Luminar's suite of tools presents a user-friendly interface designed to streamline the photo editing process, making it accessible and efficient for users of all skill levels. Here's a breakdown of how these features enhance the photo editing experience:
Intuitive Tool Control
The design philosophy behind Luminar's tools emphasizes ease of use. Users can adjust settings by sliding or rotating controls, providing immediate visual feedback. This approach demystifies the editing process, making it approachable for beginners while offering the precision that experienced editors appreciate.
Preview Original
The ability to check the original file instantly by pressing and holding on the image is a thoughtful feature. It allows users to quickly gauge the impact of their edits, fostering a deeper understanding of how each adjustment affects the overall look of their photo. This immediate feedback loop is invaluable for fine-tuning edits.
The Power Icon
Each tool's power icon button is a small but significant feature that adds flexibility to the editing workflow. It enables users to quickly preview the effect of each tool on their image, aiding in decision-making and allowing for rapid iterations of creative ideas.
Double-Tap to Reset
The double-tap reset functionality simplifies the process of reverting changes, encouraging experimentation. Users can freely explore different settings, knowing they can quickly return to the starting point without navigating through complex menus.
Importing Images
The streamlined process for importing images into Luminar sets the stage for editing by organizing photos efficiently. This ease of importing supports a seamless transition from capturing to editing, ensuring that users can focus on creativity rather than file management.
How to import images into your library
Bringing your images into Luminar iPad is straightforward. Begin by tapping the folder icon to open the import window. From here, you can easily upload photos directly from your iPad or online sources. This ensures a smooth workflow and allows your creativity to flourish. With this simple step, you're prepared to explore the world of photo editing with all your images readily available.
Presets
Navigating the Presets tab
You can find Presets on the dial at the left of your screen. Scroll the dial until you see two overlapping squares. The Presets tab will open with the list of available default presets on the right side. Presets are divided by topic, such as Landscape, Portrait, Travel, etc.
Scroll the list and click on the preset to apply it. At the top of the list, you’ll see a scrolling wheel with numbers that allow you to set the value of preset strength.
Adding the Preset to Favorites
You can add the Preset you frequently use to the Favorites section for quick access. When a preset is chosen and applied, click the heart symbol, and it will mark the preset as Favorite. This section is displayed first in the list under “Your Presets”.
Saving your custom Preset
To save your own adjustments as a preset, you need to open the Preset tab after finishing all the edits in your photo. Click the button “Save as preset” to add preset to your custom presets.
There is also an option to save your set of adjustments as a preset in a quick way. When you’ve edited the photo, open the menu (it looks like three dots), and choose “Save as Preset” option.
Important: the option to save a preset will be greyed out and inactive if no changes were applied to the photo, so there is nothing to save, or you have selected a preset from the default list and didn’t modify the default adjustments.
Deleting the preset
If you don’t want your custom preset anymore, you can delete it by selecting the preset and clicking the trash bin. Confirm your action by pressing “Delete” on the warning pop-up. Deletion of presets is permanent, and they cannot be restored.
Crop tool: Refining Your Story
The Crop Tool's inclusion of predefined aspect ratios caters to various display formats, acknowledging the diverse platforms where images are shared today. This feature helps users optimize their photos for social media, print, or digital displays, enhancing the photo's appeal across different mediums.
Undo/Redo: Tap the Undo icon to reverse a recent edit. To reinstate the change, use the Redo icon. These functions facilitate efficient edit management, supporting uninterrupted creative workflow.
Straighten: Use the Straighten tool to align photos accurately. Tap the straighten icon to correct tilts or uneven horizons. Ideal for aligning horizons or vertical architectural lines.
Rotate to the Left: Tap the rotate icon to turn your photos left. Continue tapping to achieve the desired angle, from slight adjustments to a full 90-degree rotation.
Flip Horizontally: Mirrors your image side to side, swapping left and right. Ideal for adjusting composition flow or creating symmetrical visuals. A simple touch transforms photos, unveiling symmetrical elegance.
Flip Vertically: Instantly inverts your photo, mimicking a reflection across a horizontal axis. Ideal for unique perspectives or composition corrections. Offers a fresh angle with a quick tap.
Crop to Aspect Ratios: Reshape images to fit various platforms with ease. Select from original, free-form, square, or social media-optimized ratios (Instagram posts, Facebook posts, Instagram stories, Facebook covers). Ensures your photos look their best across all platforms.
Rotating Dial: Precisely align photos by rotating to the exact angle needed. Ideal for straightening horizons or adjusting angles. Offers control for fine-tuning, ensuring balanced and professional-looking images.
Done/Cancel: "Done" to apply cropping changes, "Cancel" to undo and continue editing. Offers flexibility in the editing process, allowing exploration of cropping options until perfection is achieved.
