Hands-On Photography Episode 121 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show. 

Ant Pruitt (00:00):
Today on Hands-On Photography. I am stepping out of the world of Adobe creative cloud, you know? Yeah. I'm a creative cloud user. I use all of their apps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I know we're stepping out of that and we're gonna talk about another app today that I think you may find useful as a Hands-On Photography listener and that's Luminar Neo y'all stay tuned.

... (00:22):
This istwitT.

Ant Pruitt (00:23):
This episode of Hands-On Photography is brought to you by Nova traditional audio conferencing systems can entail lots of components. Installation can take days and you might not get the mic coverage you need. That's complex expensive, but Arava audio is easy to install and manage no missions required and you get true full room coverage. That's easy, economical, learn more@neva.com.

Ant Pruitt (00:59):
Hey, what's going on everybody. I am Ant Pruitt than this is Hands-On Photography here ontwitT TV. Hope y'all are doing well. I am unbelievable as always as usual. I like to sit down and share different tips and tricks that are gonna help make you a better photographer as well as a better post processor. And from time to time, have a guest or three on the show, or even take, could look at some topical photography related news that may have happened over the given week or so. And that's what we're gonna look at today. We actually have a piece of software that I'd like to share with you all. And I've been trying out for a little while and give you my 2 cents worth on it. But before we get into all of dad, let me say welcome to all of our brand new listeners.

Ant Pruitt (01:46):
Hey, welcome to you brand new listener, whoever you may be. Thank you for popping in and, and hanging out with me here on hop. Go ahead and subscribe in whatever podcast application you're enjoying. It's on we're available on all of them. Spotify, apple podcast, Google podcast. You too YouTube. Yeah, we have a YouTube channel. So you can subscribe there as well. Or you can just head on over to our website, twit.tv/hop at TWiT TV slash H O P for Hands-On Photography. And you'll see all of the subscription options right there, as well as our previous episodes and, and previous show notes and things of that nature. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna reference a couple previous episodes. So go ahead and keep that website handy. All right. So let's go ahead and get started with today's show. Okay. So I wanted to hang out with you folks and talk about some alternatives to the world of Adobe Lightroom.

Ant Pruitt (02:42):
I go, you know, without a doubt saying, Hey, I am an Adobe user. I'm an Adobe fanboy. I've been using their products for, I don't know how long now, quite a while I have the full creative cloud suite, I am also an authorized Adobe affiliate. So yeah, that all those little disclaimers are out the way, but with that said, I have no problem trying out other applications out there, but what happens is I tend to lean on the Adobe workflow because that just sort of works best for me. So I will pay the little 50, so dollars subscription I pay each month. Yeah. That's a little expensive, but it works for me and it makes my job a little bit easier. So with that said, there are other apps out there that I have used from time to time, such as capture one such as affinity photo.

Ant Pruitt (03:35):
You know, we talked about some alternatives to Photoshop pre on episode 92. Yeah. Episode 92, where we talked about affinity photo being a nice alternative to Photoshop as well as something like GI. You know, if you're into that open source kind of thing. Well, I'm always asked about alternatives for the world of light room and capture one is pretty popular and it, it, it deserves the credit that it gets, but it's starting to, in my opinion, it's starting to lose a little bit of its its sheening and shine a little bit because of their the, the way things are handled from a license and standpoint, people are having mixed emotions about out it turning more into like a subscription plan, the way Adobe does and Hey to is on. I have capture one. I use it from time to time.

Ant Pruitt (04:30):
I dig it. I really like it. I still use Lightroom a little bit more because it just works better for me, for me, digital asset management standpoint. But now there's other options out there such as what we're talking about today, and that is Luminar Neo. And this is from the folks at Skyla and a shout out to those, to those, to those folks out there in Ukraine, they are dealing with a lot of stuff going on right now at the time of this recording regarding the rush invasion thoughts and prayers go out to all of those folks. And we appreciate what you do for the photography community, with your Skyla software that you all have put out over the years. Thank you for that. But anyway yeah, I I've been playing around with Luminar Neo. This app has been released and you can get it online on their website for about 80 bucks.

