Fargo, North Dakota.

As I am working on this post, it’s late April. We’ve been back in Fargo for nine days and we are honoring the North Dakota Governor’s mandate that snowbirds spend two weeks in quarantine. So far, we are fine here, but going a bit batty from watching TV and doing puzzles. Our bright spot of the day is the online exercise classes we’ve found to keep us at least a little bit active. But I digress from my digression…

The opening image is a “trick” I’ve seen going viral on a lot of photography websites. They look interesting and fun to do. It turns out that they are simpler to create than I might have thought. You don’t even need to go out and take “special photos” to make these images “Twirl”. All of the example images in this post were gathered from random selections in my own personal image archive.

What follows here is a tutorial on how to create these “twirled” images. I know many of my readers couldn’t care less. For those in that category, I invite you to scroll to the end of this post where you will find a gallery of images created using this technique.

It does help if the image has a variety of colors. The opening image was created by manipulating the image of orange and yellow flowers using Photoshop Elements. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials on using Photoshop to create these geometric patterns, and if that’s a tool you have access to, you can search on YouTube. I use Photoshop Elements, however. Long story, but until I have to, I’m not jumping on Adobe’s “subscription train.” I just don’t like the concept of subscription software. Right now, I’m using PS Elements 2019. I couldn’t find any tutorials on YouTube, but I know that most of what’s in Photoshop is in Elements. You just have to look for it. The process takes only 6 steps from image to twirl. Bear with me and I’ll show you how easy it is to create your own twirls with Photoshop Elements.

Step one: select an image, crop and adjust as you see fit. I found an image from a collection of floral photos captured in North Carolina’s Duke Gardens. Note that In Elements, I am using Expert mode (not that I consider myself an expert, it’s just that the menus are easy to navigate for this process.)

In the Filters Menu, find Pixelate>Mezzotint… In the dialog box that opens, select “Medium Strokes” from the available options.

Next, from the Filters menu, choose Blur>Radial Blur… and from that dialog, select Zoom, and 100, and Good.

Now, from the Filters menu, choose Distort>Twirl… and in that dialog, set the angle to 100. You will see the first half of the twirl begin to take shape.

On the right, you’ll see the Background layer icon. Right-click on it and choose Duplicate Layer… Select that and just click OK on the dialog. You will now see a second layer icon that has become active. From the dropdown above the new layer that says “Normal”, choose ‘Lighten.’

Note: If you cannot duplicate the layer, then the image is a 16-bit image. To work in layers, the image must be 8 bits/channel. You’ll find that setting in the Image menu, select Image>Mode and select 8 bits per channel. You will then be able to duplicate the layer. Don’t worry, you won’t notice any loss in image quality.

This new layer is now the active layer. Go to the Distort>Twirl… option and this time, change the number to -100. The twirl image is almost complete. By the way, if you reverse the order of entering the 100 and -100 twirls, the image will twirl counter-clockwise instead of clockwise. All that’s left to do is tweak for contrast and effect which you can do right there in Photoshop Elements.

My preference, however, is to make those adjustments in Luminar 4. That program has a large selection of preset filters that the developer of Luminar calls Looks. I seldom use them when working on photos, preferring to adjust specific sliders to achieve the “look” that I want. But when it comes to these Twirls, I’ve found that there are several Look presets in the Landscape series that can enhance the image with a single click. For this specific image, I found the Autumn Colors Look to add some warm tone to some of the “petals” in the twirl. From there, I tweak specific sliders that I think might help the image, for example, backing down on highlights when there is a lot of white in the image.

If you read this far, (or if you just scrolled to here), you’ve reached the point where I say, “I submit for your review a gallery of images created with the Twirl effects in Photoshop Elements. In most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it and scroll through the gallery. If you’ve tried creating twirl images, let me know how you like the trick in the comments.

John Steiner

OK, so I’m not a portrait photographer and I don’t claim to be. Turns out Luminar 4 might just make me a portrait photographer that could make me happy with my work… if I can get the camera to focus on the eyes. I scoured my gallery of images to find snapshots that I could somehow justify in the name of portraiture. I didn’t find any. But I did find some images that were captured at a wedding in San Diego some years ago. The snapshots I found included an of my sister and an in-law, and, a solo image of my wife. The opening image features my sister, Veronica (we call her Babe), and my nephew’s wife Edwina. I chose this image to tweak and share because I got the focus right, the fill flash did its job under the shade tree that kept down the sun’s glare, and it allowed me to test whether or not the portrait adjustment controls would work on multiple individuals. I was pleased to find that indeed it does. All portrait adjustments operated on both people simultaneously. That’s smart Artificial Intelligence software.

