Photo Editing Challenge Day 4 – Portrait Editing with Luminar AI

Welcome to Day #4 of the photo editing challenge! In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the portrait tools in Luminar AI to edit your photos of people.

In this lesson, you’ll learn all about the tools available inside Luminar AI that are designed to help you edit your portrait images quickly and easily.

You don’t need to learn complex retouching, masking, or how to use layers to do this! Luminar AI does all the heavy lifting for you.

Luminar AI has several new tools that analyze your image looking for facial features. Here are some of the things I will cover in the video tutorial:

• Face AI (including Iris AI)
• Skin AI (automatic skin smoothing that actually works well, NOT overdone!)
• Body AI (slim the body and/or abdomen with two sliders)

AI Photo Editing: Read my review of Luminar Neo, the next generation photo editing using AI. It’s an industry game changer. If you’ve already got it, enrolling in my Luminar Neo course should be able to get you up and editing in days instead of weeks. Check it out.

Notice that I have sharpened the image overall, but softened and smoothed the skin as well! That is ALL easy to do with Luminar AI, I promise you.

Follow along and you’ll see.

Photography challenge themes for the week

Over the course of the next five days, you’ll be working with these photography themes and practicing these editing techniques:

• Day 1: Quickstart using Luminar AI templates and tools – Learn how to do quick edits using Luminar’s template workflow and a few of the AI tools.
• Day 2: Contrast, tone control, and sharpness – You’ll learn how to fix a high-contrast image to retain detail all over, as well as how to give a flat image more punch and color. Masking will be covered today also.
• Day 3: Getting creative – Learn how to affect the mood and style of your images with the Creative Tools panel. I’ll provide two photos from my brand new sky replacement pack and two of my Caribbean texture images for you to work with this day.
• Day 4: People and portrait editing – You’ll learn how to use the amazing Portrait AI tools and other enhancements to make your people pictures really pop, quickly and easily with the Face, Skin, and Body AI tools in Luminar AI.
• Day 5: Correcting and fixing issues – Learn how to fix common issues like removing unwanted things from your photos, lens distortion, lens flare, perspective distortion, noise, and removing a pesky color tint.

Step 1 – Sign up to get the RAW files

Make sure to click CONFIRM in the email you’ll get after you sign up. Then look for the next email with the download link for day one. Then you’ll get each of the next 4 days delivered straight to your inbox.

NOTE: If you don’t see the confirmation email, check your spam and junk folders. Also, make sure to add my email address to your contact list or address book so you get all future emails as well.

Here’s a before and after example of an image you’ll get to use if you register for the challenge. This is one of today’s images.

Let’s take a closer look at that!

Notice how flattering the image above is without overdoing the smoothing and removing all the detail of her skin or making her look plastic. This is ONE SLIDER!

You can do this too. It’s easy.

Step 2 – Get Luminar AI

If you don’t already own Luminar AI (aff), there is currently a free trial available to use while you go through the challenge. This download link is available in the first email you will receive once you subscribe. I am a Skylum Ambassador, so I can provide the free trial, but it’s not publicly available so you will have to subscribe to get the link.

Using the free trial of Luminar AI will not allow you to learn about photo editing as you go through these tutorials, but also try out and experience what I believe to be one of the BEST photo editing software (especially for beginners) currently available on the market.

NOTE: If you download it today make sure to check for updates and then update to the latest version after you install it!

Luminar AI Discount Code: If you decide to purchase Luminar AI use my discount code DIGITALPHOTOMENTOR to get $10 off.

Step 3 – Watch the Luminar AI tutorial on portrait editing

Here are a few other links to related articles or things I mentioned in the video above:

• Portrait Retouching Using Lightroom in 10 Minutes or Less (see how much more work it is with Lightroom here)
• Topaz Sharpen AI Software Review (if you want to check out my review of this product)
• How to do Noise Reduction – Software Comparison and Recommendations (they also make a great noise reduction tool)

Step 4 – Your turn to practice

Here is another example set of before and after images from the video tutorial above.

Now it’s time for you to get working on them yourself. Please share one or more of your finished images in the comment area below.

If you choose to work on our own images, that’s fine too. Share whatever you come up with and any questions you have while going through this Luminar AI tutorial video.

if you need help opening images in Luminar the first time, read this: Video Tutorial – How to Open Images in Luminar 4 (in that video I demonstrate both the stand-alone and plugin version for Luminar 4 and the process is exactly the same for Luminar AI.

NOTE: If you are having issues uploading your images to the comment area, you need to make sure they are not over 2 MB in size. Watch this to see how to make them smaller: How to Resize Photos for Facebook, Email, and Social Media.

For the final, I’ll be back to wrap up the 5-day photo editing challenge with tips on how to make corrections and fix image issues. Things such as removing an unwanted element or color cast, lens flare or distortion, perspective correction (tilting buildings), and more.