Unleash your inner artist: Photos as you images with Luminar Neo
In this hour‑and‑a‑half live workshop, photographer Robert Vanelli demonstrates Skylum’s Luminar Neo to a group of Texas photographers. He explains how Neo bridges the gap between Lightroom’s cataloging and Photoshop’s advanced editing by embedding AI‑driven tools—Sky AI, Relight AI, Face AI, Body AI, Power‑Line Removal, Dust‑Spot removal, Focus Stacking, Background Removal, HDR Merge, Noiseless AI, Upscale AI, Super Sharpen, and Magic Light—into a single, intuitive interface. Vanelli shows how to integrate Neo as a Lightroom plugin, keep existing workflows, and organize images with Neo’s Active Directory‑style catalogs that sync with the file system. He walks through practical demos: erasing power lines, cleaning dust spots, stacking focus frames, replacing skies, and polishing portraits with AI‑presets, masks, and layers. The session also covers the new Extensions marketplace (subscription vs. one‑time purchase), ethical considerations of AI‑enhanced imagery, backup best‑practices (3‑2‑1 rule), and promotional details (15 % discount code). Throughout, Vanelli mixes technical instruction with anecdotes, humor, and encouragement to adopt AI tools without abandoning traditional photographic fundamentals.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to another episode of WTF Stop Photography and Jeff and Angie Photography. So today we have something a little different. I have a class that was taught in front of four photography groups here in Corpus Christi. Skylum, the creators of Luminar Neo, sent to Corpus Christi. Robert Vanelli, also known as Vanelli, and he will go over how to unleash your inner artist's photos as you imagined with Luminar Neo. So let's, uh, let's get into this. But before we do, hit that subscribe button and hit the like button. And also one more thing, There's going to be chapters below so you can skip through to the parts that you want to see because it's kind of a long video. It's about an hour and a half. Anyhow, I hope you enjoy. Let's get into this. Here's Robert Bonelli.
All right, all right everyone, welcome. Thank you so much for, for having me here. Angie, thank you so much for inviting me. So what I want to do with you is first I want to explain to you what Luminar Neo is. All right, now before I do that, what type of photo editing tools are you using? Because you have to. I mean, think back when you first got your digital camera, you took a picture, you're like, oh my God, this looks incredible! And then you put in the computer, you're like, hey, wait a second, what? Especially if you were shooting RAW, you're like, wait a second. But that's not what I saw on the camera, um, because when you're shooting RAW, it's just that— it's the RAW photo. So you can take it later in editing. When it looks really cool in the camera, that's because it's the JPEG reference of the RAW photo. So if you shot RAW and JPEG, yes, the JPEG would look pretty cool, but it's, it's not the same. You have to edit those images When I first started out, back then, you had to do Photoshop. You had to do Photoshop. Well, Photoshop is a graphics program. It was designed for graphic artists, and man, is it incredible. It has some, back then, tools for photographers. That's where Thomas Knoll came along, who was the creator of Photoshop, and said, you know what, it's too complicated. He came up with Lightroom because he was an avid shooter. Neo's gonna bridge the gap with that. So what Neo does is it takes the complicated things that takes years to develop and master in Photoshop, and things that Lightroom can't do, and it puts it together for you. All right, so just out of curiosity, what editing tools are you guys using?
Lightroom.
Lightroom? Majority of people Lightroom? All right, so, and again, Studio. Okay, so when I started, it was a balancing act. You know, I'll never forget Scott Kelby. I sent him a picture that I took of this beautiful light stand, or the beach lifeguard stand, and he said, wow, Vinelli, you're turning into an incredible photographer. I go, well, let me show you the original image.
Paused.
Wow, Vinelli, Your Photoshop skills are really good. So it was like I had to learn photography, Photoshop, photography, Photoshop, and it got to the point where I was like, you know what, I'm going to spend one month just on Photoshop, then the next month just on photography, and the balance, it was a nightmare. Now yes, I'm very proficient with it, but man, it was painful. Photographers nowadays have it so much easier. And more— they're able to do more creative stuff that we couldn't do way back then. All right, so keep in mind, Skylum's philosophy isn't to change your workflow if you're used to Lightroom, because Lightroom is a phenomenal digital, digital asset manager, a DAM. You can organize your photos, it's great for that. We don't want to change your workflow, we just want to come in if you're used to Lightroom Use it as a plugin. This way you'll keep your workflow and then gradually say, oh wow, the things I normally do in Lightroom I can do here much faster. And then gradually you can switch over, you know, when you're ready. So what is Neo? Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software. The cool thing about it is it's powered by AI. No, it's not going to take over the world. It's not gonna do all the work for you. It just makes things that you normally do easier. Um, my car seat, uh, my, my son laughed at me and said, oh, you teach efficiency and workflow. And here, every time I use your car, you manually reset the seat. I go, yeah. He goes, uh, what's these buttons right here? 1, 2, 3. Watch this. Bip. Oh, look, the seat goes right back where you were. Oh yeah. It's the same thing with your photo editing. If you catch yourself doing the same thing over and over and over again, that's where you can create a preset, or you can make your life so much easier with AI. All right, so with Luminar Neo, you can edit with the innovative AI tools, enjoy the easy intuitive interface, and then quickly enhance your images with presets. Now I know a lot of photographers Pros say to you, don't ever put your camera in auto mode. Bull. Sometimes if I, if I look at a scene and it's, it's a complex lighting, I'll slap it in auto mode or aperture priority, take a picture, look at the intelligence of the camera and see what the camera says. Oh, the camera's reading it at this, this, and this. Put it into manual mode, dial in those settings. you're good to go. Same thing here. By using presets— doesn't matter which program it is— by using presets, it gives you a way to learn what the tool is doing. The cool thing about our presets, it's called a white box and a black box. So like Nik FX and Topaz, they're black box, which means you run a really cool filter, it looks cool, you have no idea how they did it. You just push the button and it did it. Here you push the button, it gives you all the tools that were used to create that particular look. You can make a slight change, rename it to your tool, and now you just taught yourself how to do a certain look. All right, um, the key features of Neo is edit, enhancing, and fixing your photos. You can boost creativity with layers. And you can use it as a standalone app or as a plugin. Ironically, layers is like the most complicated thing in Photoshop. Understanding layers and masking, it's so complicated. I laugh because our product has layers and I don't even think about it. It's the most simplest thing to teach people because of the way, um, our designers came up with teaching layers. Now if you're a landscape photographer, we have Sky AI, Mask AI, and Enhance AI. So those tools, and of course Relight AI, these are tools that do the work for you that you would normally do. If you were to do it manually, you'd catch yourself saying, huh, Relight AI does the exact same thing of what I normally would have done. I would have darkened the background and lightened the foreground. Here it does it in one slider. You can add fog or mist to a scene. You can even add sun rays if you wanted to into a photo. Does it sound like cheating? No, it's creativity. Now grant you, if you're hired to photograph a beautiful building and you do all these cool things and you bring in clouds from other parts of the world and you put it in the scene, well, yeah, now that's an augmented photo. That, that photo doesn't represent— let's say you're selling a house, it doesn't represent that house. That's the point where you draw the line. But if it's for creativity, the sky's the limit. Now, do any of you shoot portraits in here? Show of hand.
Yes.