The image I chose of my wife, Lynn, was the only image of her that I got where her eyes were completely in focus. Unfortunately the fill flash didn’t fire on this shot, so her face was darker than I liked, and it is marred by the sunlight coming through the trees and hitting her face. The image above is the final image after using the many portrait enhancement tools built into Luminar 4.

As you can see by Luminar’s “before and after” tool, Luminar did a nice job of lightening her darkened face. It also was very helpful in tweaking some of the other facial features. Notice that I touched almost every slider, some quite a bit more than others, some not moved much at all. If your browser supports image enlargement, click on the above image for better detail. Note especially the improvement in and around the eyes. Rather than describe the function of every tool, I captured a snapshot of the toolbar. Each tool performs quite nicely in doing its assigned task.

The last mode for me to mention in Luminar 4 is the Pro mode. It contains tools for advanced contrast, adjustable gradients, dodging and burning, and other professional tools. Only occasionally have I gone into this section of Luminar, partly because I still use Lightroom 6 and I am used to those tools. Until the day when I quit using Lightroom, I’ll probably continue to perform those tweaks in that program, only because I’m used to them and they come naturally to me. I’m not done learning Luminar’s features, and you can expect that at some point in the future, I might post a tip or technique I’ve found for using the tool. I conclude this post with the usual comment that in most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it for a better view.

Finally, I would be negligent if I did not recommend Jim Nix and his series of Luminar videos. He’s a master at every bit of the program, and it was from him that I learned the basics of Luminar 2018. As each new version came out, he taught me more of how to use the program effectively. To find his videos, simply go to YouTube and put “Jim Nix” in the search bar. There are plenty of tutorials to choose from.

John Steiner

I am writing this as my wife and I self-isolate in our winter place. A couple more weeks and we will venture back to our home in Fargo. With less travel on my schedule, last month I shared some of my work flow using Luminar 4. This week, we take a peek at the Creative section. As with my earlier post, this is not a full review, I am just sharing some of the tools that I use. I don’t find myself using anywhere close to the full capacity of the program, preferring instead to keep my images all with a similar “look and feel.” This month, I get a little more creative for those times when I want to do something “special.”

The opening image features a shipwreck sitting in the lagoon on the atoll in the central Pacific Ocean known as Fanning Island. This image is a far cry from the original shown below.

The original image suffers from an overcast sky. I captured it from the cruise ship tender as it took us to the island. Shortly after I took the photo, a rain squall went through and the rest of the day went from cloudy to mostly sunny. I needed to do something with the sky to make it more photogenic. A few years ago, I loaded the image into Photoshop Elements and painstakingly masked a new sky around the ship’s superstructure. That sky replacement is shown above. The blue sky and clouds makes it look a lot better, and I considered it done. Then along came Luminar 4 and it’s sky replacement feature. The program even comes with a collection of skies to use, although in an effort to keep the images all my own, I am gathering my own collection of sky images as the opportunity arises. The opening photo features one of the sky images in Luminar’s collection so this version of my “altered reality” is not all my own. Nonetheless, it’s a much better image than even my own attempt at sky replacement.

OK, now it’s time to comment that many photographers think it is somehow sacrilegious to modify an image for a better sky. We are supposed to wait around for that perfect time when the clouds and sun present themselves in a perfect storm for the image. Well, life for the amateur photographer simply doesn’t work that way. The entire premise of the Creative tools in Luminar can be summed up as “altering reality.” It truly embodies Ansel Adams’ quote, “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

As I noted last time, Luminar includes “Looks”, their term for presets that can give you a head start at pre-editing the photograph. I seldom use looks in my work, preferring to go through my specific collection of tweaks manually, one control at a time. For the purpose of this article, though, I decided to do a black and white conversion. The Temple of the Masonry Altars is found at the Mayan Ruins of Altun Ha in Belize. Though I prefer the tools for black-and-white conversion in DxO’s, (formerly NIK), Silver Efex Pro 2, for this post, I chose to use the Landscape B&W Look and then played with some of the other creative tools to produce the final image above.

When you have Looks visible, they show up at the bottom of the screen. The program comes with a wide variety of Looks for various photographic genre. You can also create your own style format and save it as a Look to use as you wish. I could do that with my own edits, but find I enjoy the action of tweaking each item in a specific order. Does that make me OCD? Could be.

Finally, you can have a little fun with sky replacement. Once you learn how to use the tool, you can create other versions of altered reality. I submit for your approval (or not), a gallery of images from this post. Included in there are some “just for fun” altered reality images.

