Luminar Neo update 1.8

Skylum has quietly slipped out an update to Neo without much fanfare. It has two features I’ve really wondered why they were never included. Both make a significant improvement in useability for me.

1. Before & After Sliders

This was pretty hard to believe because Skylum had this feature in Luminar Ai and PhotoLemur. I do find it much better to compare before and after on one screen than flicking the whole screen before and after backwards and forwards. The fact that this also works when you mouse-over presets leads to a better appreciation of their effect on your chosen photo. Finally having a slider to control the opacity of how the preset is applied makes this a real winner in my books.

2. Histogram at the top of the edit controls 

This was also a real puzzle because the histogram has always been displayed in Luminar’s catalogue screens, but was missing when using the edit tools. This is the time that I find the histogram gives its most useful feedback. Specifically, it changes as you apply different edits, so you can follow the tonal impact of them, You do need to understand how the histogram works and why it is a useful graph. It is activated from the main View Menu by ticking the Show Histogram option at the bottom of the pop out list.

AutoTonal Fixes & Jpeg

ost packages these days offer an autofix solution for “correcting” the tonal range in an image, which normally means stretching the range by increasing the contrast and manoeuvring the exposure/brightness. They mostly work, underexposed images will be lightened and overexposure images will be darkened, and some extra detail will appear. However these processes/filters can come spectacularly unstuck when the exposure is heavily clipped (clipping is an adobe-centric term to described when the exposure intensity falls below the minimum recordable, ie black or above the maximum recordable ie white). This clipping will be visible as vertical lines on the right or left hand edges of the intensity histogram. The image I’m using for this series is clipped a little on the black side, but not that significantly.

Original Jpeg (as Shot)	After Auto Levels	Perfectly Clear

If you look at the exposure intensity histograms under each image you see what has been done by each step. The original jpeg image does not capture the full range of exposures, they are grouped to the left og the histogram. The auto level fix has stretched the available pixels to fill the histogram. Because there is less detail in the information to begin with, when this is stretched across the full range there will be some new intensities that get missed, the new locations for originally adjacent exposure in a nice gradient of light will now be two or more illumination values apart, leaving a little gap, which can produce stripping in the nice gradient, and sometimes this becomes very obvious and distracting. The perfect clear filter has done a similar stretch but has less mini peaks.

All on these images still have a very dark shadow in the foreground and probably a bit more post processing could be justified.

AfterShot Pro’s Perfectly Clear filter, is a bit of a secret sauce, but I find I prefer using it to any other AutoFix solution because it gives me a better idea of a what an image is capable of. The ones I want to rank as worthy of further work in the future. On occasion I need a jpeg version to post on the web straight away, and perfectly clear probably does the best job in most situations, with just a single click. (Perfectly Clear also works with RAW images).

Google+ photos has a featured called Auto Enhance which is turned on and set to normal by default. It works well most of the time, but if you think your images is just to contrasty, or looks posterized you can turn it off or change it individually on the photo page under edit, or change the default setting under the google+ settings. If you are only uploading jpeg photos, from your phone the normal setting will probably do a good job 90% plus of the time.

So be careful with Autofix as a solution to extend your dynamic range. There are better solutions to come in this series but it is well worth having a play with these settings/filters in your package of choice.

Cambridge in colour has a good introduction to Understanding Image Histograms

The Shadow Portrait Method, free light meter for digital cameras.

Looking back through my photos I notice I have a lot of “shadow self-portraits”, those shots where you take a picture of your shadow. However there is method in my madness. With a digital camera it is possible to get a reasonable idea of the correct exposure even without a light meter. Just point your camera at your shadow on the ground. Looking at the image on the back of your camera, can sometimes be difficult, because of the glare and strong reflection but even so you will usually be able to tell where the detail is in the image. If all you see is a very strong silhouette of the shadow and some detail in the ground you may be underexposed and you should do one or a combination of the following,open the aperture by perhaps an F stop, move to a lower f number, decease the shutter speed or raise the ISO a little, Alternatively you could increase The EV Value (exposure compensation). When detail is spread across the shadows and sunlit ground your exposure will probably be ok for an subject also illuminated by the same light (except if you are wanting to point at the sun or the sky!) If the sunlit ground looks washed out and the shadow not so strong and/or the shadow has the best detail you are on the overexposed side. So in this case you might close the aperture, move to a higher f number, decrease the shutter speed or lower the ISO a little. In this case you you want choose a negative EV. If you don’t trust the screen because of glare, the histograms for shadow portraits generally have two distinct bumps. If the bumps are over on the left there's a risk of under exposure, over on the right your probably find your photos are overexposed. Once your changed your setting taken another shadow portrait to check

Underexposed Shadow Detail Lost	Exposure OK	Over exposedLosing detail on the sunlit sand

Next time you are out on a sunny day, set your camera to M (for Manual) and point it down and at your shadow. Then start experimenting with a few or one of the above options. You should find you can find the correct exposure with as few a three or four test shots.