Become a pro-photographer with Luminar 4

There is a quote I have heard a few times, that says “underwater photographers love their work, but many spend a lot of time trying to remove the water to see the subject”. Some of this is done with physical filters in front or behind the lens, and/or white balancing underwater. I prefer non-filtered shots and concentrate on contrast/light with the confidence that my camera using the RAW image format will collect enough useable colour data, generally I take a reference shot of my fins which I have a white square painted on. This is useful only as a guide, but 9 times out of 10 it seems to work well.

With these pilot whales, I “lost” my light with cloud and boat shelter, so this shot was much duller than the others  from the sequence. So I decided to import this “reject” as a single frame into Luminar 4. Once I became familiar with the terminology, I headed straight to “Light” to correct my white balance.

As I know the colour of the pilots are browny grey to black in colour, and white is as white as the markings; so that’s where I sampled my white. I was very impressed with the split screen “Before/After” which gave me a satisfying result very quickly.  When I applied the highly acclaimed AI Structure “Amount”  it was very simple to bring up so much more detailing in the scarring on the pilot whale, without spending time on every tiny detail of editing.

The AI Sky Replacement, which for me was fun to play around with, I have to say handled leaping dolphins in cloudy skies or dramatic sunsets rather well. The same could be said for the Augmented Sky that would make a compilation artists job a dream. I also found that the mystical, fog, grain, sunrays  and dramatic options were fast and easily controllable when it came to enhancing other aspects of the photograph.