John Steiner

Yes, this is a travel and photography blog. Most Tuesdays I focus on Travel Tuesday posts. As COVID-19 has disrupted travel of all types, it seems that Travel Tuesday is a bit, shall we say, “out of place?”. Still I’ve got a backlog of travel posts to share, and someday, hopefully soon, the pandemic will be behind us and vacation travel will return to relatively normal. This week, it seems like a good time to talk photography, specifically processing those digital photos. After all, I call this site a Travel and Photography Blog. In fact, I expect photography posts will span several Tuesdays, but I won’t throw them at you all at once. I’ll plan to spread this report over the next month or two so Tuesdays remain mostly focused on Travel.

When I started into digital photography in earnest back in 2011 or so, a friend recommended that I purchase Adobe Lightroom. For working on photos from my camera, I’d been using Photoshop Elements. I quickly became an expert at Lightroom’s quirky catalog and developed a schema for tracking what now amounts to over 50,000 photos (because, of course, I can’t delete anything.) I quickly learned that Lightroom did almost everything in post processing that I needed and to this day, I only use Photoshop Elements for those “artistic” or practical modifications I might need that Lightroom cannot do.

Ever since Lightroom quit being a stand-alone product, I’ve been looking for a product that I could purchase that I could own. I’m not a fan of subscription software. Indeed, I’m still running that last stand-alone version, mostly for its catalog function as I haven’t found a tool in other applications that I like for that function.

In my exploration for a Lightroom replacement, I found a product from a company that used to develop only Macintosh software. Skylum Software (formerly MacPhun Software) developed a product called Luminar that in version 3 has a catalog function. Let’s just say that I didn’t like that catalog implementation. What I did like, however, is the program’s creative take on photography. For some time now, I’ve used Skylum products in my production because of their use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that reduce complicated photo manipulations to the use of a single slider.

The opening photo features a view of the Sonoran Desert near a residential development in Buckeye. That big, blue mountain in the background is Estrella Mountain, one of my favorite hiking haunts. The photo came from a cell phone camera and was minimally tweaked in Lightroom before I sent it to the latest iteration of Luminar, version 4.

A lot of people think that a camera presents a “true” image and that any creative manipulation somehow destroys the “truth” of what was really there. Cameras generate an image based upon a compromise between engineering and art to deliver an approximation of the scene that fits the design constraints of the camera and an interpretation of a reality that was never seen by the camera software design team. The image above is what came directly from the camera. It lacks contrast and definition.

In Lightroom, the basic functions I tweak are minimal. I typically add some contrast and tweak the exposure to ensure that as much detail as I desire to represent in the image is given. Add a bit of micro-contrast using the clarity slider. In my pre-Luminar days, I’d tweak a few more sliders and attempt to bring out some more detail in the mountain. That haze on the mountain is a problem that could be fixed with the later versions of Lightroom that have a Dehaze adjustment. My old version doesn’t have that tool and will never get it.

The simple interface includes presets that Luminar calls “Looks” to allow an easy and quick edit to a specific configuration of pre-determined control settings. I don’t use those, preferring instead to find and tweak each item I want individually. The interface is shown above. on the right middle is a set of four icons. The first icon (like a sunburst) is called Essentials. With it, I tweak AI Enhance and AI Sky Enhancer. You can see the results of any adjustments with the Before and After view of the image. That line down the center is moveable to allow you to see more or less of the image as adjusted.

Next, I hit AI Structure. It’s effect is a bit more subtle and won’t really show up well in the before/after photo above. It adds noticeable definition to the scene that can be quite effective when viewed as a full resolution image.

My last typical stop is to the Landscape Enhancer which provides three tools that I use as needed. It’s here I find Luminar’s Dehaze filter. The Golden Hour enhances yellows and reds to bring out colors you remember you saw but were muted by the camera’s software. The tool in this section I use most often is Foliage Enhancer. I have to be careful with this tool. It emphasizes the greens in plants but it doesn’t take much to make the image look “neon”. As you can see by the before/after image above, a setting of 9 brings out the greens to the point where any higher than that would certainly be too much.

Looking at the icons on the right, the next icon down looks like an artist’s palette. That section is called “Creative”. Unless I really want to modify an image for artistic purposes, I don’t go here. There is one tool, though, that I’ve played with and will provide examples and justification. That’s AI Sky Replacement. It’s a fun tool to play with, and has its advantages, but consider that you are modifying an image to an alternate reality. Why would you do that? We’ll visit about that next time.

Next week, we’ll be back to our Travel Tuesday series, but in April, you can expect the second installment of this overview of Luminar 4. Thanks for stopping by and feel free to comment on your favorite photo manipulation tool in the comments. I’m always interested in knowing what other people are doing.

John Steiner