Yes. All right, good, because typically that's not going to mention who, we're with a lot of landscape and wildlife photographers. Portraits is my thing. So for her to get me out today photographing in a cemetery of all places with her ringtone, which was like a— What the heck was that ringtone? I got to photograph wildflowers, which I'm going to show you, and it was really cool, but as a portrait photographer, I love the fact that my friends have different styles that we can learn from each other on. With portraits, you learn how to use portrait bokeh, which is really cool. So if you photograph something, let's say at f/8, and the background doesn't have the beautiful bokeh effect or the geometric patterns, you can emulate that inside the program. Face AI— wait till I show you this. If, if you forgot, or if your assistant forgot to bring a reflector and the person's face just isn't illuminated, this One Face AI tool, you literally make us— you, you slide it and it only targets the face. If there's 1 person, 2 people, 3 people in the scene, it targets all the faces. Now, why am I excited about this? Because it's using AI That means that you can create a preset and you take that preset and apply it to all your images. So if it's a man, if it's a woman, if it's a child, it doesn't matter. AI knows, hey, that's a face. This is what I can do again in the— with Lightroom and a few others. Well, let's see if I have the eyes. Okay, skin is the same thing. If you smooth skin Well, then in the next scene, the person's face isn't here, it's here. If you apply that preset, you'll have something really weird on this side of the screen, which was a person's skin. Using AI technology, what that does is the next image, it reanalyzes it and says, all right, in that last image you did this to the skin. All right, let me find the person's skin. Let me add that to this. So if the person's skin is here, And now they're down here. It's smart enough to know where that person is and apply your settings. Body AI— this is one of those tools where you have to be careful not to— oh, it's body shaming. Yeah, okay, you say that, but then when you talk to people, they say, make my body look slimmer. You know, nobody has a problem with it, but yet— It's a problem. On the internet, people flip out. So when we first came out with Body AI, I used me as an example, and I sat in a chair and I said, look at this!
Wow!
I can't believe I'm saying this live. This is Veli. This is Veli's Christmas card. This is Veli's datebook dating profile. Whoa! Look at this! Wow! You know, and you just slowly, gradually do it this way, or You take an athlete and you go the opposite way with it. All of a sudden you make their shoulders look massive, their arms just— you're like, oh wow. And that's okay if it's for the person, you know. If they say to you, hey look, do me a favor, I want you to make me look a little beefier, then by all means. Uh, portrait background removal is a really cool feature now to where it's taking the complexity of masking and doing it for you. In Photoshop, it would take— oh my God, so long— your skills to learn how to remove somebody. Now, from a simple background, it's not that hard, but you put a person in front of objects and things like that, it gets really complicated. This tool does it. And of course, I mentioned the batch processing. So the goal is for you to achieve more with the new extensions. So think of Luminar Neo as the host program. So Neo is now the host program. The extensions are the add-ons. So our, our CM, our co-founder, I've, um, Dima, when he created Luminar, he sat me down at Savinelli. I know you've been in the photo editing business and the photography business for years. This is unlike anything you've done. Yes, we've heard that before. How many times? He goes, no, no, no, our philosophy is different. The old way of editing is outdated. And what he meant by that was, like, a perfect example: I wanted to change the colors of the eye. Okay, so I'd create a new layer Grab a color, paint it into the eye, blend it in. Boom. Nope. That's the old way of doing it. It's outdated. Why? All right, we'll do it to the next image. Oh yeah, I have to start all over again. Even if I made a preset, the eyes are not in the same spot. So his attitude was, let's create AI to do this for you. So that's what Neil's gonna do now. The extensions It's a new way of teaching people about programs because in the past, Photoshop for example, 18 months you would go before there was an update and the updates were like $600, $700 if you wanted it. So 18, a year and a half later, and typically with the Windows people, we got it, it took longer for the Windows to get done. You paid for updates and maybe out of the 7 you only wanted 2 of them. With the extensions, what's really cool about this is you only pay for what you want. So if you were to do the subscription plan, you get all the extensions included. If you're like, look, you know what, I hate subscription, I don't want to do that, I just want a lifetime, uh, program, I'll pay for it one time, have it for life. If I like the extensions, then I'll purchase those separately. There's HDR Merge, Noiseless AI, Background Removal, Upscale AI, Focus Stacking, Super Sharpen, and this new Magic Light is pretty cool, which I hope to show you in a couple minutes. So that's Neo, all right? And I wanted to just take you through the slideshow just so you know what it is and what it's capable of doing. Now with that, let me get out of this. And here we are. All right. So we talked about AI. All right. This scene right here in the past, as a portrait photographer, someone said to me, well, how do you remove power lines? I go, well, let me show you how to do this in camera. Really? Go watch this. Click. Took a picture of my buddy Lewis. Power lines everywhere. There's Lewis. They go, you're going to remove that in camera? Yeah, watch. Lewis, 5 feet to the right. He moved, no power lines. Click. There it is. They go, okay, no, seriously, how do you do it? That's it. I mean, as a photographer, if I see power lines, why am I going to put the person in that shot? Somebody called me out on it and said, yeah, well, what about this image here? How can you not avoid power lines? And that's true. I mean, in Florida, we don't have power lines like that. Well, where I am, everything is underground. Do you have a lot of power lines here in Texas?
No.
So we don't because, well, you have hurricanes too. So where we are, we don't have a lot of this stuff. So I'm not used to it. So watch this. I wanna get rid of the power lines. If I come over here to Edit and we're going to go to Erase, right down here, Remove Power Lines. I'm going to click it and it's going to analyze the image. From there, it's going to think what are power lines, what should be there, what shouldn't be there, but it's going to give you the ability, um, to go back through it. Look, look at that. Now I just realized something. You're gonna kill me. I didn't hit the record button yet.
Oh. I did.
So that's fine. So let me just show you that one more time. So here we are. Here's before. Here's after. Now I wanna manage expectations, okay? Yeah, if I look here, It did a great job, and if I had to do this in Photoshop, it would take forever. But look, it missed a spot. Well, did it fail? No, it just missed that little area. So I can still come back over it and then click erase, and boom, it's gone. Now what happens if, like in this area right here, so it, it looked at this and thought it was a power line. So why don't I do this? I'm going to make my brush size a little bit bigger. So now if I brush over this, instead of hitting erase, I hit restore. Now look what just happened. So now it brought back the areas that I thought— that it thought was a power line. It brought it back. How long did that take me, right? If I had to do that by hand, That would have taken forever, you know, cloning, stamping, um, trying to use Content-Aware Fill. Doing it like this was really quick. Well, here's the best part: because it's AI, if I had 15 of those images, boom, I just run it on all of them, and now it's going to erase the power lines in all those images. And then you go back for quality control And say, okay, well, it missed it here, let me fix it, and you move on. So it does a great job, like I said, with power lines. Now what happens if— oh, this cracks me up— how do you remove dust spots? Clean your stinking lens and your sensor. I mean, if, if you got this on your first shot I mean, you're looking at the camera now. Sometimes you can't tell. Here you could definitely tell. You take that camera out, you clean it really quick, and you go on to the rest of the shoot. If you missed it for whatever reason, again, erase. And here's dust spots. I'll give it a second. Look at that. So it knows enough where the dust spots are And removes them. And, and if it doesn't do the job the way I want it to, then you go back and you, you fine-tune it. Um, let's go— all right, okay, let's take— let's see if I have one right here. Focus stacking layers. You know what, I'm gonna go into focus stacking. Do a lot of you do focus stacking? All right.
Not yet.
