Angie Birmingham edits a raw bobcat photo in Luminar Neo, showing five core adjustments: develop raw settings, the Enhance tool for tone, Structure for fur texture, radial masks to sharpen the face and control exposure, and Noiseless to reduce grain. She demonstrates how masks can be copied across tabs and warns against over-enhancement.
Today we are going to do a Luminar Neo edit. We're going to use this raw image of this bobcat, and we are going to process it with Luminar Neo, and we're going to turn it into this bobcat. Just to give you a little background on this image, This bobcat image was taken during my South Texas Wildlife and Bird Migration Workshop. It takes place every year in April down close to Harlingen. So if you're interested, check the link below. But meanwhile, let's dive into Neo and get started editing this beautiful male bobcat. Alright, so let's go ahead and dive into Neo and edit this bobcat. So first thing you want to do when you're in Neo is you want to come into Develop Raw, and typically what I do is I bring down my highlights, take up my shadows a little bit, a little bit more in this particular one because the cat was laying in the shadows. There we go. Add a little contrast. Come down to the black and whites, the black, and do some whites. There we go. And go into the optics, probably go ahead and do quick little distortion, chromatic aberration, and auto defringe. Then we'll jump up here and we'll hit close the Develop tab, and we'll jump down into Enhance. This is one of my favorite tools right here. You can use it globally, which does an amazing job. Look at that. That's just, that's amazing. So that's the before and the after. We'll probably leave that as it is. And then we'll jump down into Structure, which is another one of my amazingly favorite tools. And this one you can do it globally. We'll zoom into the cat's So you can see that it just adds a whole lot of texture to it. You can come down here and boost it up, give it even more texture. I mean, look at the, the hair on this cat. It goes from kind of soft to detailed. And you can see that it's not just Which I find amazing. And I don't really think I need to do anything with the colors in this. It looks pretty good. And we can jump down into some details, and we'll just do a quick little radial mask on this cat's face, something like that. That right there. Oh, darn it. So if you do that, you can go over to Edits and you can go back over here to Details, and now we're back where the mask— where I had closed it. See, there's the mask. And then you can also copy that mask as well, and you can use it later in other Edits tabs as well. So let's go over here to Adjust. We'll zoom in and watch what this does to the details on the face. I mean, it's just amazing. Look at that. Not that I ever sharpen my stuff that sharp, but it's pretty amazing what it does. So we'll go a little sharp there. I'm gonna back this down a little bit. So let's do a little before and after. Before and after. Did a very nice job. All right, so now we'll jump back over here to this tool and we will go down to Let's take a look at this image. Let's see, I want to darken this foreground because I don't like how bright it is. So we will go back up to Develop. We're going to do a quick mask, and we're going to do a linear, and we're just going to draw that up like so. Go back to Adjustments. We're just going to take those highlights and knock them all the way down. And we'll probably add some shadows to it, maybe even take some exposure out. There we go, that looks better. See how not so bright it is now? It doesn't draw your attention to, to the foreground. Okay, now we're gonna go into my favorite tool again, Enhance, and I'm going to take that mask and I'm going to paste it back on that cat, but I'm going to go in here to erase and I'm going to just kind of erase a little bit of that extra overflow for this Part that I'm gonna do, and I might even paint just a little bit more on the cat. So when you're doing this, you want to make sure that you don't paint outside the lines because it becomes very obvious. So we can always go back and erase. I'm going to zoom in so I can see where I went out of the lines right there. I mean, it's almost better to have it overlapped onto the animal or whatever it is that you're trying to mask. Go down here. All right, that looks pretty good. Now we'll go into Adjustments. And we're just going to boost the accent on the cat. So watch that cat just really start to pop out of that background. See the before and the after. Might be a little too much, a little over, over enhanced, if you get my drift. All right, so we're going to go down to this mask and we're going to go back to Mask Actions and we are going to copy that mask once again. So if you're enjoying Luminar editing with me, you should like and subscribe and check the links below because you can get 15% off everything on Luminar's website, even if it's already on sale. So go check out the link and get your editing program and start editing today, because now I'm going to go back to this Develop tab and I am going to paste that mask back in there. See there? And I'm going to invert that mask and go over here, brush, and I'm gonna adjust it just a little bit, get rid of the cat ears. Something like that right there. And all I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take the contrast down a little bit— or I'm sorry, I'm gonna take it up. No, maybe not. Take the highlights down. There we go. And we'll drop the overall shadows. There we go. There's your before and your after. So now he, he definitely pops a lot more now. So here we got before and after. All right, one more thing we're gonna do. I'm gonna go down here, or actually up here, to one of my other favorite tools. It's called Blur, and I am going to mask this annoying tree limb right here, that one right there, and that one. I'm gonna go over here to adjustment and I'm gonna blur those trees out so they just kind of disappear into the background. There we go. Before and after. They just kind of blend into the background. If you've never done an edit with me online, I do them on the fly. And I share my edits and my thought process with you. And I think that might be it. That's it right there. Okay, there we go. My greens look a little better now. You could always go into the hue, saturation, and luminance and And mess with the saturation here on the green. See what it does. Maybe hue. There we go. I think that's the ticket right there. Okay, now that we're done, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna zoom in. All right, now we're going to go over here to Noiseless and we're going to go ahead and run Noiseless on this and see what kind of job it does. Pretty good, pretty good, pretty good, pretty good. But it didn't do quite enough for me, so I'm going to go over here to my mask tool once again, bring this down, paste it in, show, invert, and go over here. I'm going to zoom in just a bit so you out there in YouTube world can see. There we go. That is what I was looking for right there. Before and after. There we go. Um, actually, you know what, let's do a quick little crop on him. There we go. And then Show you a quick little tool here. This is really cool. So in crop, if you don't like the orientation of him, you don't like him on the right side of it, the frame, you can just flip him and then flip him back. Isn't that cool? And there we have it, an edit done in Luminar. Go right here, we'll go before And after. Quite an amazing, amazing program, and it's super easy. All right, well, thank you for watching another episode. Thanks for tuning in and editing Bobcat with me. And if you like that edit, don't forget to like, subscribe, and ring my bell so you'll get notified the next time I post the video. Thanks for watching! Talk to you later!
