LUMINAR NEO ESSENTIALS: Master the DEVELOP Tool

Hello and welcome to another episode of Jeff and Angie Photography. Welcome back if you're a subscriber. If not, I want to welcome all the newcomers. Don't forget to like and subscribe as usual and ring my bell so you know when I post a new video. So today we are going to be doing, um, part 2 to the Beginner's Guide to Luminar Neo, so you can learn the power of Neo. It's pretty incredible. Stay tuned. I'll teach you some more. Right. So here we are. We are going to start part two of discovering the power of Luminar Neo. So. So let's go ahead and jump into Neo. And I will— I found a couple images that we can go in and edit through— excuse me— the Develop part of Essentials. So altogether we're going to end up with 10 videos, maybe 11 depending on if I decide to combine 2 of the segments together. But some of them will be short, some will be long, but let's go ahead and get started. All right, so here we are in Neo, and we're going to go ahead and we are going to select this image right here. I took this when we were in Colorado this November. Um, so we have been very busy, and I'm sorry I didn't get these out sooner. We have been on probably about four or five trips since my last video I posted, and actually the last one I posted, I posted while we were in Africa, and it took like five days to upload because the Wi-Fi was so slow. But here I am, I'm home, and this month is going to be. The Essential Modular here. We're going to go over each and every one of these segments. Today we're going to be covering Develop Raw and why you want to start in Develop Raw. So I've chose this buck. So believe it or not, when I'm on vacation and I'm out taking photographs, I actually purposely take photos that are overexposed and underexposed just so I can share them on my YouTube channel so I can show you how powerful Neo is in bringing these back. So this buck right here, you can see that he is pretty much underexposed. So we are going to go into the Develop Raw modular, which is what we are going to go over today. That's all we're doing is just the develop. So what we're going to do, first thing we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and boost the exposure on this since I completely blew it. So I'm thinking maybe somewhere, maybe about 1 stop. So we'll go 1.01 because I can't get it exact. I guess I could if I typed it in. There we go. And then we're going to go ahead and we're going to bring up some of the contrast. Kind of get maybe some of those greens in the background to kind of come out. And then we're going to take the highlights and we're going to bump them down just a smidgen. And then the shadows, we're going to open up the shadows probably quite a bit. Bit there. There we go. And then the next section in Develop is your black and whites, and you can hit your J key and that will turn on the blacks where it shows that you have overexposed, like so. And if you double-click on the adjust your bar, it takes you back to where it started from. And then whites, if it's overexposed— there we go, you can see— double-click takes you back to zero. Alright, so we're gonna take the blacks and we're gonna add a little bit of black to this image. And the whites, we're gonna bump the whites just a little. I don't wanna go too much because I don't want to blow out this portion of the antler right through here. All right, and then we're going to jump down here to Curves, which Curves, you can use Curves or you don't have to use Curves. I'm going to kind of show you a little example on how Curves works. I, I personally don't do the red, the greens, and the blues. I just do the shadows and the highlights. And what I'll do is I'll go in here and I'll— if you go in and you click once in the middle here, this is the center of your shadows. This center block, click the center of that line, that is your midtones. And this up here, if you click the center That is your highlights, and that's the center of your highlights. So typically what I'll do is I'll just put one dot in the center of each of those, and I will just play with it to get it to where I like it. And I kind of like that right there, helps bring out the greens in the background. And then the midtones I don't know, maybe something like that. And then the highlights— see, if we take the highlights too much, we're going to get that red starting to pop out on that antler right there. So we don't want to take the highlights too bright, but we also want to make sure we get as much detail as possible in this antler. So we'll just kind of play with that, maybe right there, midtones, something like that. Okay, all right, so he's looking pretty good. Here is your before and after. It does a really good job of Bringing an image back, that is one thing that hopefully nobody can argue with. So we're going to take the temperatures, so we go into color, this is our next one, and then sharpness. We're going to— I'm just going to go through here and I'm going to close all of them because you