I'm getting ready to. I never, never ever— I'm a portrait guy, so when people were coming up with a request on what, what are some requests we could do for, um, for, for Neo, I was telling people, for the love of God, stop talking about focus stacking, because the more you talk about it, the more the engineers say, well gee, it seems like everyone wants it. So all my portrait stuff that I want them to do they put on the back burner and they work on focus stacking. I gotta admit, after I played with focus stacking, I'm like, oh, this is pretty cool. And what you end up doing is you put your camera, of course, on a tripod. Um, I, I did it with cookies and I did a fake background. I wish I had to show you. So it looked like I had a really cool kitchen, and my sister right away said, wow, you remodeled your kitchen. My brother the chef said, yeah, right, there's no way you made cookies. I mean, for the love of God, people, look at the focus stacking I did. They had no— they had no clue. So what focus stacking is going to do is you're going to make everything in the image sharp. So you could think, well, why can't I shoot just at f/22? You're still going to get that depth of field that No matter— even if you're shooting at f/22, you're still not going to get that depth all the way through. So with focus stacking, you pick a spot and notice, look how it's changing. You see that? So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So 5 shots. All they did with the camera is put it on the tripod or a Platypod, touch the back screen, take a picture here, take a picture here, take a picture here, take a picture here, and it's focusing. Well, now that they did that, I'm pressing the Shift key down. I have all those selected. By dragging them into the focus stacking, it's going to analyze each and every one of those images and figure out, okay, well, let's stack them together and figure out which is in focus, which is not in focus, merge them all together. I had to do it. Merge them all together and end up with one image that's focused from the front all the way to the back. Now, does it take a long time? Yes, it's, it's a complicated, um, tool It does require resources. This is one of those tools where it's a specialty tool to where if that's what you're really, really into, look at this, boom, then there's right here. Oh, there's my cookies. Look at that. Look how it took each. Now we couldn't have done that today because of the wind.
Yeah.
The wind was blowing way too bad. There was no way we could have done focus stacking, but the bee, the elusive bee that we tried to photograph, that little, you know, either is, they don't have a butt, let's call them the back end, whatever it is.
The stinger.
The what? The stinger, okay. Yeah, you can tell I'm a nature photographer. Alright, so the back end of the bee was either not in focus and his face was, or vice versa. So with this, somebody did it with a fly. which I thought was interesting. They only took 2 images, the front and the back. Look how in focus that is, but notice the wings aren't because they only took 2 shots. So it's not like this super miracle— oh yeah, just click, not even look, click, click, click, look at this, click— oh wow, my images are incredible. It's not like that at all. You still have to put time into it. And that brings me to my cookies. So they were impressed with— look at, look at the focus stacking. Nope. My, my brother and sister, they were more impressed with, wow, your, your background looks amazing. It was an 18 by 18 backdrop, and I just went to the store. Yes, I didn't make them. Bought the macadamia nut cookies, popped it down. did this experiment and I thought it came out pretty cool. All right, so that's your— that's focus stacking. And okay, um, oh, you know what, I, I will show you— I'll come back to showing you more, um, portraits. But the reason I want to show you this one is, remember The Crown series on Netflix? All right, so that's what this was. That's what this is here. All right, so I wanted to show how to light this, and I felt like— remember back in the '70s and '80s, if you were a computer programmer, the goal was how many lines of code can I make that in? The fewer the code, the better. Lighting is the same thing. Photographers' attitudes are like, you know what, I bet you I can light that with 3 lights. I bet you I could do it in 2 lights. Well, I bet you I could do it with 1 light and a reflector. And that's what I did here. So the key light is on her face here, and then I just put a reflector behind her, and that's what's making sure the earring was well lit. Now, when I first did this, because it's a side profile, Our program— so wait a second, you want me to smooth the skin? Well, a person is supposed to have 2 eyes. A person is supposed to have a nose and lips. This was a side profile. It wasn't working on images like this because it's AI. The engineers just kept feeding it profile photos and it taught itself how to edit photos like this. So Do you remember I said about that face relight? So I'm going to come down to portrait, and here's the face, and it's going to look for the face for me. Now watch this. Look at that. It knows that that's a face, and I could bounce a little light into the face for the eyes, even though there's only one eye. I mean, the eye looks pretty good here. Look at that. Do you see it?
Mm-hmm.
And this is my favorite. Actually, she doesn't have too much of it. Raccoon eyes, you know, either from a night of heavy partying or if the photographer screwed up and photographed the light a little bit too high, boom, you have shadows. Or it could be from people with deep sockets in their eyes. That right there is going to remove under the eyes, um, that dark patches. But look what we did with that. Just once again, um, even though it's a side-lit image, look how it found elements of the face. All right, let's see. I got that set for you. All right, now let's go on to what we did today. All right, so where do we begin? And, and I know we were talking about this where people have a— have— we take so many photos now, how do you organize them in Lightroom? One of my number one articles I've written that was the most viewed ever was the Oh No Lightroom, the top five oh no Lightroom lost my photos mistakes people make. Who was my inspiration? My cousin Mary Ann. She'd call me every day. Oh my God, Robbie! I can't believe this. Lightroom lost my photos. Mayor, Adobe is not in the business of losing your photos. You did something. Let me show you where it is. And my cousin Nick would yell. Leave your cousin alone, come on, he's busy. No, no, no, Nick, she is my muse. I don't want to say cash cow. She was my muse. This is going to be an incredible article because if she's messing up, how many other people are going to mess up? Boom. Neo comes along and guess what? Those days are gone. It's an Active Directory. You change something on your computer, boom, it instantly gets changed in Neo. You delete a photo in Neo, it gets deleted on your computer. So if you could wrap your head around Lightroom, Neo, um, Nik Effects, Topaz, all they're really doing is they're— it's a reference. They're not like the old days when— what was it, Aperture? Aperture would take your images and put it in its own little vault. And because Apple is so like, Oh, I got control now. And if you lost that catalog, everything was gone. Here, if you lose the Lightroom catalog, or if you lose a Neo catalog, all you lost were the edits, never the photos. So you're not— when I say you import images, you're importing them into your computer, and all you're doing with Neo is pointing to where they are on your computer. So let's do that real quick. I'm going to start with, first of all, a catalog. Now the catalog is just that— it's, it's a catalog of all those images. Now I can add images to any catalog I want, but you have a choice. You either make a project-based catalog, and this holds true for Lightroom too, have one catalog with all your photos in it all your eggs in one basket. That's one way of doing it. Or you could have what's called project-based catalogs. So here she is, a wildlife and nature photographer. So she may have one catalog wildlife, maybe another catalog nature. She's been watching— we've been talking about portrait stuff. Now all of a sudden she gets into photographing models. Adult models, 17 and under models. So you see what I'm doing here? Uh, then all of a sudden she gets into sports. Oh, sports could be a new one. If you start to travel, you could have a travel catalog. And let's say she has like the top 5 places she wants to visit, um, travel-wise. You can have a catalog strictly on travel photography. So that's just the way you organize it and the way your