Learn to Use the USER INTERFACE in Luminar AI

The folks at Skylum were nice enough to give me a beta copy of Luminar AI. So now I have the chance to go ahead and start showing you some of the features inside the user interface and so forth. And that's what we're going to do today. We're going to take a look at the user interface of the Luminar AI beta. Keep in mind,

since this is a beta, the user interface may possibly change. We're not going to dive too deep into the tools, but I'll show a couple of things. And then in later videos, I'll go more in depth with inside of the tools. Hi, my name is William Beem. I am a portrait photographer in central Florida. If you're new here,

I hope I give you a reason to want to subscribe and stick around a little bit longer. Today, we're going to look inside the user interface of Luminar AI beta and keep in mind, it's a beta. Not everything that's on the menu is there to work. Most of the things are, and I'll show you what we have. And in later videos,

we'll go ahead. We'll take a look deeper down inside of some of the tools, but for right now, I just want you to take a look at the user interface and see what's available. Keep in mind Luminar AI is a new tool. It is not the next version. It's not an upgrade path of Luminar 4, so Luminar 4 will continue on with updates for at least another year.

Luminar AI is a new tool that is scheduled to come around. They say holiday season. I presume that's in December. There is no actual date committed yet, but as we get closer, like I said, I'll give you more updates in videos on what's inside the tools. And if there are any changes or if there's a final delivery date that comes out,

I'll let you know. So with that, let's go ahead and take a look. Okay. We're starting off here inside of the catalog, and I'm going to just kind of move things over from left to, right. So if you see the Luminar AI logo up here, if you click on that, you'll get a little bit of a dropdown and I'll give you a an About,

there's a check for updates, the part for installing plugins. I'll bring that up. You'll see that you can install inside of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom. In other words, this works as a plugin within those tools. You do not have the ability to host any plug-ins inside of Luminar AI. That's just not the way it works. So you can use this as a plug-in in Photoshop or Lightroom.

And quite honestly, that's my preferred way to use Luminar. There is a way to use this as a standalone tool. So for example, it has a catalog here. I've got a folder called demo with a few items in it, but I already use Adobe Lightroom Classic. And in my opinion, that gives you more features and capabilities for organizing and managing your photos.

It's the way I like to do things for organizing my photos. If you don't have Lightroom or another tool, then you could probably go ahead and organize some photos here, but you're not going to get into the same kind of metadata that you would in Adobe Lightroom. So adding something new is pretty easy. You can edit a single image if you want to,

or you can add a folder with images and that's what I've done to bring in this demo folder. And then the catalog you can see right over here that will just show the photos you have. I only have a handful. And then there are a couple of interface things. So you can show all of your photos. If you Mark something as a favorite,

so when you hover over this. So there's a little heart right down here. Let's say that this is the favorite. I say, show favorites. Then it's only going to show that one because it's just basically a filter on the ones that you've marked with a heart. If you've rejected some photos, you can see what they are. And if you want to see what hasn't been marked,

you can see this. Now, this little icon that's up here that shows that these photos have some edits to them. So if you want to see photos that have been edited, you'll only see photos that have that little Mark over there. And don't worry if you don't like the edits that you've done, it's very easy to reset them. And we'll go through that in a moment.

So you can change things back to their unedited state. You can also kind of sort things ascending or descending by any of these little features over here. The capture time when you edited it, when you chose it as a pick and so forth. On your catalog, you can see how many photos. I have 11 photos here. Only one is a favorite.

You can see that they were all pretty much recently added and seven of them I've gone through and done some edit. Lost edit is kind of interesting. You see that you've got this little triangle over here and I did do some edits on this one. Apparently I've done something to screw that up. So it's actually kind of interesting that it shows you lost edits.