Erase Tool: Remove Unwanted Details
Capture moments without distractions by using the Erase Tool on your iPad. Eliminate unwanted elements like stray passersby or objects to perfect your photos. Adjust the tool size for precision, erase with ease, and use undo/redo for adjustments. Finalize edits with a tap, refining your images effortlessly.
Using the Erase Tool
The Erase Tool in Luminar Mobile simplifies removing distractions. Adjust the tool size, trace over unwanted areas, and correct mistakes with undo/redo. Tap done to complete your edits, ensuring a clean, focused image.
Filters: Enhance Your Photos Instantly
Filters in Luminar Mobile provide a quick way to enhance your images. Scroll, select, and apply filters to change the mood or tone with a tap. Adjust intensity for the perfect effect and save favorites for quick access, making photo enhancement effortless.
Using Filters
Explore and apply filters in Luminar Mobile for creative transformations. Adjust intensity with a spin feature, save favorites, and streamline your editing workflow for imaginative photo enhancement.
Sky Replacement: Transform Skies Easily
Sky Replacement in Luminar Mobile changes photo moods by swapping skies. Enhance landscapes or cityscapes with dramatic, beautiful skies. A few taps let you select and adjust skies for the perfect backdrop, bringing your vision to life.
Using Sky Replacement
Effortlessly change skies in Luminar Mobile. Explore sky options, save favorites, and adjust placement for a seamless blend. Reset skies or undo changes to explore creative possibilities, ensuring your photo's mood matches your vision.
Develop Tool: First Steps to Stunning
The Develop tool is essential for transforming your photos, offering a wide range of color and tone adjustments. It's like a Swiss Army knife for photo editing, perfect for enhancing skies or sunsets on your iPad. With its help, you can easily refine and enhance your images.
How to use the Develop Tool
The Develop tool offers an intuitive interface for photo adjustments. Slide or rotate its controls to modify white and black tones, contrast, saturation, or vibrance, and watch your image update instantly. This tool combines ease of use with powerful editing capabilities, functioning like a portable photo lab:
Let's learn more about the tools showcased in the screenshot from top to bottom:
Temperature and Tint: Adjust to fine-tune the mood, from cool blues to warm yellows and correct color casts for true-to-life hues.
Highlights & Shadows: Manage the brightness of the lightest and darkest parts of your image, revealing or concealing details as needed.
Exposure: Control the overall brightness and darkness levels of your image to achieve the desired lighting effect. Adjusting exposure allows you to enhance or diminish the brightness of the entire image, bringing out or toning down details accordingly.
White & Black Tone: Set the extreme points of brightness and darkness for dynamic range control.
Contrast: Enhances the visual depth by amplifying the difference between light and dark areas.
Vignette: Darkens photo edges to subtly focus attention on the subject.
Saturation & Vibrance: Increases color intensity overall or boosts muted colors while preserving natural skin tones and vibrant colors.
These tools collectively empower you to adjust the atmosphere of your photos, ensuring they convey the intended emotion and story.
Enhance AI Tool
The Enhance AI tool is crafted to give your images a distinctive boost and fine-tune color, detail, tone, and depth with ease. Ideal for enhancing the appeal of vacation photos or adding finesse to portraits, Enhance AI ensures your pictures stand out. This tool simplifies the editing workflow, allowing your images to capture attention and express their mood more effectively.
How to use the Enhance AI tool
Using the Enhance AI tool is straightforward—rotate the dial on your iPad's screen to the right to amplify the enhancement effects. This adjustment enriches the colors, sharpens the details, and balances the image's tone, essentially bringing your photo to vibrant life with each incremental change.
Structure AI tool
Structure AI on your iPad elevates your photos through subtle adjustments, allowing you to unveil intricate details in textures or achieve a smoother look for cleaner, more serene visuals. This tool is indispensable for intensifying the drama in landscapes or maintaining the natural elegance of portraits. Structure AI functions as an intelligent assistant, adeptly enhancing clarity or softness as needed while distinguishing between subjects and their surroundings. It ensures targeted enhancements that preserve the natural beauty of subjects, avoiding the overly processed appearance common in many photos, especially in terms of skin texture. With Structure AI, your photographs achieve an ideal balance of detail and refinement, ensuring a professional and appealing result without the harshness of overprocessing.
How to use the Structure AI Tool
To adjust the effect, turn the dial to the right to increase contrast and detail for a sharper image. For a softer appearance, rotate it to the left, which softens the image for a dreamy effect. This feature is ideal for both enhancing textures in landscapes and preserving the natural look in portraits. Structure AI provides flexible control, easily adapting to your creative needs with a simple gesture.