brain works. So here I'm going to create a new catalog, and where do you store this catalog? Well, me personally, and I do the same thing for Lightroom, on my fastest hard drive I create a— where's E drive? There it is. I created a folder called Luminar Neo Catalog. If you're a Mac— how many Mac users? The rest are Windows. Okay, so with Mac you have pictures and documents. My suggestion, put it in documents. Windows, we have the same thing, but Windows we have more control of our file structure than we do with Mac, unless you know Mac well. So here I created a simple folder called Luminar Neo catalog. Now if I open up this catalog, look at this. I have a lot of— because this is a teaching computer. But if you notice, here's models, here's photography, here's presentations. Well, do I have a travel one in this one? ST, almost there. Okay, good. I put Texas. All right, so here I can make a decision. Do I want to create one catalog? Yes, I do. But let's call this the, um, oh, it's the tour, the tour that we're doing. So I'm going to do a right-click and I want to create a new catalog, a new folder. And this new folder is Um, photos you imagined, uh, the Luminar Neo tour. All right, so now I created a folder, or a, um, yeah, a folder inside of that. So now if I come to Texas, I can create a Texas, which I'll double-click on this, and now I'm going to create Texas. So I'm going to keep Texas separated from— this sounds really political, I shouldn't say it like this. I want to keep Texas separated from DC. All right, so I'm going to DC tomorrow. That's all right. I saw that playing out in my head, and I was like, Oh my God, why, why would you say that? Um, but it was too late, it was already out there. So I'm gonna go to DC in a— when is it? Not tomorrow, the next day. So I'm going to DC. Well, now I have a Texas catalog. There's my— it's a blank catalog, nothing's in it. Great. Now I have, I have that catalog. The only images I want in that catalog are the stuff I did here during my tour on Texas. Now let's say I come back 2024. Well, then I'll put 2023 Texas, 2024 Texas, and so on. That's again entirely up to you on how you want to organize. Since there's nothing in this catalog, what I need to do is bring my images into my computer. So I can either do that at the system level Or at the— at Neo level or Lightroom level. All right, I kind of find it easier to do it at the system level. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open— I'm going to fire up my Windows Explorer. I almost said Finder. And what I like to do is my fastest hard drive for this here is the SSD drive E, create one folder called photography. I just put underscore in front of it 'cause it shoots it to the top. So in that photography folder, these are the subfolders I have. Well, we already said that we're gonna use the tour. So just to make life easier, I'm gonna create a new folder. And let's just call this the tour. So now that we know it's the tour, now I'm going to organize. Right-click, new folder, Texas. Now you can take it one step further and you could just say, okay, Texas 2024, whatever. For now, I'm just going to say Texas. Well, now that I have my Texas folder here. What I want to do is take the images off this memory card and put them into that folder. Now Lightroom is really cool at this, which I wish we had, and I'm hoping and praying our engineers are going to do this. You could rename the images as they come in. Mac users, they have it easy. Us poor Windows people, for the love of God, Bill Gates, Come on, you know, build a renaming app for us. We don't have that batch renaming in Windows. So there's ways around that. But for now, just make life simple. I'm going to open up another instance of my Explorer. So now they're side by side and I'm going to go to my memory card. Here it is. And what I'm going to do is this. I do have multiple shoots on this card, and that's okay because I'm going to show you what we could do, how I can reorganize it. Or if I wanted to, I just click on dates, and what's today's 18th?
21st.
Oh, whoa, that was awkward. All right, so here we are on the 21st. I can just select those and bring it in, but for now, select all, copy, right-click, and I'm going to copy the images. I'm just going to pop them right over here, paste. Now, okay, Vanelli, how many did I copy? Okay, it's only 2 minutes.
925.
How many images did we take? Not that many. Oh, the other shoot's on here. All right, so my memory card, I'm taking it off that computer. Now, I've written a book called 3-2-1 Backup. 3 copies of your data, 2 stored locally, 1 stored offsite. That's how you should approach your file. What's your favorite place you visited?
Alaska.
Alaska. By the way, they're sending this Florida boy to the Antarctic. Oh, how fun! How fun! I bought a jacket for the first time in 30 years. I bought a jacket and I bought boots, and my son said, okay, Dad, good job on the boots, but what do you need with the boots? Like, what, socks? I go, oh, that's right, I don't have any socks, do I? No, you need to buy socks. Antarctic? What the heck?
Well, we're going to the North Pole, so—
Okay, yeah, but you got— you get to go see the polar bear. I get the penguins. All right, so you went to Alaska. How expensive of a trip was that?
Pretty expensive.
Very expensive. What would have happened— you got some good shots? Yeah, I know you did.
Yeah.
What would have happened if you got back and all those shots were gone, especially if one of your sponsors sends you If a sponsor sent her and said, hey, well, like Iceland— Iceland cost us a fortune. Could you imagine? In fact, we're live, darn it. Well, I will say it. One of the Fuji, um, influencers had the really, really expensive Fuji, the, the, um, what's that?
X100.
Yeah, I don't know, it's like thousands and thousands of dollars, right? The medium format camera. Head on his tripod, turned away, oh no, too late, boom, on the— down. And then they had to pay a lot of money, which I thought they were— I thought they did it for free. People had to rappel down there to retrieve it. And my CMO Juliana goes, Finelli, they didn't do it just because they like us. We had to pay them a lot of money. And so we had to retrieve it. I don't know whatever happened to the memory card, but could you imagine that? If he had all of his images from that Iceland trip on that card and now it's at the bottom of the ravine or whatever that's called. All right? Think about that. So my suggestion, especially if you're on that trip, leave everything on that memory card. That's one. Put it on your computer. That's two. The third best way, upload it to the cloud. However, if you're in Alaska, like in Iceland, internet stunk. It was horrible. There's no way you could have done that. Bring an external drive. There's your third source. When you get home, pop it up. So, and again, that's if you're on this major trip. So now that I have all the images in, in on my hard drive, right? Now let's get out of here. All I need to do here is I have to tell Neo where are those images. So I'm going to add a folder of images and we already know where they are. E drive, photography, tour. There it is. And actually, you know what? I'm just going to do tour. I'm not going to go deep down. I'll just do tour and I'll show you why. When I say select folder, look at that. We shot these today. Were you there?
Nope.
All right. Everything in that folder, in that tour folder, which is Texas, appears, right? Well, watch this. I'm going to show in Explorer. Here it is. There's that tour. If I right-click and I create a new folder, let's call it DC. Notice what just happened. It automatically appeared over here. How cool is that? If you're a portrait photographer, your brain should be going, huh. So, Vaneli, let me get this straight. I can take a photo of somebody during a live Portrait session, tether it to my computer either wirelessly or with a cable. The moment I take that picture, it appears in Lightroom Neo.
Yep.
And I can have an assistant or an intern, which every one of you here should have an intern or an assistant. They push one button, your preset adds to that image. By the time that person walks around to the computer to see what you just did, they're going to see a finished product. So that's the power of this Active Directory. All right? So now that I have it in here, I'm going to look— I had a lot. Okay, this was for a model shoot. All right, almost there. There we are. She got that portrait photographer. Let's not show the picture of me on the ground getting these shots. And by the way, My little— what do I want to call you? Let me think. Um, I'll think of a good— I don't want to say, uh, my guide. My guide who was in charge, right? She was in charge of us today.
Yep.