And then if you've got anything in the trash that you haven't emptied yet, they'll show up here. Albums are virtual folders. In other words, it's not a physical folder on your hard drive. Like this demo is. Albums are what you would create and you drag photos that you want into them. So you can organize and quickly access them that way. All right,

let's go over to Templates. This is the magic that happens with Luminar AI. And this is the new workflow that they're talking about. It will scan your photo, determine what type it is, and then make suggestions for templates. And it's going to say for this photo Essence, or this Easy Portraits over here. There's another one for People. You still have options to use Landscape and others,

and you can see Portraits down here. I like the fact that it gives you For This Photo. These are the recommendations that we have. So if we go into Essence, there are a couple of templates under each of these categories. So Essence is a category. Flawless is one of the templates that you can apply. And what it does is it kind of smooths out the skin over here.

And it does a nice job on most of these templates. I actually kind of like, and you can see how it just popped in and changed there. So you can see how her skin is smoother, it's brightened some things up. Let's go quickly over here, you see this little eyeball you used to be in the center of Luminar 4, so you can do a before and after,

or you can use the compare mode. We've got the slider that you can bring in and just kind of show what changes were made. So it's nice and easy to tell what your original photo was like. And then what changes appear based upon the template that you've selected. And of course you can click these again, to turn them off. As long as I'm up here,

I'll just go ahead and show this little thing where it says 53% is "fit to screen" and that's for mine, but you can go ahead and select your zoom level based upon percentage 25%. And on up to 1200%, we're not going to go that far. And right now, coming back to these templates, only one of them apply at a time. In other words,

you cannot stack them. So if I changed from Flawless to Rembrandt, everything on Flawless is going to be undone and only the settings for Rembrandt are going to go. And that's because essentially what they're doing is they're making selections based upon saved settings in the edit tool. And we'll click on edit. This might look familiar if you've used Luminar 4. You see that we have our essentials,

Creative, Portrait and Pro. Something that's different is now you see local masking down here by itself. Something else that looks familiar, if you can see that we're Light is brighter than the other tools. That tells you that something's changed inside of this little category. And that's based upon the template that we just selected. So it's already changed Smart Contrast, a little bit of the highlight and the exposure is the same.

The shadows are the same, but a few settings have changed within Light based upon the template we just applied. If you want to undo the results of a template or any of the Results that you've done an editing, come down here to the bottom on the right corner. You'll see these three dots, click on that and just set, just click reset adjustments.

And with that, you're back to your photo without any editing, the export tool comes over here. You can save it to a disk, mail it, you can send it in messages, send a SmugMug or 500 PX. So you've got a few different options as to how you're going to set up. Let's say that we choose to use, save to disk.

We'll go ahead and click save to disk and you'll get an option. You can change the name. You can add any tags. You've got a choice of where you want to submit. You know, what, which folder do you want to put it on? Any sharpening? You can resize it. So it starts off with the original. Let's say,

if I go with a long edge, I want to make that 1920, and then you can choose your color space, your format, and the quality that you want to do. Let me go ahead and cancel this for right now. And that is the basic of user interface. I'm gonna come back to edit and just take a look at a few of the items on here.

So we've got under Essentials, we've got Composition, AI. This is an interesting new tool that tells you what is the best composition. And this one is selecting the composition that I already had. Let's try this with a different photo to see if it comes up with another composition. So you can see it change the composition. It's actually tilted the original frame and that's to kind of level out the ocean in the background. And look how it's got the,

the third line over here. So it's on this subject, it's on this subject and it's also on this subject. For this particular photo. That was the best composition. according to the AI. if you want to change this, you still can. So if I move my cursor off of the outside, I can go ahead and change that angle so that this is the way I took the shot.

And you can see the horizon line is off. So it was a good choice to go ahead and move that down, but you can still move this in and out. You can make whatever composition that you want to make out of it. All the tools are there for you to take control, but allowing the Composition AI to come in here and choose the composition for you is basically a way of saving time.

Now you can also do this with a different aspect ratio. So let's say that I wanted this to be a 16 by 9. And also I wanted to point out this little button over here. So this will kind of change the composition from landscape or a portrait. You can change perspective. We'll get to that in another video. So under the Essentials,

we just went through composition. You can erase, the light tool we mentioned. One of the nice things about the light tool is in the past. You couldn't really do anything with this, with the masking tool. Now, if you choose local masking, it'll let you add, and then let's say we can do basic. So we've added a basic brush over here so we can paint.

