Luminar 4 Looks (Presets) Help You Save Time

Luminar 4 Looks are essentially presets. It's a fast and easy way to give your photograph a look that you love. It's also a way that you can save some of the great processing that you've done so that you can reapply it to other photos. And that's what we're going to take a look at today. Hi, my name is William Beem. I am a portrait photographer in central Florida.

I'm also the cohost of a photography podcast called I Like Your Picture. This is part of a tutorial series that I've done on Luminar 4 and there's a whole playlist with it. I'll link that in a card above. And if you enjoy this, please go ahead. Subscribe. You'll get a notice. If you click that bell to find out when I've got a new video coming in the series or other videos coming out later on.

All right, let's go ahead and take a look at Luminar 4 Looks. So I've got a photograph up here. The only thing I've done, I went into the Light and I added about a stop of exposure, cause it was a little bit underexposed in my opinion, but we can come over here to this bar just underneath the menu. And you can see where it says,

Looks, I'll click on that. And at the bottom you can see, we have this little film strip that looks from here and it says Luminar Looks and you can see where it says currently portrait. And then there are different Looks with inside of the portrait session. If I open this up, you'll see that there's different types, essential, street and so forth.

There's also a way to get more. We'll look at this a little bit later on. So you can see here where it says get more. That'll take you to a webpage where you can look at and find other Looks that are available for purchase or download. And of course, you've got this notice here with a star. I'll show you this where you can mark some of these as favorites.

And that way you can always quickly and easily get to the ones that you love without having to go in the different categories. So let's go ahead and lower this down for right now. And we'll start off with the first one. Here is his AI Face Enhancer. And it takes just a moment to process. And then once it's done, it'll go ahead and make its changes to this photo.

Now notice down at the bottom here, we talked about favorites. There's a little star. So if you click on that, you can see that it kind of highlights and that adds one to your favorites. So let's do a little before and after. And if you take a look at her face, you can see that it's done a little changes. It's looks like that

it's kind of changed the exposure, but also you can see how the face is coming in and out. It's doing a little bit of portrait. You can see over here on the portrait tab, that's lit up compared to some of the others. Remember the Essentials is lit up because I did adjustment on Light. Let's click on here and you can see it's done the AI skin enhancer and AI portrait enhancer.

If you open these up, you can see where it's changed the skin enhancer, and we'll open this next one up and you can see that it's done a little bit of eye whitening, and has added a little bit of face light, but look, how much of the slim face that was put on here. So let's go back to a before and after, and you can see that it really is kind of slimming down her face.

Whether the subject needs or not is doing it automatically. Now some of these other portrait options that you have for Looks, there's a black and white there's, one called desert, which I think is kind of interesting by the way, it just changed the color tones. And you can see this. There's a few others. I won't go through all of them,

but let's go back up to a, take another choice here. I want to click on the essentials and just kind of want to point out the fact that just because you're working on a portrait, doesn't mean that you're limited to using the Portrait Looks. We can come over here to the Luminar Looks. And this first one over here says AI Enhanced Image.

It's a quick and easy way to come over and take a look at what has it done. You can see that I, you know, that I did Light, It's done something with AI Enhance and it's also done something with color. So let's pull this down. It's moved AI Enhanced up quite a bit. And let's see what it's done with color.

So it's kind of tweaked the saturation and vibrance a little bit. And that's the nice thing about using these Looks. If you find one that you like, it's very easy to open up and see just what changes it made. So let's go down here to these three dots. We're going to revert to our original, that removes the changes I did on light.

You can see how it's gotten kind of dark. Let's go over to soft and airy and you can see how it's done a few changes as well. So it's changed Light. We can tell this because this is the text on Light is brighter and it hasn't done an exposure change, but it has done some changes with highlights and shadows. It's changed color again,

boosted the saturation. Vibrance is still a bit and details enhancer. So you can see it's made some changes there, pulling details down. And also we can see that it's done something over here and added the Mystical look. So it's just a very small tweak. Usually I think these are about 50. So this amount on Mystical is about 52. It's almost imperceptible to me,

but that's really what presets do. They make changes automatically for you. So you don't have to go through and touch each one. Okay. Let's say that we have a portrait and we want to create our own look. Basically what you do is you enhance the photo of using the various tools to the way that you want. So on this one, I'm going to click on portrait and I'm not really going to use anything here,

maybe a little bit of face light, and I'm going to enlarge the eyes just a little bit. But the thing that really I find interesting is the high key look. And I'm going to bring this way up and I'll bring up the standard high key. I'm going to click on advanced and I'm going to pull the contrast a little bit, but the saturation will pull down quite a lot and I bring up a lot of glow.