Hey, so as you would say, what's the f-stop? Um, so she's, she's guiding me because again, I'm a portrait photographer. I don't do this stuff. And I did find out you guys do have red ants. like we do. I'm on the ground doing all this stuff. She's telling me all these cool things. I'm doing— I'm kicking butt. I think I'm doing pretty good. I'm like, okay, this is pretty cool. Let me go through some of the ones I really like. And then at the very, very end, right? That's a bad shot. All right, so I'm going through some of these shots. I'm like, oh, these are pretty cool. The very, very end she says to me, oh, well since you had a macro lens, I probably would have shot it with an f/4. Wait a second, what? So I went back and I shot the, the last half of these, I think, at f/4. Yeah, 4, 4.5. So yeah, thanks a lot there. Look at these. All right, so now I have those images on the— in my catalog. Here's where I could decide, well, How many times has this happened to you? Your friends take these photos, they come back from a trip, they sit you down, hey, let me show you a couple images. All of a sudden they have popcorn, they have like 32-ounce drinks in front of you. You look at the clock, you're like, oh my God, are they really going to make me sit through 175 images? I trimmed them down to these are my favorites. For the love of God, just show me 3 or 4 of them. Don't show me every single image. So here, I'm going to let you guys just do a real quick— I love this shot. The only thing I don't like— I shouldn't say that. You should embrace imperfections. I can fix that, but I don't want to waste my— I don't want to spend my time. It's not a waste of time. All right, so why don't I do this? If I shot it up 4.5. All right, anyways, um, where was— okay, these ones. What are these called again? What are they called? I think it's a coreopsis. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I wasn't quite sure. So Um, yeah, I got those shots. I'm not even going to show you the bee because the bee was just a pain in the neck. Yeah, that's what she called it.
Is it?
All right, what about that flower?
What's that flower called? Purple socks.
Purple flocks. You know what, didn't I tell you that?
I heard you do.
Yeah, I whispered it. All right, so I'm gonna grab one of these. Oh, here we go. It was the weirdest thing. I mean, I'm sitting there shooting, all of a sudden A one rain cloud just came out and just dropped rain just on that one flower. That was amazing. All right, so yes, as a portrait photographer, yeah, I try to get everything done in camera. I try to crop everything. Man, you people, you landscape people, I have a fixed lens, I'm on the ground getting eaten alive from red ants, and I'm crawling like I'm in the Army, She's laughing at me, she's taking pictures, and I'm trying to get a shot. I finally said, you know what, the heck with it, I'm gonna get the shot, I'll crop it afterwards. I know that's a horrible thing to say, but this isn't a photo shoot with people. And what I mean by that is if I had to edit 13 to 20 images, if I had to crop that many, I'd go insane. So I'd make sure I got it done in camera. I knew I'm only going to pick 1 or 2 of these images, so I have no problem cropping. So let's use, let's use that. I like that image. I'm going to press the letter P for pick. All right? It's selecting the image. So that's 1. Yeah, this is when—
Yeah, yeah.
That was when I decided to change miraculously my f-stop. Where was it where I was like really like killing myself? It was towards the end, right?
Yeah.
That car almost ran me over and nobody tried to say, hey, there's a car coming. No.
Oh no, I was yelling her off. She's, she's in the bushes.
Yeah, she was like very, very close to me. Okay, all right, all right, nature lady, tell me. Like, yes, no, what? Yeah, it looks good. Not bad for a portrait guy. I know that's what you were thinking. All right, yeah, so yeah, these were the ones where you were talking to my buddy Kabasi, and I did look at— notice I did move it to 5.6. All right, so yeah, there it is. All right. Right about there, what do you think? Talk to me.
Yeah.
All right, pick. So now let's just say I went through, we picked them, now I have a choice. If I, if I come through, show just my favorites, Control+A or Command+A, I select all of them. I just wanna create a quick album. All the album is gonna do for me is just organize it better. I'm gonna just call— what the heck are these purple flowers?
Bluebonnets.
It's the Texas state flower.
Everybody loves bluebonnets.
Okay, so I apologize, I called it purple. So is that why you said if you take a picture of it, there's a Texas star? The Texas star. Okay. I'll believe you. All right, so now all I did was move them over— not move them, but let me take that back. I put a reference to— they're still in the same spot, nothing moved. Now I know where they are. Now what I like to do is select all of them again, and guess what? Let's get rid of the picks because they're already organized for me. Now what I'm going to do is— and I'm going to let you be the judge. Can you see from there? Ready? Just, ready, 1. You're gonna tell me which one you want. 2, 3, 4. Oh, that was it. Alright, so, ready? Pick one.
I think that one.
Alright, good, so that's the one we want. Now I'm gonna pick it. So now out of, so look how I quickly called it. Now, there is a program called AfterShoot. Which is really cool. It uses AI technology. It's not part of our company. It uses AI technology and it goes through, especially for portraits, if the person's eyes are blinking or they're shut, they, they reject it. If the flower is not in focus, it'll reject it. It'll, it'll pick, it'll say, hey, look, I think these are the best images what you got. And And then you can decide what you want to do. All right, so we got this image here. That was way too far out, you would agree? Well, I'm going to press the letter C for crop, and here I am, and I want to crop this. Um, you decide, we keep the original, but what are we going to use this for? Let's say, pick something. Oh, I know. I'm going to use it for, um, my slide, my slideshow. So I know it's a 16:9 ratio, so I'm going to come in here and select 16:9. Now I could always go back and change this, but I just want a good reference so I don't get distracted, because God knows I get distracted, don't I? All right, so I'm using the rules of thirds. All right, do you like it right about there?
A little down.
Down here?
Yeah, right there.
Oh good, because you got this up here.
Yeah.
All right, so now there's my canvas. All right, I have a choice to make. Again, portrait guy, don't do a lot of land— I don't do a lot of shots like this. So I'm either going to have my friend sitting next to me And so what would you recommend? Or, which I think is better, I'm going to use the power of AI. Not that you're not smarter than AI, but for this photo is AI. It's analyzing this image and it's thinking, okay, what tools do we have that'll make this image look really good? Well, it's close up. It knows it's scenic.
Ooh.
And it gives you a choice over here, influencer to be a little crazy. I'm gonna go with the crazy because I've been hanging out with 2 crazy people today. Come on, we were in a graveyard, for God's sake. You were worried about stepping on people. All right, so here we are. Let's see, cozy den. Oh, that's interesting, right? But Texas people are going to kill me Because I just messed up your colors. Okay, this is more of a conservative group, so let's go back. Let's go back here. Oh, you can't go wrong with clear and sharpened, right? There you go. So that gave us a base. Let's see what fast fix does.
Okay. That's nice.
All right, let's see. Simple. Nah, but that's okay. So let's go, let's go with Fast Fix. Oh, you like Fast Fix? All right, edit. Now you see this edits right here? Think of that as history. If I click on it— oh, look at this, it's showing me what tools it used to create this look. So if I had no idea what I was going to do with this, I can go to these right here and I can change them. So if I go to the very bottom, this is my Camera Raw. Um, develop. Let's go with— that is a raw file, correct? Let me make sure. Are you for real? Oh, thank God. I, I photographed both RAW and JPEG. Oh my God, I thought we spent that entire time me shooting JPEG. All right, so real quick, we're here. Crop 16, and then what was the preset we used again?
Uh, the beach scene one, I think.
So by the way, those are the exact same images, just what was wrong was JPEG. All right, so we have this one here, preset, and we did fast fix. All right, there we go. All right, so now edit, and from here I'm going to right to the bottom. This is your Develop Raw. I'm going to use my, my camera profile. Let's go neutral. Neutral looks good. All right, maybe bump up the contrast a little bit, bring down the highlights. And you know what, those colors are a little too— for me, that's a little too much. So I'm going to come back to saturation Dial it back a bit, but then use vibrancy to pump up the muted colors. All right, before, after. Now if I go back to the top, it goes all the way back. It goes to the, to the top area here. Well, I want to see what, what's it do? What is it doing here? So Enhance AI. I'm going to click the visibility icon. Okay, look what that's doing. You know, I'm going to dial that back just a little bit. Let's see what landscape's doing. I bet you that's what the— yeah, that's making the greens. I'm gonna get rid of that. So I hit the reverse arrow and just delete it. And now let's see what the colors are doing. HSL, hue, saturation, luminance. So it's changing the yellows and making the— so it's deciding this for me. Let's see what the luminance of the blue is. So here's the blue. I think, I think the blue is a little too rich. What do you think?