can leave them open or you can close them, and for this tutorial I'm going to do them closed. So the next one we're looking at is going to be Color, and this is still inside of your Develop Raw. Okay, so now we're in Color, and we're going to take this. And so this is as it was shot. The camera did a pretty good job of the white balance, but I am going to Maybe make it— no, I like it as shot. Yeah. And then tint, I usually don't mess with tint, but we'll kind of see if that brings out some more of those greens in the background. Kind of a little bit. There we go, a little. And saturation, I usually don't use saturation. Saturation really takes everything and just like really, really just— I don't know, it just makes it super saturated. Now vibrance, on the other hand, I will use vibrance. So there's a little bit of vibrance, 18, and there's 0. It's not a lot of difference, just a little. And you could add a little saturation if you wanted to. My opinion, I kind of go negative, kind of get rid of some of that orangey overtones that is going on. Okay, now we're going to jump down into sharpness. Now because we're only working in the Develop mod I'm going to use the sharpening here, and we're going to zoom in to the eye on this buck here. And we're going to— typically I put it at about 50, and then the radius, I usually back the radius off because it tends to soften everything too much. Okay, so there's 50, there's 0, there's 50. All right, that's— we'll leave that at that. And then we're going to go ahead and jump in here to noise reduction. Which, because we're working just in this Develop modular, we're going to use this noise reduction. But we're also going to go up and we're going to use the noise reduction called Noiseless. So you can kind of see the noise in the background there, and that's because the image was extremely underexposed. So we'll take the luminosity up to probably 50. You don't want to do too much because you don't want to soften your image, your subject, because if you do too much, it will really just like soften everything. Of course, this isn't a very good example. I got a I got a nice blurred spot there from a tall piece of grass, but it will definitely show you the power of Neo. All right, and then we're going to go down here into Optics, and this is something I use just about every single time. I use Auto Distortion and Auto Defringe. And I use this Karabik Aberration sometimes. It gets rid of the little, the little lines, red and purplish color lines that run along your images. But this image doesn't have really any of that, so I'm not going to apply it. And then Transform, if you were doing like buildings and stuff, you could use this because it really Really transforms your image. It does horizontal as well, and it does your aspect. Make him a fat deer, make him a tall deer. All right, so that is the Develop mod, and after that I told you I was going to take you up to Noiseless, and we're going to run Noiseless on low. And just like that, the noise is definitely muted. There you go. Here is your before and after. So what do you think? Is Neo powerful or what? So before you go, I want to jump over here to— I have a fundraiser going on right now to help fund my first publication of my book. I've been writing this book now for about 2 years. It is The Creative Guide to Nature Photography: What the F-Stop and More. And it goes over everything from exposure to how to photograph everything and anything in the nature world. And don't forget Luminar Neo right now. If you decide to get Luminar Neo, you can type in my code AB15 at the link that will be below. So there'll be 2 links below. There'll be one that'll take you into Neo to purchase it. If you want to purchase it, use AB15 and you can get 15% off, or you can do a 14-day free trial, and then if you decide to purchase it, then type in AB15 and you'll still get your 15% off. And I have a couple workshops coming up. I have one spot left in the Whooping Crane Photography Workshop from February 22nd to the 25th. I got a couple spots left on my South Texas Bird and Wildlife, uh, down in the valley. Um, the valley would be very South Texas, down on the Mexican border. This place here is located just outside Hebbronville. And then of course I do private workshops here in South Texas. Just click on that link there and you can go and schedule your time with me, and it's one-on-one. I can do up to 3 people. And then next fall I have the Caddo Lake Fall Workshop coming up, uh, 7th through the 10th. That's going to be another amazing trip. I'm going to do a video on the last workshop that I just did up in Caddo Lake. Even though it was gloomy, we still ended up with some pretty good pictures. All right, so don't forget to like and subscribe and go and click on the link above because it'll take you into the next video. Have a great day! All right, well, thank you for tuning in, and don't forget to like and subscribe and ring my bell so you will get notified the next time I post a video. Thanks for watching. Bye.