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Become a pro-photographer with Luminar 4

WDC Field Officer, Charlie's, fin-tastic dolphin photos have been illuminated with Luminar 4's AI technology

We are so pleased to be working once again with Humble Bundle – this time with Skylum’s AI Powered Photo Editor, Luminar 4.

Humble Bundle is an online platform that sells bundles of books, games and software for a fraction of the retail price and all purchases help support good causes. With their community of over 12 million customers worldwide, Humble Bundle have been incredible supporters of WDC and our work since 2014, raising a staggering £2.3 million for us to date. Through Humble Bundle’s flexible pricing policy you can choose the price you want to pay, and how your money is divided between the creators of the titles, Humble Bundle and their chosen charities. In other words, you can choose how much of your cash goes to supporting our vital work protecting whales and dolphins!

This bundle features Luminar 4 - a powerful photo editing software programme with revolutionary tools and AI technologies that give superpowers for creative photo editing. Including the full Luminar 4 programme, this bundle also contains some incredible effects and objects packages so you can create unique and original looks with just a few simple clicks, while helping protect whales and dolphins at the same time!

The bundle is available to purchase now until Tuesday 2nd December – click here to buy the bundle now.

But don’t just take our word for it!  We asked a few of our photographer friends including WDC ambassador and underwater photographer, Drew Sutton, and award winning photographer and Adopt a Dolphin Field Officer, Charlie Phillips, to put the software through its paces and tell us about their experience. Read on to see how they got on:

 

 

Drew Sutton, WDC Ambassador and underwater photographer, pilot whales:

Before
Before
After
After

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.

 

Charlie Phillips, WDC Adopt a Dolphin Field Officer – bottlenose dolphins:

What I will say about the Luminar 4 setup is that it's pretty easy and intuitive to use, the controls are clear and simple and once you get used to the terminology and location of the functions, it has some nice tricks up its sleeve.

The AI Enhance slider is great and is a favourite - it really does a great job and the Details Enhancer works a treat.

Luminar 4 Example

[shariff]

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