We can use radial brush. We can use a gradient, but look down here. Now you can mask off of the basic tools for the light tool, and you can add your exposure, your contrast, you know, your warmth. And it's just kind of a nice little change from what we have with Luminar 4. So for example, let's say,

make this a little bit faster. We'll just do a radial brush. I'll put that around her and let's just brighten up a little bit. And that's one of the problems with the mask is that never goes the direction that you want it to. So we've got the radial mask and it's masking everything outside and I raised the exposure up. So if you want to change that,

you can hit Command-I on Mac and then suddenly your mask gets reversed. So if I click on this, now, you'll see how it was before then we've got this little exposure. It's nice to have all these tools. And again, if I want to go ahead and let's say lower, that exposure command-I again. And that way I keep the highlight on her and just kind of darken the background a little bit.

So it's nice that we've got local masking and we can use the basic light tools that we had in the past. I just turn that off and that you can click this little X over here and just get rid of the mask. If you don't want to. And you can stack multiple masks. If I want a mask on her skin, if I want a mask on her face or even texture.

We're going to show texture. And I think we're going to wind things up because that's shown most of what we want to do without getting too much of the tools. So the idea with the texture is that you can add a texture over everything. Let's change this to a radial mask. I'm going to just going to make it an enormous one that covers everything.

And then now I can load a texture. All right. So the texture's loaded. You can see the capacity is at 50%. If you want to do a texture over your subject or your photograph, that's fine, but I kind of want to do something different. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to change to paint mask. I'm going to click this button to erase and I'm going to start revealing her.

Okay? So it's not a perfect mask, but now we've got a few options. So let's say we go ahead and bring the opacity of the texture up. She can't really see the background that was there before. And this mask over here, I'd say you'd probably want to go in and do some detail work to kind of let the sharpen the sharp part of this.

Come out a little bit more. Cause it's kind of coming in. You can see some of the red there and also we've still got some on her, on her cheek. It's not perfect yet, but there's room to go in there and do a better job. So now you've got blend mode options. So if we want to change this over to soft light,

the nice part about soft light is it allows the fine hairs to come out, but it also still brings in like there was that fence behind her. So you can see some of that that was there. And that's kind of one of the things I think it's easier to do your masking on soft light or a 50% opacity. And then you can go ahead and change your blend mode the way you want.

So if we go to darken, we'll have a different look and same thing with color burn or multiply. I typically like to either leave it at normal. If I can mask the edges the way I want them to, or use overlay or soft light. I think overlay in this case looks a little bit better. So we've talked about this in some previous videos as to whether you could replace a background,

I've got a couple of videos on replacing a background for Luminar 4. One was using a technique with a texture added similar to this. Another one was using the AI Sky replacement to do it. There's some possibilities here. It depends on the texture. It depends on the background. It depends on your subject, but there are some possibilities. And this didn't really take that long.

I'd like to do a little bit finer masking over here. This isn't a masking tutorial. So I know someone's going to come along and say, there's all sorts of halo and stuff around that. And possibly there is, but this is just kind like a quick demo to show what the capability is rather than fine tutorial on how to, how to make sure that happens.

How can you replace a background? That's one possibility with using the local masking and the texture. There are a few other things that came up with some previous videos that I had talked about. And one of those was on whether or not Luminar AI can do any perspective. And I didn't know anything from the information I got, but quite honestly, I've since found out that inside of the Composition tool,

you have some perspective tools right here. So we'll work on some future videos to show how that works. There's a lot of capability here still to unpack. I'm looking forward to going through a lot of this. Even on the portrait, you can see there's face, skin, body, and you can kind of reshape people's bodies or abdomen. So we're gonna have some fun with that in future videos.

But this was just to kind of give you an idea of the overall look of the user interface for Luminar AI. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below. If you have any favorite tools, if there's things that you want me to see me do videos on again, leave me a comment. And I plan on working through these things kind of based upon either what I like to do,

or if I've get some requests that are popular, then we'll go ahead and make sure we do videos on that as well. I hope this was useful for you. If you liked it, or, you know, someone else who might like it, please go ahead, share it with a friend and then click that like button that tells YouTube if I'm doing something right or not.

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