Ant Pruitt (05:26):
I think it's like 79, 99, so 80 bucks. And I said, you know what, let me take a look at this thing a little bit closer and see how it will work for me just as a post processing standpoint, I don't necessarily think this is going to be an app that I will utilize for asset management, but as a post processor, I think there is a lot of potential in this, but before we get into that, let, let me talk about why I use Lightroom, the way that I use it, you know, way back in episode, was it two or so? It was way back in the days episode four, episode four, I spoke about the differences between Lightroom versus Photoshop and how Lightroom is more of a photo processor and editor. If you will, there were a Photoshop is gonna give you photo processing, editing and manipulation, like legit photo manipulation.

Ant Pruitt (06:21):
So it's a whole lot of other tools inside a Photoshop that you're not going to get inside of Lightroom and vice versa. And so when I stuck with Lightroom is because of how I can organize my files and be able to find content years down the road, just in case I need to find something for a client or what have you. And I enjoy using it. I enjoy the, the simple interface of it, just being a bunch of sliders on the right hand side of the screen, that just makes things really, really easy to use. And I always hope that there would be other options out there that can pretty much give me the same type of, of, of experience where you literally open it up. And there's no confusion on the app that, you know, if you want to increase your exposure or brightness on the screen, on the, on the image, there's gonna be an option right there on the screen that says, Hey, this is where your exposure is, fix that.

Ant Pruitt (07:13):
And that's how I want something simple and really, really, and easy to use. And I'll go ahead and tell you Luminar has given me that. And then some, it also includes a lot of AI tools built into it. That's part of what Luminar is known for is their AI technology, artificial intelligence. That's built into the application to help make your images look a little bit better or, or enhance different things in the image, or just speed up the workflow because there are some things inside of photo editing that is pretty repeatable from, from photo to photo. So why not have AI just go ahead and jump in and handle some of those repeatable tasks. So you don't have to do all of the particular clicks and sliders and things like that. And I give 'em credit for that. They do a really good job with that.

Ant Pruitt (08:02):
Okay, let me shut up about this. Let me just go ahead and, and show you all Luminar Neo on the screen. But before I do that, I wanna take a few minutes to thank this week's sponsor to find folks and the RVA. This episode of Hands-On Photography is brought to you by Ava complicated and costly. That has been the state of audio conferencing for larger spaces for a long time. Choosing a traditional system might entail difficult design software in selecting from a dizzy and array of separate mics, speakers, DSPs, and a whole lot of tech that we really won't need in the end. It's sad. Insulation usually requires some outside texts to come in and they often have some highly invasive and expensive process to go along with it. It could take your room offline for days and you got meetings to handle, but yet you can't get in there because there's texts in there trying to set up the audio conferencing system, what a pain.

Ant Pruitt (09:06):
So technology for, for audio conferencing needed some type of leap forward. You know, something that can really help transform and amplify this particular sector. That's when the Reva comes in, Nera made the leap when they created revolutionary microphone missed technology with this patented technology one or two integrated microphone and speaker bars fill a room with thousands of virtual microphones. There is no dead zone, so everyone can be heard in the room. Even that person is trying to hide back there in the corner of the meeting meeting and class participants can simply talk and move naturally in the space and still be heard by remote participants. Thanks to continuous auto calibration. Your rooms are instantly and is ready with optimized audio, no outside texts required. The radio also simplified the installation process. So yeah, it's, it's literally about a 30 minute DIY job that pretty much anyone can do.

