In this tutorial, Angie Birmingham walks viewers through a complete edit of a coastal brown bear photograph using Luminar Neo. She begins by cropping the image to frame the subject, then selects a camera profile and adjusts highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. After applying optics and modest sharpening, she creates a radial mask to isolate the bear’s face and uses the Enhance tool for subtle detail improvement. She copies the mask for use across the workflow, then boosts structure and fine details. Next, she refines the mask for the entire bear and adjusts color using the Color Harmony module, tweaking warmth and saturation. She removes distracting flies with the Erase tool’s dust spot feature, and finally applies dodge and burn to brighten the eyes and selectively mask fur areas. Throughout, she mentions a Luminar spring sale with a discount code, and previews an upcoming Svalbard polar bear expedition video, asking viewers for feedback on channel content direction. The tutorial is instructional, conversational, and promotional, emphasizing incremental adjustments to achieve a polished wildlife image.
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Hey, and welcome to another episode of WTF Stop, Jeff and Angie Photography. Today we are going to take this little coastal brown bear and we are going to turn this bear into this bear. So stay tuned and we will edit her together. She may not turn out exactly the same because I got rid of all of the edits. I did save a preset, but we're going to do it off the cuff with you as an audience. All right, let's go. Welcome back. Um, if you are new to the channel, make sure that you hit that like button— hit that like button and subscribe for more great stuff to come. All right, so let's jump into this edit and see what we can do to this beautiful little bear together. I took this image when I was in Alaska, and she was out clamming is what she was doing. So, all right, let's see here. So you can see, um, this image was taken at ISO 1000, 600mm, f/4 and 1/800th of a second. So let's jump into edits. So the first and foremost thing that, that I kind of like to do before I even get started editing is I like to go on and crop the image because then I know what I'm looking at and what I need to do That way I'm not worried about painting and editing areas of the image that I'm going to throw away. So— oh, let me show you a cool thing too. In Neo, if you don't already know, if you don't like the way the animal is looking, you just click this button right here and you can flip the bear. But I like the way she's looking. I kind of like that crop, so I'm gonna go with that crop. The next thing you do is you jump into the develop mode and you go down here to camera profile. And my particular camera is not in there, so I'm just gonna choose Adobe Standard. And then we're gonna go and we are going to reduce the highlights just a little bit. 'Cause her blonde coat, she was very blonde. Even though there was no sun out, she's still a little bit white. Bring up the shadows just a little bit. Maybe bring the highlights down just a little bit more. Go for a before and after. Oh yeah. That's good. Hit the J key on the keyboard. That way we're gonna bring up the blacks and reds. The blacks show you the shadows where it's purest black, which a little black is good, but she was not that dark. She was probably somewhere right in there. And then the, the brights, the highlights. Yeah, she's not clipping any highlights, so we'll put a little bit of white in there. And then before I move on— All right, so just real quick, Luminar Neo is offering a spring sale, 83% off. And if you use my discount code that I put below, you will get an additional 15% off. So take advantage of that deal. And if you're already a Luminar subscriber, they have a Spring Creation collection that you can get for $39 right now, and that too you can get the 15% discount on. So it's a really good deal. Make sure you sign up for that. And so let's jump back in the edit. I always go down here to optics and do all of the 3 optics, and then I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in on her face a little bit here and see if a little bit of sharpening will help her. Oh yeah, a little bit of sharpening, not too much. You don't want to overdo the sharpening. So now you can reach up and you can hit the J key again, and that turns off the highlights and shadows warnings. All right, so we're going to jump out of the Develop module. We're going to go into Enhance. We're going to create a mask. I like to use radial masks. That's just my preference. I find it faster than taking a paintbrush and painting her. Plus, it also seems to fade in and out a little better too, as far as the softness goes. So I just kind of want to center that over her face. Then we'll go down here and hit invert so the only thing that's masked is her face. Then we'll go over here to enhance. We'll zoom back into her face because we don't want it to over-enhance and make her face look all weird. So that looks pretty good. Just a nice subtle little enhancement. You can barely see it. But that's the idea, is to do like little baby steps, and the little baby steps will, will make your image amazing at the end. So one thing I forgot to do is you go into your masking actions and you hit copy. So now that mask that I created, I can use that throughout my edit. By opening up Mask Actions and hitting paste. Now go into the structure, and structure, I'm going to see what that looks like. Before and after. Before and after. I kind of like that. And then we're gonna boost up the fine details. Yeah, that's good. Okay, so now we'll jump down into— let's see, we need to— the before— or that's the after. That's before, after. So we need to bring her color out, so we're gonna jump into Color Harmony. And we're gonna do the same mask, but I'm gonna make some adjustments to it. So I'm gonna have it show me the mask, and then I'm gonna go to brush, and I'm going to brush in some additional areas and also make it so that the mask Is even throughout the entire bear. There we go. All right. And then we will jump in here and we'll play with the sliders and see what we can do. So that there, that brings out the, the red in her very, very well. Maybe warm her up a little bit. I don't know if I like that. That's alright. I think we'll go down here. We'll go into split the warmth and the, and the cool, and I think we'll bump that a little bit. Yeah, that looks pretty good. That brought out her good color. Let's do a before and after again. I just love this new slider. Oh yeah, look at that big difference. That's what she looked like right there. So, oh, and one more thing I want to show you. Let's see here, we'll turn this slider off. If you notice, there is a bunch of flies all around here. We're gonna hit the erase and we're gonna tell it to remove dust spots because I've found in past bear images when I hit remove dust spots, sometimes it removes the flies. The flies are just kind of distracting in the image, so I choose to get rid of them. So it picked up one fly, so we'll go through and we will remove the rest of them. She had a lot of them all around her. And then I find that on this erase, if I'm in the same tone and I click more than one, it'll do a pretty good job of removing it. But once I go into another color tone, like this down here, it's kind of split. If I were to have done that with the other ones, it would have created some weird, some weird stuff. So, all right, so that took care of the bugs. So let's see, what else do we need to do? Let's go into Dodge and Burn. This is another really good tool I like. Kind of reduce the size down, zoom in on her eyeballs. Whoops. Oh, I see. Let's see, kind of lighten up the eyeballs a little bit. Except that's a little too strong. Soften it down a little bit. Oh, there we go. That looks good. Yeah, that's much better. Okay, so instead of using the dodge and burn for her fur. I'm gonna go up here to mask, and I'm going to paint this area right here and right here, probably even right along here. Let's see what that does. I might have to go back and erase a little bit, but we'll see what it does. Oh yeah, that's good. I need to erase a little bit of that mask though, right along here and right over here. All right, so there you have it. Easy peasy. Before and after. All right, so before you leave, the next episode is going to be about our upcoming trip to Svalbard, Longyearbyen. We're going out on a polar bear excursion. We get on a ship and we spend 7 days on a ship. I'll have no Wi-Fi and no cell service, so there will be no videos for 1 week. And if there is a video that posts during that week, it'll be automated and I will not be able to reply to it until I make landfall. So my next video, I'm going to go over How I'm packing for that trip, what I'm taking, and kind of give you an overview of what I'm hoping to see and hoping to do. All right, well thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Make sure you like and subscribe for future videos. Make sure you follow me on other social medias. I'm WTF Stop. All right, one more thing before you go. If you're liking the Luminar editing videos, please comment below. If you like the product review videos, comment below. If you like the traveling videos, comment below. Trying to see which way that I should take this channel. Please comment below so we can see what you like, so I can bring more of what you like. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.