Relight AI tool
Relight AI in Luminar turns your device into a sophisticated tool for manipulating light in photos, simulating the control of a 3D lighting studio with just swipes and taps. It analyzes photos in a unique way, creating a virtual 3D map to distribute light naturally and realistically across the scene. This advanced feature enhances your images with photorealistic lighting effects, making it perfect for illuminating subjects in shadows or adding warmth to features. It's an intuitive solution for improving lighting in your photos, ideal for both amateur photographers and enthusiasts looking to correct or enhance lighting without complex equipment.
How to use the Relight AI Tool
Adjusting Background and Foreground Lighting: You'll see two light icons with a slider. The top slider controls the light in the background, adding depth and dimension with a swipe. The bottom slider adjusts the foreground lighting, brightening up or toning down the light on subjects closer to the camera.
Fine-Tuning Light Depth: Alongside the sliders, there's a dial. Rotating this dial left or right adjusts the depth of the light, allowing you to control precisely how the light falls within the scene. It's similar to moving a light source closer or further away in a real 3D space.
Landscape tool
Designed for landscape, real estate, travel, and nature photography, this tool enhances your images with just a few taps, making them stand out.
How to use the Landscape tool
When you open the Landscape tool, you'll find three distinct symbols, each serving a unique purpose in your photo editing arsenal.
- Golden Hour: Bring the warm, soft glow of the golden hour to your photos, enhancing the ambiance without having to wait for that perfect time of day.
- Foliage Enhancer: Turn the greens in your photos from drab to fab. This slider is a game-changer for nature shots, automatically boosting the vibrancy and natural beauty of foliage and greenery.
- Fog/Dehaze: Clear away the mist and unveil the scene beneath. Ideal for cityscapes, landscapes, and aerial shots obscured by fog or haze, this tool adjusts contrast, clarity, and color to reveal the hidden details.
Details tool
The Details tool enhances good photos into breathtaking ones. It sharpens and clarifies your images, bringing out life-like detail. Whether refining a landscape or portrait shot, mastering this tool can transform your photos from nice to exceptional.
How to use the Details tool
- Small Details Slider: The Small Details slider enhances intricate patterns and textures in your photos. Starting at 0, where there's no effect, sliding to the right gradually brings out the smallest details. It's akin to adjusting a microscope to reveal hidden elements. However, be cautious not to slide too far to the left, as it may make your photo appear washed out.
- Medium Details Slider: The Medium Details slider refines broader strokes in your image, such as tree bark or fabric folds. Starting at 0, where there's no effect, sliding to the right sharpens these medium-sized details, enhancing texture and depth. Conversely, sliding to the left softens these details, which is useful for achieving a dreamlike or ethereal effect.
Large Details Slider: The Large Details slider fine-tunes the sharpness of your photo's global contours, like the horizon line in a sunset or skyline silhouette. At 0, your image remains untouched. Moving it right enhances the crispness of object outlines, giving the photo a defined look. Sliding left softens these contours, often creating a more subtle, painterly feel.
- Sharpen Tool: The Sharpen tool adds a finishing touch to ensure everything in your frame is in perfect focus. It's great for drawing attention to specific elements and enhancing overall clarity. However, be cautious: excessive sharpening can introduce graininess, resembling digital dust. Use this tool carefully to maintain clear, crisp images without turning them into grainy memories.
Curves tool
Curves are essential for adjusting brightness, darkness, contrast, or color in your photos. It's a powerful tool for subtly shaping the mood and feel of your images.
How to use the Curves tool
- Color Selectors: The Curves tool allows you to adjust brightness using white, red, green, and blue selectors, enabling channel-specific enhancements. To enhance the sky in your photo, utilize the blue selector to adjust the curve for desired effects. These selectors facilitate adjustments for the entire image or individual color channels, providing precise fine-tuning capabilities.
- Control Points: You can use up to 10 control points to adjust specific areas of your image. Each point acts as a tool for enhancing different aspects. To add drama and depth, drag a point up to darken and increase contrast. To lighten the mood, pull a point down. Placing multiple points across the curve allows for nuanced adjustments to convey your desired story through the image.
Monochrome tool
The Monochrome tool unlocks the timeless elegance of black-and-white photography. Whether you're drawn to classic cinema or seek to add drama to your photos, this tool is essential. It transforms colorful images into stunning black-and-white masterpieces. But it's more than a conversion; it's a canvas for creativity. You control how each color translates into shades of gray, empowering you to highlight the beauty hidden in contrasts and textures.
How to use the Monochrome tool
When you use the Monochrome tool, you'll find sliders for Cyan, Red, Yellow, Green, Magenta, and Blue. Adjust them left or right to control the brightness of each color as it's converted to black and white. This allows you to guide viewers' focus, evoke emotions, and set the mood. Experiment with each slider to see its effect on different elements in your photo. Remember, in black and white, nuances matter most.