Ant Pruitt (10:09):
That means big savings on time and big savings on the cost compared to the traditional audio set systems. They've simplified management too. Yep. The it folks have gone to love this new Reva console gives it the power to monitor, manage, and adjust their systems from anywhere. There's no need for it to go from room to room to make sure everything is plugged in correctly or make sure someone is not gonna trip over, but particular cable running across the floor so much simpler folks. So ask yourself if you want to go with the costly and complicated traditional system, or do you wanna make the leap to the simple and economical Neva learn more@nereva.com that's in you R EV a.com and we thank Neva for their support of the show. Okay. So now we are in Luminar Neal and what I've done is gone ahead and imported a couple images here, and these are all varying and different styles and, and use cases and so forth.

Ant Pruitt (11:17):
I'm not gonna go through all of these, but it is just a couple things that I wanted to note first. These are all raw images shot from my camera with the exception of this photograph here. I believe I shot this one. Well, I'm not even sure. Now I may have shot this one with my camera, or I may have shot shot at it with my smartphone either way. It didn't matter. This apple handled raw files as well as just JPEGs with PNGs pretty well. And with these, if, if I might add, so let's first, go ahead and open up this image here. So what you do is you first click on the image like Soso. It has a little highlight on it and you have to click edit, cuz if you just press enter on your keyboard or something like that, it doesn't really do anything other than make it bigger.

Ant Pruitt (12:05):
So I'm just gonna hit edit here on the screen here. Like, so, and now we are in, in the particular workflow on the right hand side of the screen. So you see, you have a couple menus at the tops it's tools at its presets and so forth presets are great because it makes it easy for you to just sort of get started. So if you want to just use a simple preset, that's fine. Sometimes they're just, they're just as good as standard filters. Like you'd see on Instagram to each his own, I don't always dive into presets, but every now and then I will build out a preset for a particular batch of images that I'm working with, because I know I want that batch of images to have a certain look and I can keep it nice in uniform with the preset. So that's why you have those over there. And these are all pretty neat. So we just click on 'em you got several to choose from and it's gonna apply to preset if you select it, granted, I've already done some editing on this, so that's why I'm getting this particular warning, letting me know, Hey, you gonna wipe out everything you've been doing on this. So yeah, let's go ahead and apply it

Ant Pruitt (13:14):
And click okay. And boom, it's done. And this looks pretty good, not bad. It's a little, little dramatic and, you know, just gives it a little more Mo a little more mood to the image. And it even lifted up some of the shadow information here on our model. I had the opportunity to hang out with the fine folks at Flipboard, not too long ago, go out on their sailboat. This is the CEO of Flipboard S flipboard.com had a great time. I appreciate them having me out and him opposing for me here in this photograph. But yeah, again, playing around with these presets is easy. Just click the button and it'll, you know, apply 'em as such, but if you don't want to go to preset route, you know, you can just turn it all the way off. What have you just moving the slider like?

Ant Pruitt (14:01):
So, or if you go over here to this edit tab, you can just delete it like that. Okay. So it discards all of the different edits. Now let's play around with the actual tools option in here and the develop menu. The developed menu is what most Lightroom folks or, or capture one folks are, are going to be used to. It has because it has pretty much all of the essential tools that you're gonna need for spruce and up your photographs, such as exposure, contrast, highlights, and shadows. Again, this is under exposed. So I need to push the exposure up, looks good, right easy. And it handled it pretty quickly. There wasn't a lot of lag when I moved the slider around, it's a pretty efficient app on that standpoint. Next I wanted to play around with the shadows. So I'm gonna push shadows and highlights down, shadows up, I should say, highlights down.

Ant Pruitt (14:51):
And that's gonna gimme more detail right here on his chest. If I were to go the other way, you notice everything gets darker in the shadows. So again, pretty efficient app. You even have a curves tool, you know how I love the curves tool, just handle the contrast, put a little S curve in there, really bring things up like, so it's good stuff. Again, standard stuff that works really, really well. So now let's take a look at this edits tab again, and you'll see that it has like little layers built in. So this is showing everything that I have done up to the mall. And if I click back into tools and say, I want to go down here to let's say film grain. So we'll click on film grain, and I'm gonna add film grain to it, and I'm gonna overdo it.

