Better Environmental Portraits with Luminar 4

Creating dynamic and interesting images in a time crunch situation sometimes means you’ll have to finish your images in post to develop the most iconic and exciting imagery for yourself or a client. This has usually meant a good amount of time spent in Photoshop to extract and then blend  your foreground and subject with your sky. In this video you will get to see how Luminar 4 can save you time and help you create an epic back-lit environmental portrait.

Coming to you from Pye Jirsa and SLR Lounge is a new video that deep dives into post processing using Adobe’s Photoshop and Lightroom along with Luminar 4 and how each can simplify you workflow in post. Pye understands how a good image can really become a great and more dramatic portrait with a more interesting sky, but due to lighting conditions in the scene or the lack of clouds in the sky may have not been a reasonable image to create in one photograph. What Pye takes you through in this video is a complete breakdown of his post processing with Luminar 4 and how this very powerful software helps you develop images that may have been an absolute pain to create previously. 

With certain foreground elements sky replacements can be a tiring and time consuming process to do in Photoshop, but with Luminar 4’s artificial intelligence that time is saved with it’s development module and a few sliders to process the image to your taste. It’s amazing to me to see how this software can process the foreground out of the background so easily without anywhere near the amount of time I would normally spend in Photoshop to do the same thing. 

What did you think of Pye’s full post processing video and his breakdown of using Luminar 4? If you’re looking for a complete and comprehensive library of royalty free sky images for your replacements, definitely check out Mike Kelley’s Ultimate Sky Library from Fstoppers.

JT Blenker's picture

JT Blenker, Cr. Photog., CPP is a Photographic Craftsman and Certified Professional Photographer who also teaches workshops throughout the USA focusing on landscape, nightscape, and portraiture. He is the Director of Communications at the Dallas PPA and is continuing his education currently in the pursuit of a Master Photographer degree.

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