Kind of looks like it.
So let's go to saturation. Look how I'm targeting just the blues. Right about there.
About there.
All right, and then I know this toning— well, actually, color harmony is probably causing it too. Okay, color harmony, that's not bad. And there's toning. All right, so that was a preset we used. What I want to do is this, I'm just going to discard those real quick because what I want to do is start From develop. And then let me get rid of that. There, discard the images, the edits. I want to add my own. That looks good there. I want to add, let's go with enhance AI. Oh, look at that. Look how it's bringing out the colors more. So Enhance AI automatically improves color, detail, tone, and depth of an image. And honestly, here's before, here's after. Maybe a little structure.
Mm-hmm.
So Structure AI, if there were a model in this scene, Structure AI knows it's a person and it doesn't mess with the skin. Here it, it knows that it's, um, flowers. It's going to develop the structure. Look at that. All right, um, background looks okay, right? But remember that relight tool I mentioned?
Mm-hmm.
Watch this. So here's the background, the far. I'm going to go to an extreme so you can see it. Look at that. Look how it's using 3D mapping technology to where it knows that there's the background, what's closer. So look what it's doing here because it's a macro, it's probably freaking it out. And yeah, look at that, right about there. There we go. All right, and one last thing. Let me take a vignette, and I want to put the vignette here. Again, I'm going to go to an extreme so you can see what it's doing. That's what the vignette is doing. Well, if I click on Advanced, watch this. I can actually add inner light to that. I'm going to add just a little bit. And then back it off quite a bit. Here's the deal, if somebody looks at your image and says, wow, that is a really cool vignette, then you obviously went too far. Because look at that, just that little, just that little bit. Look at that, to tie it in. All right, so there's that on that end. Now Let me get back to here. Um, we'll get into portraits real quick. We'll use this as an example. All right, first time I worked with her, and okay, here we are. Now I was talking to you about this. So here she is, we're doing a quick shoot. I don't like the smiling, but for the, um, the modeling agency, they need you to smile. Because what if she shows up and she's drop-dead gorgeous, she smiles, and she has no teeth? So they're very selective. So I call it the Kelly Turner smile because Kelly is the talent agent. All right, um, that's not too bad. She was breaking her neck like this a lot, and when people start doing this, it looks spooky. Um, so that's That's like a concept we call breaking the neck. All right, let's do— there we go. I like this one right here. Actually, you know what I like? All right, you know what, we'll use this one. All right, good. I like that better. All right, here we go. P for pick. Now again, I can start with the preset. For this photo, look at that, it realizes it's a portrait, right? So I'm going to pick this here. I love, love, love, love, love Soulful. Let it do its thing. And by the way, you know presets are working when up here illuminates. All right, so let's see. All right, so we're off to a good start. Now look at her face though. Oh, that's different. And here it's a lot darker. Um, so with her face, what I want to do is come over and under Portrait, I want to relight her face. Look at that. So I can relight the face if the black and white is too strong. Well, then watch this. I could take it and I could dial it back a bit, you know, different parts of the colors. So what I'm going to do is this: I'm going to get rid of that black and white, get rid of that black and white. There we go. In fact, I'm going to do this. I'm going to discard all of it, and if you want this, this LUTs, I'll make sure you have it to get to everyone. I like my own personal LUTs. A LUT is a lookup table, and it's a mood. So I created this here, uh, black and white. Which one did I just do? I believe it was this one. Yep. Okay, there it is. All right, I like that black and white better. All right, so there, that's a LUT that I created, and I'll make sure you have it if you want it. I like what it's doing. Look at her eyes. So let's go back to the portrait face. I don't need to relight her face because that looks pretty good. But man, those eyes. What I wanna do is I wanna come down and enhance them. Look at that. You see how I'm bringing out the eyes? And then we talked about that dark circles. Ooh, look at that.
Wow.
She was up all night with her son. That's up all night with her son. That's no sun. All right, so look how we got rid of that. Before, after. Those are things we always do, right? Those are things you'd always do on a portrait. Now that I have it here, all I need to do is create this as a preset, which we'll do in a moment, apply to the rest of those images, and I'm done. All right, so I have that there. Um, her eyebrows Let's see. Nah, I like her eyebrows natural. Uh, her skin, let's not make her look plasticky, but I do want to keep these freckles. Any shine? Nope, that's good. We're going to stay away from the body. All right, so that looks pretty good, right? That looks good. Now that background, I love that bokeh. So I can make a decision here. If I go back to that relight, this is going to light her. I'm sorry, that's going to light— look at that. See how that knows where she is? And it's, it is adjusting the background, and that's her. Doesn't seem like it's doing a lot, but look how it brought her to the center point. And then we'll finish it off on the vignette, pop a little inner light. There we go. Before After. All right, now we're gonna save it. Um, give me a name, any name.
Texas.
Black and white Texas.
Bluebonnets.
All right, so now that I have that set, I don't have to do that to all the images. So what I can do is just select— I'll leave that right here. I'm going to select all of these here. Now when I select all of them, notice there's a blue box around this one. Well, if I right-click, Adjustment, Synchronize the Adjustment, what I just told Neo to do for me is reanalyze all those other images And apply all the settings that we just did on that one image, apply it to the rest of them. So now I don't have to sit back and re— you know, apply to each one of them. Look at that. Someone made a comment, well, that's taken at least a minute and 30 seconds. Well, how long would it have taken you if you had to do every one of these on your own? All right, so now why is it doing that weird order? I have no idea. Um, but it's, it's going through and it's going to make sure that each one of these— and that's what this little symbol is right here that you're seeing. That symbol right there means that there's edits to the image. All right, but look at that. So now I could give her this and look how The consistency is still there, and I can go back through and do quality control. All right, so do you see how that makes your portrait life that much easier? All right, so that's on this part. Now I'm going to add another image. So instead of adding a folder of images, what I want to do this time is just add a single image. All right. And that's going to appear slightly different. So let's do my external drive. Um, actually I did not. Interesting. So let me go back to my actual hard drive and— oh, I have some Iceland photos I can show you. Um, what I'm trying to find is something with a horrible looking sky. You know what? Yeah, I'm going to show you one of my Iceland ones. All right. Um, I think I, I think I called it Old Iceland. You do? I just saw it right there. All right, um, we did the photo tour. Okay, and by the way, I climbed all the way to the top, took a picture, sent it to my doctor. He wrote back, BS. I'm like, what? Who took the picture? I did. No, you didn't. Did you climb all those steps? Yes, I climbed all those steps because my hip flexors are really bad. He didn't believe me. Okay, he'll hear. You guys saw me laying in the red ants? Yeah, I did the same thing in Iceland, except in volcanic ashes.
They have red ants there too?