Ant Pruitt (15:46):
Okay. Just so you can see it here on the playback of the video and I'll leave it at that. And if I go back to this edits tab and they upper, right, again, it's gonna show what I just did here in the edits tab. And this is good because it, it gives you a history to let you see what you've been working with. One thing I don't like though, so let's say I go back to tools and I said, oh, you know what? This thing, it could use a little bit more lift in the shadows. So going to click on the developed tab and I'm going to lift the shadows again. Now, do you notice that the shadow button is now set to zero because this is a brand new reading of the developed module. I tend to forget that I had already done this at times, ended up putting multiple layers in this edit stack.

Ant Pruitt (16:37):
So if I click on edit now, you'll see two different times where I worked in the developed module. So rule of thumb, if you know, you're gonna sort of bounce back and forth between different modules, try not to repeat your steps and unless you are pretty deliberate about it, you know, unless you have some sort of reason for repeating that particular step, or you're going to end up with two different layers of the same module here in your history, and that can work for you or work against you depending on the, on the, you know, the photograph at hand. So just keep that in mind. All right, next, let's go back to the catalog and play around with some of the AI tools. So we're gonna click on this image here. Some of y'all may know who this person is. I know her quite well and I bow down.

Ant Pruitt (17:29):
So we're gonna hit edit on this image. All right, now this is just a, a high and key portrait that I snapped. Not any, there's no processing done on this, and you can look at it. Well, actually, let me double check here. There's no processing done on this one yet. And if you look at it, it's pretty crispy and sharp where it needs to be. It's probably over sharpened in this couple spots. Like the skin should probably be smoothed out just a little bit, because this is supposed to be a flattering portrait, beauty portrait, you know? So I'm thinking, all right, if Luminar knows I'm working with a portrait, how good is its AI? What can its AI? I do that says, Hey, let's speed up the process and make this portrait really stand out. Well, I am in luck because down here at the bottom, there's a couple different tools for portraiture.

Ant Pruitt (18:20):
Okay. So you can, if I had something in the background, I can blur out the background with this bouquet option. Like, so but nothing in the background. So it wouldn't really show anything, but then you have these other tools like face here. Okay. So this one says face light, right? If we look, we see, we have a hi, a high key light coming straight down on our face. We're not really straight down, but at a decent angle. And if I want to increase it, let's watch and see what happens with the AI. So I'm gonna push it up. Not too bad,

Ant Pruitt (18:59):
Not too bad. It's still thinking. And yeah, it just sort of brought it up just a little bit more. It's, you know, it almost looks like it's going to wash her out, but I don't need that. I just wanted to you, you know, show what it's trying to do. So that's, that's a good way to do a bit of feel light on your subject. If you sort of missed it with your reflector or missed how you placed the light on your subject. So I'm gonna take that back, cuz that's way too much, cuz I got my light and right on this thing for once anyway, now look at these other tools here. You have eyes, you have mouth down here, you know, she's got lipstick on. So lip saturation, sometimes there are models, especially if you're like dealing with a, a brand, a makeup brand, that's really trying to make things stand out for their particular product like lipstick. Here's what you can do to just boost that lipstick colors by in that lip saturation slider. So we're gonna push it all the way up to the extreme and it's gonna think and say, Hey, we really blew those lips out like that. So no, we don't wanna do it that much. So let's dial it back just a little.

Ant Pruitt (20:12):
Here we go. So now the lipstick is standing out. I happen to know the lipstick brand, but they're not paying for this show. So I'm not gonna mention their name. But yeah, it does help the lipstick stand out there a little bit more. And even if I wanted to do teeth whitening, this AI already knows to take a look at teeth in this image without me having to go in and manually do it with an adjustment brush. That's pretty good. All right. The last thing I wanna show on this is the slimming face feature. This is pretty good AI. Now it depends you can't overdo it, but every now and then you could just really make things stand out a little bit better. Like her cheeks, cheek bones are really nice and her smile is really nice. But if I were to slim her face just a little bit, it's really gonna help make that smile. And those cheeks stand out a little bit more. So if I did it way too much, like so now she just looks like a child. We don't want that. So let's reset it back and we'll just push it in just a little.

