Photo Editing Challenge Day 3 – Getting Creative with Luminar AI

Welcome to day #3 of the photo editing challenge! In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the creative tools in Luminar AI to add style and mood to your images.

The following are just a few examples of the tools I’ll demonstrate:

• Sky Replacement AI (easily swap out a drab sky for a new one).
• Sky Augmentation AI (add clouds, birds, or other sky elements).
• Atmosphere AI (add fog, mist, or haze to your image).
• Mood (LUTs) to add color grading or cinematic effect.
• Texture overlay tool (to give an antique or aged look to your image).
• Sun Rays tool (add the look of a sunburst in your image).

Here is a before and after teaser of one of the images demonstrated in this lesson.

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 AI 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 Cuba texture images for you to work with this day.
• Day 4: 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 AI, Skin AI, and Body AI tools in Luminar AI.
• Day 5: Fixing Issues – Learn how to fix common issues like removing unwanted things from your photos, lens distortion, lens flare, perspective distortion, noise, sharpness, and removing a pesky color tint.

Follow the steps below to get started, then watch the video tutorial.

Step 1 – Sign up to get the RAW files and be entered to win

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.

Not to worry if you’re a day or so behind, you’ll get each of the emails and images one day after the last. Just start on day 1 and continue from there.

Step 2 – Get Luminar AI

If you don’t already own Luminar AI (aff), I’ve arranged for a free trial that’s available to use while you go through the challenge. This download link is available in the first email you will receive once you register. I am a Skylum Ambassador, so I can provide the free trial, but it’s not publicly available so you will have to sign up 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 – Learn how get more creative with your editing

Here are a couple of links to things I mentioned in the video that you might find helpful:

• Find out more about the Luminar X membership where you can get monthly assets sent to your inbox including Looks, Templates, Skies, and more.
• Go to the Skylum website to read or download the Luminar AI User Manual if you want more details on any of the tools.

Here’s the other before and after example shown in the video.

Sky Replacement and Texture Packs

If you want more information on our Sky Replacement or Texture Pack, click on one of the images below.

Inspiration time

I have one last image pair to inspire you into action and get your creative ideas flowing.

This is an image I shot in Japan at an anime festival. The costumes were often extremely elaborate like this one, to rival many of those I saw at the Venice Carnival.

I know when I took this shot it was going to be something I’d want to work on and do something special. The model was walking down the street and I asked her to step into the shade so I had nice soft light to photograph her, so I have a good raw file to start.

When it came to editing, I knew I wanted to do something with a bit of an edge, a bit funky, but I wasn’t sure exactly what that was or how to do that.

So I played around with a few of the new Luminar AI templates and came up with the image below just by experimenting. This is what you’d call a happy accident!

I am super pleased with the final result!

Step 4 – Your turn to practice

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. I’d love to see how you make out and what you create with my images.

If any questions about Luminar AI or anything else in regards to photo editing in general, please post them in Disqus below as well.

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 Day #4 tomorrow, we’ll take a dive into the Portrait AI tools in Luminar AI and do some editing on photos of people.