No, they had volcanic ashes. I almost died. Well, I felt like I was gonna die. All right, I— if you don't believe in God, go, go here. Oh my God. As I'm walking out to it, I did get queasy because you look at the reflection, it's so— you feel like you're about to fall in. And I'm walking, walking, walking, and I get to this, and I'm laying right in the middle of it, not realizing there's about 30 photographers behind me trying to get this shot, and there's this guy in a red jacket right in the middle of it. Yeah, I know. And I got stuck. Asia, one of our— my coworkers walks over. I love the Ukrainian— Vannelli, what are you doing? I go, I'm trying to get this shot. I go, Jim Nix told me to stand here. He goes, no, Jim Nix said go down that way. I said, no, why would I go down there at an angle? I'm sure— oh. Landscape photographers are different from portrait photographers. I would never photograph you from an angle. I'm going to shoot you head on. Same thing here. By going on an angle where Jim Nick said I should be, I wouldn't have to lay in the water like I did, and I would have gotten a better reflection, not this little whatever that thing was here. So my other shots were better, and I was stuck. And this one gentleman, Ken, said, Vannelli, do you need help? I said, Ken, stay back. Do not come out here and help me.
Why?
My self-esteem cannot handle an 83-year-old man saving me from being stuck in this water. So Asia did, and I'm not exaggerating, that's the sound my boot made coming out of the, the volcanic ashes the other side. And we went where Jim Nix told us to go. I got a better shot. All right, so For this particular image preset, let's do, um, I wish I had Jim Nix's. Oh, you know what, maybe— no, I don't. Nope, I thought I had Jim Nix's ones in here, but I don't. Oh, you know what, I'm not gonna buy another set. Let's do this one. Rich, I bet you deep blue may look good. Oh, that's not bad. Oh, I like that too. All right, um, stop me, people. Pick which one now? Deep blue. All right, so here's deep blue. Now make a decision. Do you like the sky or you don't like the sky?
Say again?
I don't like it. Oh, you don't like the sky? You're not picky. All right, sky. Now Sky AI is using AI technology like for this photo, and it's saying, hey, look, based on this image, these are the skies I think that'll look better. So let's click on one. Let's see what that does. And by the way, I would— oh, not bad at all. Here's another. Oh, I actually like that too. All right, I'm gonna do something a little bit different. I'm gonna erase that, and guess what I'm gonna do? Yes, you guessed it. I'm gonna drag and drop into HDR, because what if I shot that as an HDR? You know, the traditional Normal shot, 2 stops under, 2 stops over, or 1 stop under, 1 stop over, 2 stops under, 2 stops over. You know what, I'm sorry, I get too confused. 1 shot, I like it. Look what it does. Look at that. That does— that did, I, I think, did a really, really good job at rendering it in HDR. Then I like to come over Structure. Oh, look at that. Now that's what I envisioned when I was there sinking 5 feet into the volcanic ashes like it was quicksand, and I thought I saw the light. This is what I envisioned. This is what I— I mean, I— that's what I saw, right? And all that ice. Look at all this ice. Look at that. I braved all those elements just for you to see this photo. All right, so I like it. Again, what I could do is I'm going to get rid of that, um, structure only because what I want to do first is add a different sky. And I can add my own sky or I can select from here. I'm gonna let you pick which sky you want. This is definitely not gonna look good. Oh wait, maybe it will. I don't know, what do you think? It's not bad. No, yes, people? And here's the thing, here's the thing about this. It's like, why'd you marry your husband, right? There's a reason. And there he is, good-looking guy, right? For his money. So, but, but you see what I'm saying? So it's, it's a personal preference. Um, and I will say, I will say, and please don't judge me on this, the, the driver of the big old whatever we were in said, oh yeah, everyone's out here photographing. And I look— this is bad— I did not see the reflection. Because believe it or not, I mean, you have to get really close for that reflection. So I'm under the truck and I look down and it's all dirt. And I went, oh, maybe the high tide's not in yet. Maybe it didn't roll in. And I kid you not, click, click, and I got back in the bus because I was so cold. Everyone came into the bus with incredible shots, absolutely amazing shots. Let's see if I have it right. Well, I don't have it. Absolutely amazing shots. And I went, wait, where'd you get that shot? Right there. How? You have to walk like 600 yards into it to get the shot. I was so upset. The next day I said, oh man, Thomas, I can't believe I missed it. I'm all the way here. I wish I could go back. It was good. I'll tell you what, I'll go to the ice caves. If you take my spot and go back to this location?
Yes.
I went out and that's where I got the shot here, but the clouds were not like the first day. The first day clouds were absolutely gorgeous. This, it looks good, but because I saw the other one, I'm hooked on that one. So I have this here and now I'm going to apply structure. And yes, I know I go overboard with structure. Look at that before. I love that shot. So, um, landscape lady, what would you do differently? Or you like it or not?
I do. I, I always add a lot of structure. I love the structure.
I probably go overboard on my structure too. All right, so there's amount and then there's boost. And for the love of God, don't say boost just boosts the amount to make it better. Okay, so amount is going to add the structure globally, everything. It, it's not prejudiced. Boom, it does it. Boost only goes after the finest details and it boost those details. So if, if I were to do this, notice— look at that— notice it's attacking the fine details. So I'm going to dial it back a little bit, bring this up. There we have it. I can pop a sun rays in here. There's a lot of things you can do. But look, look how it brings the reflection back into the water too. All right, so That's Sky AI. Is it cheating? No. You know, and people, oh my, now I wouldn't enter this in a contest because that is cheating, you know. Or if in Scotland, when I went to Scotland, oh my God, the weather was either horrible or just not as horrible, but it was horrible all the way through. If I brought a Florida sky to Scotland, oh, look at this castle for sale. Look how great this is. People are gonna be furious if they buy that castle and say, "Wait a second, you made it look like this place was a beautiful resort." It's dull, gross, disgusting. With this here, do I believe those clouds would be in this scene? In my opinion, yes. Do I believe? Let me go back to edit, and for the love of God. I don't know why people do this because it gives us— that's Skylum. AI is going, Vanelli, what did you— so let's see if I have it right here, or is it stopping me from doing it? Oh yeah, right here. For the love of God, why do people do that? Why? Oh my God, look at this. Skylum's AI stinks. It's horrible. Look how fake that looks. Of course it looks fake. When have you seen the Milky Way over something like this, right? So you look at skies that— well, that's not too bad, but yeah, it would take a lot of work to make it look where I want it.
There you go, that's the one.
Okay, so yeah, that's the one that's going to get a lot of hate mail. So you decide again To me, yeah, I was there. That is something that I could see being in there. All right? And then we can go even deeper. In fact, what I'll do for you is show you this here. Here's Iceland. Here's complete. Okay, look at this one. That is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. I love it, love it, love it. I wish I took the darn photo. This was the photo that got me so upset. Steve was the one who took the photo. He walked on the bus in camera, looked at me, and showed me this. I wanted to kill him because this isn't— I mean, he did such an incredible job. So look at this. I will. Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay, ready, people? Let the judging begin. This was my first shot. Stop it! No, okay. Do you realize you said that out loud? Oh my God! That was the first shot, and I went, I went, oh, I guess the high tides didn't roll in yet. So stop it, stupid New Yorker. All right, that's what you're thinking. And Yuri, him, I'm like, okay dude, why are you in my shot? Okay, well, I thought, okay, well what can I do with this image if I absolutely had to? How can I salvage this to use it for, to teach people? Well, I could do this. Hello Yuri. Bye Yuri.
Hi.
Replace him with Jim Nix. Boom, done. So that was the only reason, and a few other reasons, why I took that shot. Um, no, I just— I took it because I thought that— I honestly thought that was it. But look how beautiful those, those clouds are, right?
Yeah.
