From a session at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC for Samsung. Shot with a Galaxy NX camera and the 85mm f1.4 Samsung lens. They got a lot right...
Anyway, I played around some more with Luminar 4.x and it's actually a great program for quickly retouching and enhancing portraits. You'll have more fine control in PhotoShop (for instance you can control eye size for each eye in P.S. instead of having a combined setting in Luminar) but Luminar is great for fast skin smoothing, detail enhancing and color correction. The filters also work well and you can dial back the effects with sliders.
I'm having fun with it. And it's not too expensive. I'd buy it again.
Not supported or sponsored by Luminar....or any other photo company or retailer. So there.
5 comments:
Hi, Kirk -
Even though I don't make photos of subjects that talk back, I'm a big fan of your portraits and your descriptions of how you made and processed them. I'm also a big fan of your B&W portraits. But this one in particular works better in color, to my eyes. It's so present and realistic I almost expected her to move. Great image.
Tom
Luminar. If you read their forums you'll find a fair number of people who are REALLY mad 'cause the program is really SLOW. Something about using the CPU instead of the GPU for processing, while all the other competitor programs use the latter. My computer is a relic from 2011, but until version 4 it played nice with Luminar…but here I am, watching the beach ball spin. I WANT to like Luminar, so: can you offer any advice from your experience, or else a bit of Texas Hot Magic Powder to get it moving faster? The support folks at Skylum like to say "we're working on it," but the new date for updates is moveable.
I'm glad to see you're working with it, and creating the fine work we all expect. I also prefer the color version here.
Thanks from Oregon, where we're playing it safe.
Hi Bill, Let me preface this by saying that I have no connection to Luminar. I'll agree that it's not the fastest program on the market but I'm using a late 2019 iMac Pro computer with 32 GB of Ram and a very fast processor. I hadn't heard that the program doesn't use the video card and that makes me sad because my computer features a pretty fast video card...
But, even with 47 MB files from the S1R it only takes a few seconds to save a file and I've never had a swirly beach ball show up. Just a progress bar.
Might not be the best choice for someone on an older laptop. But It seems to be fast enough. I do find that the more changes you make to a file the longer it takes to save it out at the end so it seems like it's not doing the full computation each time you make a change but just doing proxy changes and then rendering at the end. Like a video file.
Thanks, Kirk. My machine is a mid-2011 iMac, 21-inch; 24GB of RAM. It may well be that with succeeding versions of Luminar that "older" is just that—OOD. I'm already cut off on the PS/LR versions for upgrades (Adobe CC), being at Sierra for the OS. There are other programs that offer their own enticements, but software is like hardware (I'm thinking of cameras now)—if you haven't mastered the tools, don't complain when "they" don't work. Meanwhile, I'll dream of a 2015 model.
Your story and photos from Enchanted Rock are great, especially those showing the curves and those BIG blocks standing around. You put us in your shoes with that post.
Thanks Bill !!!
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