So just so we can tell the difference, this is before, and this is after that's the look that I want. Now, one of the things that's interesting about this look is there are places I don't want it. So for example, I really don't want it in her eyes. Now I've got a choice. I can go ahead and mask things out and save the look or I can save the look now and people need to know to mask things out.

So what I'm gonna do is come down here to Save New Look and I'll just call this high key portrait. So let's go ahead and reset everything, revert to original. Okay. So now that I have this as a Look down here, I just go ahead and I'll hover that. And if you hover it, it'll show you what your photograph looks like with that Look.

So I move it over and I'm just hovering and going back. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on it and it'll take a moment. You'll see where it says image processing here. And that's where it's applying things. Now, what I want to do here is I want to remove the Look from her eyes and her lips. So I'm gonna click on edit mask,

choose a brush in this case, I don't want to paint it on. I want to come over here and select erase, because I want them the Look over most of the portrait and let's turn on the mask overlay. We can see I've got a little bit more to do on the lips here. And I missed a spot there on her eye.

So that's good enough for me. So now I've got some clarity in her eyes. I never want to lose that clarity in the eyes. When I did the glow it's kind of softening the portrait. The lips I may have changed my mind, and I may have probably have gone back and not done that quite so much. The easy way to do that is to go ahead and choose your opacity.

I say, bring this down about close to 50%. I go back to paint and now I can just paint some of the effect back on, and we've kind of tamed her lips down. So that's a quick way to take a look at how you can add your Looks and modify them. I like the idea that you can save these almost as adjustments that you paint on or paint off.

And it gives you actually a lot of power for any kind of photography, whether it's portraits, landscapes, events, so forth. There are times where you want the Look in a certain place. And depending on what you want, a mask will really help you apply it where you want it to go. All right. So let's go back over here and take a look at getting more Luminar Looks.

So this will go ahead and launch your web browser. And as you come over here, you can say there are Signature Looks. There are skies and a few other things over here. So let's scroll down, take a look at some of the Signature Looks. And really these are a matter of taste as far as what you like or what you don't like.

And we'll go ahead and click on, let's say Capturing Your Wanderlust. If you want to click on buy now it'll scroll for a moment and there you go. You can get that for $19. If there's a coupon code available, I don't have any for this right now. You can go ahead and put that in there. All right, let's go back over here to Looks and you can see there are a number of different Looks over here,

and you can see the prices down beneath them, and then you can make a determination. Is this something that you want or not? If you find one that looks interesting, you're not sure about any details. There's a learn more button right nearby, and you can tell what's inside. So 30 landscape Looks. In other words, you're not paying $15.99 for one Look and you can kind of see before and after with this little line,

you drag back and forth and notice that they've got these little arrows. So you can go ahead and take different photographs and see how they look. And that gives you a quick and easy way to determine is this something that I like or something that I don't like. All right, that's all we have to talk about Looks. Essentially, Looks are presets and you can buy and download these Looks from the site here where it says,

get more. You may be able to find some photographers who've created their own Looks and buy them from them and install them. Also, you can create your own. I'll be honest. I don't use Looks or presets in most tools. I prefer to go ahead and make my own adjustments, but if you're got a Look that's available to you and it's quick and easy to use,

or you've created your own Look, this is a way to save time in your post-processing to get the appearance that you want for your photographs. If you enjoyed this video or you're enjoying the series on Luminar 4, please, I would love it if you would like this video, and then go ahead, click the subscribe button and to get notices of new videos coming up,

ring the little, or click the little bell icon up there, and we will continue on this series. The next one we're going to be looking at is about layers and masks.