAW to the end. And then you also tell it where you want it to export it to. I want it to go to Neo, so I want it to reopen in Neo. All right, so we're going to start processing, and there it goes. Doesn't take very long, just a few seconds. I think the longest one I've had is maybe 30 seconds. Process done. Now we're going to go over to Neo with it, but before we do that, let's take a look at the raw image and the Neo image. Really Really helps with the noise. If you can see that on the TV— I don't know if I can make this any bigger. Oh, there we go. That makes it a little better. There you go. All right. Now we'll close out. Escape. Go over to Neo. And so that we keep all this stuff in the same folder, I want to head over here. I'm actually going to take my fox and I'm going to move him Over here to DOX, and that way they're both in the same folder. But this is the one that we are going to edit. Alright, so what do you think we need to do to this image? My thoughts are kind of bring out the colors in the fox, the reds. And probably tone down the green grass a little bit, make it not so bright. Alright, let's go into Develop and see what we can do. Take the highlights down, open up the shadows, do a little smart contrast today. Uh, no. Brings out too much of the green unless we tone the greens down later in colors. We could do that. And we'll kind of add some black and some white. No, I think TXO did plenty of that already. I really think I'm gonna back this contrast off. Then we're not gonna add any sharpen because DxO already did that. DxO already took care of the optics. Now we'll jump into enhance, but we're only going to Do a radial mask of the fox. Something like this. Might have to clean it up a little bit. We'll just see what the accent looks like. Yeah, I think we'll brush away some of that right over here. It looks a little funky with the edit. Kind of do the same there. Then we'll go over, back over to the mask actions. We'll copy that. So we can head down here into Structure, Paste, and head over here, do a little structure on her, bring out that fur, probably boost it a little bit to really bring out all the little fine, fine details in her hair. Yeah, that really See how that really helped her hair a lot? Okay, now we'll head on over to Color Harmony, and we're gonna try— we're gonna try to make this a little bit warmer image, maybe cooler. See the brilliance on this thing. Take that down. I really think we need to do a mask on this too. We'll go in here. We'll paste. Apparently it didn't save my mask, so we'll just go back up here. We'll go to Mask, we'll go Copy, go back to Tools. Go down to Color Harmony, create our mask, paste, show. We're going to invert because I want to take down the brilliance of that green but not the fox. There we go. All right, before and after. Now we'll go back into Color Harmony, do our mask again, paste, show. I missed a little bit of that mask over here. I didn't notice it in the other images. All right, now we're going to— we're going to warm this fox up a little bit. Something like that. There we go. This is springtime when I took the picture of the fox, so she was in the middle of shedding. This was in the In one of the national parks, and you can see that she's got a tag in each ear and a collar on. That means that she has been caught 3 times. At least what I have heard is that this means she's been caught 3 times getting into trouble. They tag them and they release them, and the next time From what I understand, she'll get relocated. But she did have a bunch of kits down in a den, and she was headed out to go feed them. So let's go into Clone. I tried Erase earlier on her ear tags, and it just erased the entire ear, so I know that's not going to work. So we're going to try to clone the ear. So we'll select this as our source, bring the size down, and probably start maybe right here. Just work our way down to the tag. And then work our way back down to the tag. That looks pretty good. Go over, do another clone of this ear tag, select the source right there. Reduce the size, and we'll just kind of work our way down. Probably have to close it and re— reselect. For that little spot right there. We'll start here and work our way down. That looks pretty good. This clone tool, I like it a lot better than I do the, the erase. I just have better luck with it. So we'll start here, we'll just kind of Draw a little— there we go. And the collar is gone. There we go. Let's see what it looked like before and after. Nice simple little edit that anybody can do. And we might even do one more thing to her. Let's go back into this Develop. We will paste our mask back in there. Make sure it's still her. Actually, no, we're gonna invert it. And let's see if we can't take those highlights down just a little bit more all the way around her. Make it so she just really just glows right there in the image. Something like that right there. And then crop. I don't know if you've ever tried the Crop AI, but I always like to crop it or see what it has to do. But cut the tail off? We don't ever cut the tails off. There we go. Something like that right there would— no, I gotta— about like that right there. There we go. All right, before and after. All right, all right, so there's another edit. Super quick, super easy. You need to get your copy of Luminar Neo today. Head on over to my website. Go pick it up at a super discounted rate, and then add the 15% off for even more off. And don't forget to subscribe and hit that like button so you can learn more about Luminar Neo. Oh, don't forget to ring my bell. Ding-a-ling-ling. All right, see you next time.