Ant Pruitt (21:20):
There we go.

Ant Pruitt (21:23):
This is, this is much better. You can use this tool to help bring tools up, bring certain features out in your my, or if you're just trying to help them look like they've lost a little weight. Mm. You know, the choice is yours. And again, all of this stuff is, is being recorded in my process in history. If I go into the edit tab, you'll see that those modules are now listed here in the history. And if I wanted to do some presets of things like that, I can do that as well. It's good stuff there. Very nice work. One more thing I wanted to play with, let's go back to the catalog and take a look at this, this image here

Ant Pruitt (22:05):
And edit. And if you look at this image and look at the actual history here, cuz I've already worked on this one, you'll see that I had a lot of stuff going on here. I did some Vinet. I erased some stuff that was in the sky. As a matter of fact, speaking of the sky, I did a sky replacement. So right there, I just did a selection for a particular sky and imported it in and it really just brought in and change the sky out is just beautiful. So if we take a look at the before version of it, let's see here, Whoops action to original and thinking.

Ant Pruitt (22:52):
And there we go. That was the original version of it. A night and day, night and day process there I'm, I'm totally impressed with the flexibility and capability that I was able to get out of this application to create that final image there. But yeah, this is Luminar this, this, this app is really, Daum good. If you wanna work around with landscapes, work around portraiture, it got it off. You want to take some time and play around with, you know messing with someone's body figure. Like my hard head. He didn't really appreciate me making his body really, really slim like that, but it was a lot of fun to play around with it. I really dig this app. It's again, you can, can get it online for a one time fee of 80 bucks. I think that's a pretty good value.

Ant Pruitt (23:43):
We'll put links in the show notes so you can check it out for yourself. All right. So that's gonna do it for, for today's episode folks. If you have any questions, comments, feedback, you know, other apps that you play around with that you'd like to share with the hands on photographer listener, Hey, send it to me, send me an email hop attwitt TV, again, as hop attwitt TV for all of your comments, questions, feedback, and so forth regarding the show. And also don't forget about our, you know, upcoming photography challenge. We're shooting the moon now. So go ahead and get your cameras out and go take some photographs of the moon and send those on over to me and make sure you put photography in the subject line. That way I can filter through it pretty quickly. We're starting to get some in and I'm looking forward to sharing them with all of the other Hands-On Photography listeners.

Ant Pruitt (24:35):
If you are cool with me sharing the image, be sure to mention. So inside of the email that you send to me. Okay. All right. That's it folks follow me on the social medias, Instagram. I am T underscore Pruit. Let's push that Instagram follower number up and I'm also T underscore Pruit over ontwittter. If you like to hear me ramble about random stuff from time to time, thank you all for your continued support of the show. It really does mean a lot. Keep leaving those ratings and reviews inside of our apple podcast and keep sharing the show out with other folks does help this show grow. And I really do appreciate that. All right. Thank you to my man, Mr. Victor, for making me look and sound good each and every week working very, very hard on this show, man, man, I really do appreciate you. You. Yeah, I definitely appreciate you brother. All right, everybody, you all take care. We're gonna get on the pod here so safely create and dominate and we'll see you next time.

Rod Pyle (25:34):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle editor of Ad Astra magazine and each week I'm joined by Tariq Malik the editor in chief over at Space.com in our new This Week in Space podcast. Every Friday Tariq and I take a deep dive into the stories that define the new space age what's NASA up to when will Americans, once again set foot on the moon. And how about those samples from the perseverance Rover? When are those coming home? What the heck is Elon Musk done now, in addition to all the latest and greatest and space exploration will take an occasional look at bits of space flight history that you probably never heard of and all with an eye towards having a good time along the way, a check us out in your favorite podcast, catcher.