So if we Came in here to structure. Oh, look at that. Mind the fact I don't have the reflection. Squinch your eyes really, really, really, really tight, or flip it over. And honestly, what was going through my mind was that, oh yeah, people must be doing that whole trick where they take the picture and they flip it upside down and merge it together to make it look like a reflection.
How?
How? As Kabasi would say, you can't make chicken salad out of chicken that. So I really thought this was what everybody was getting. So when Steve came back to the bus and he showed me this image, I wanted to kill him. That's what inspired me to go back out to finally get my shot. All right, so, but again, Oh, by the way, I got bored, so I started taking pictures of people. I started to— I was cold. This is in— this is literally in the bus, him sitting on the steps as you walk into the bus, and I wanted to show that I can make anything into a little photo studio. So that got me excited until I saw that. All right? But do you see what I'm getting at where you have to decide How creative do you wanna be? You know, you could go to the point to where it's totally fake, but man, if you love it, then do it. Let me do one more for you, then we'll take questions and answers. Let me take you through, I'm gonna switch catalogs real quick, and I think, Let's cross our fingers. I believe it's here. And here's Erica. All right. Let's see. That's my original one. So I had Aviator. All right, what I wanted to show you was, which I don't have, let's see, almost, oh, here's my Scotland photos. And by the way, notice I like to put _complete in a lot of my directories, so now I know right where this image is. So this image here, to get this image like this, if you saw the original, well, right-click, let's see, go to images from the same date. All right, here's the original. Does that look anything like that?
No.
But that's what I envisioned. So we used the tool called PhotoHound. And what PhotoHound did for us, or me, my buddy Matt Brown, Matt Brown is the co-founder of it, is you punch in the location that you wanna go to and it actually tells you, hey, you want this shot? Here are some places you go. But this was an alleyway. I don't know if you can see it. Nope, I don't think I have it.
Nope.
Yeah, that was shot in an alleyway to get, to get that image. But I mean, I, I love what I did with this. I love how I transformed it. All right, what I wanted to show you guys, and I don't think I have it here unless if I call it Aviator. Oh, I do. Okay, perfect. Perfect. Okay, so let's do this image here. Let me just double-check to make sure. Okay, perfect. All right, ready? That's the image. So that's my original image, and then That's Erica. What did I use? Portrait background removal. So this image right here is her on the white background like this, is that image right here. Here's a little trick, by the way. Look how she's straight up and down. For the love of God, Erica, lean, lean. So I even tried the Dutch tilt where I did one of these things with the camera She still wasn't doing what I wanted, so again, unlike nature photographers, landscape photographers' attitude is, you know what, if you don't do what I want, if it doesn't do what I want it to do, I'm going to force it to. There she goes. Now there she is with the tilt. That's what I wanted Erica to do. Do you see the difference? It sounds funny to say that, but doesn't it look like she's leaning into something? So with that being said, here's the image where I put it together. How fake does that look? Right? That looks totally fake because she was shot on a pure white background. That was a stock photo of a plane. So how do you make it look realistic? Let's see if this is the one. Good. All right, so whenever you're doing a composition, no matter what it is, here's the trick. Once you merge them together, apply something. Doesn't matter what it is, apply something to the entire image, and now it ties it all together. All right, my something and my go-to that I've been using for the sports grit look is the dramatic tool. Watch this. Ready? I'm gonna bring the brightness down. Ooh, look at this. Look what that's doing. Before— you see how it tied everything together? Now I have to continue. Let's use that vignette. Right? And before, after. It's close. It's very close. It's not where I want it to be yet. Ready? Here's develop. Had I known I was going to do this with this image in, in the photo Here's the light. I would have stuck another diffuser. So here's the light source. I would have taken a translucent material, one stop, and stuck it like right about there to hit her body. Now the top half of her would be one stop brighter than the bottom half. Well, since I didn't do that, I'm going to do this. I'm going to lower the exposure. But I'm stopping it. All I care about is the bottom half of the image, so I made a global change. Remember I talked about masking and layers? In this program, each tool has its own mask. In Photoshop, people flip out when they do this. Watch how simple this is. I want that bottom half to be dark, the top half to be bright, so a linear gradient. And I'm going to go click, drag up. Wherever there's red, the effect is going to be applied. Where it's not red, it's not applied. Look at that. And if I want to— look at that. So it created a mask for me. I mean, how easy is that to understand masking now? All right, so I have that set. Um, let's go to portrait.
Face.
I want to relight her face just a little bit. There we go. Now, Erica, I've been photographing her since she was 5. She's 22, 21 years old now. If you were photographing her, she'd walk on set, and I've trained her, she'll say, all right, where's my key light? Because your best friend is light. She'll walk on set and go, all right, So that's my key light, I'll play to that light. Where's my hair light? Back here? You got my hair light set? She'll tell the photographer what she's doing. She saw this image and said, why did you shoot that with a 35mm? You made me look fat. Erica, we didn't have that much room, all I had was a 35 with me. You were too lazy to get the 85? Yes, that's the other reason. So this is when I will do To fix the lens distortion, that's when I would use slim. Look at that. That's what Erica— if you see Erica, that's what she looks like. Not this. This. Guys who want to ask her out on a date, I show them this. Guys who I'm not worried about, I show them this. And by the way, this image— That's a good one. Is 2 feet by 3 feet. Actually, I think you saw it earlier. I even have it on my credit card. Um, she's like my goddaughter. Look at that. All right, I have it on my credit card, and like an idiot, when I first got it, I took a picture of it, and my son goes, think before what you're about to do.
What?
Hey, look at my new credit card, everyone! How cool is Are you really gonna post that on Facebook? I go, yeah. Oh yeah, my credit card information. He goes, seriously, how did you survive all these years? But that was like, you know how you have that one photo that you just absolutely love? That was mine. Mainly because it's her and I just love the way everything just tied in. One thing I didn't notice, did I fix it?
No.
Oh, look at that. Do you see it?
Mm-hmm.
Her sister Alyssa, I started photographing her, same thing with Erica. She stopped modeling, Erica went on. She came over one day, she looked over, she goes, oh yeah, of course you got Erica, and she's an artist. She goes, oh, of course you got Erica. Too bad you have a piece of hair in the picture. And I said, what are you talking about? Oh my God, I can't look at that photo now that's on my wall. I want to reprint it, but I think it'd be— look at that. So if I want to get rid of that, again, I'll use the erase tool. But look at the difference between this total fake to something that looks more realistic. And again, that was using a mask, that was using the, the layer It was using layers, and then you tie it all together and you apply it with a mask. All right, so can you see how those things you really can't do in Lightroom but will take years to master in Photoshop? Use Photoshop to repair images. Use your Lightroom to organize your images and do your editing. And let's say you want to replace the sky. Just jump right over from Lightroom into Neo, do what you want to do, boop, bring it back in. So whatever you feel your workflow should be, stick to that workflow. Because remember, are you a photographer, a retoucher, or a graphic artist? Now you could be all 3, but whatever you are, be that person In that moment.
All right, so I hope you enjoyed the video and learned lots from it. Down below there will be a, a link to the program along with a discount code for you so you can get 15% off everything on the website. So if you already have Luminar and you want to add some stuff, you can get 15% off, or if you want to get the program. You can get 15% off the program and everything else in the— on the website. So anyhow, don't forget to subscribe and hit that like button. How do you like my new signs? I love them. All right, till next time, and don't forget to subscribe because there will be more tutorials coming on this YouTube channel for the Luminar editing program. All right, have a great day.
Bye!
