The Photographer's Guide to Luminar 4. Jeff Carlson

1-1: Nearly all of the editing tools are tucked away in the sidebar, leaving plenty of room for you to work on your image.

      If you want to eke out some more screen space, you can hide the sidebar by choosing View > Sidebar > Hide. That hides all the tools you need, though, so it’s not something I recommend doing. A better way to get a less cluttered view of a photo is to choose View > Hide/Show Filmstrip to remove the images at the left side of the window. Or, for quick checks, press the tab key (or choose Hide/Show All Panels).

       Edit Tools

      I cover editing tools in much more depth in Chapter 5, so here I want to introduce the mechanics of how they work.

      When you activate the Edit panel, a few tools are already visible, such as the Essentials group, which includes tools such as Light (for adjusting exposure and white balance) and AI Enhance (which does wonders with just two sliders) (Figure 1-2).

      FIGURE 1-2: All of the tools for making adjustments reside in the Edit view.

      Just below the group name is the current layer, which in most cases is the image’s file name. As you’ll learn in Chapter 8, each layer can have its own combination of adjustments, so this tiny detail helps orient you as you work.

      Click a tool’s heading to hide or show the sliders for applying that tool’s edits. Only one tool’s controls are available at a time (Figure 1-3).

      FIGURE 1-3: To streamline the editing interface, only the active tool will be visible.

      With so many tools available, it would be madness to include them all in a long sidebar list; you’d fall asleep while scrolling. Instead, they’re organized into five main groups: Essentials, Creative, Portrait, Pro, and Deprecated. The last one appears only when you open an image that was edited using tools from earlier versions of Luminar that are no longer current; they still work, but aren’t normally visible.

       No More Work for Workspaces

      Luminar 3 and earlier used a clever method of working with tools—referred to then as filters—called workspaces. Instead of grouping tools into several main categories, as in Luminar 4, filters could be mixed, matched, swapped, and swiped between workspaces. It was wonderfully configurable—and quite complicated. Several of the filters duplicated tools from other filters as the software evolved.

      Skylum streamlined tools significantly in version 4 to remove all that complexity and to be friendlier to folks who just want to get in, edit their photos, and move on to the next thing.

       The Histogram

      For a long time I ignored histograms—I can see a photo with my own two eyes, after all! But was I really seeing it? After consistently underexposing my photos, both in camera and during editing, I realized that the histogram is more than a fancy colorful representation of the data in the image. Now, I keep the histogram visible at all times. If it’s not already visible, click the More button at the bottom of the sidebar () and then choose Show Histogram, or choose View > Hide/Show Histogram (Figure 1-4).

      FIGURE 1-4: Learn to love the histogram, because it can get you out of some bad editing situations.

      In addition to showing how color and tone are distributed in a photo, the histogram can reveal clipped areas that are blown out to white or darkened to complete black. Click the triangles that appear when you move the pointer over the histogram to view those areas. (For more, see Chapter 5.)

       Compare and Quick Preview

      Like the options for hiding toolbars and viewing the photo full-screen, these two options get used a lot. I’m listing the keyboard shortcuts first because I find it’s so much easier to use them than to click the toolbar buttons with your cursor.

       •Compare: Press the semicolon (;) key or click the Compare button () in the toolbar to view a split-screen display of the photo (Figure 1-5). Drag the middle divider to expose the Before and After versions of the image.

      FIGURE 1-5: View a quick before-and-after comparison of your photo.

       •Quick Preview: Press the backslash (\) key or click the Quick Preview button () in the toolbar to reveal the unedited version of your photo for comparison’s sake. (It’s oddly named, since what you’re doing is viewing the old version, not previewing the edited version, but you get the idea.)

       Hide/Show All Panels and Full Screen Preview

      These commands are really just different ways to view your photo, but you’ll find yourself using them all the time as you edit—which is why I’m including them so high in the list of importance.

       •Hide/Show All Panels (macOS): Press the Tab key to make all the interface elements except the toolbar go away, leaving just your image (Figure 1-6). The zoom level doesn’t change if you’re viewing the image at anything other than Fit to Screen, but you’ll see more of the photo. You can also choose View > Hide/Show All Panels/Toolbars.

      FIGURE 1-6: Hide all the panels when you want to get a better view of your photo.

       •Show All Toolbars (Windows): Under the Windows version, pressing the Tab key makes all interface elements appear if they aren’t visibile already. For example, if the Filmstrip was hidden, pressing Tab makes it appear. With all the elements onscreen, pressing Tab hides all of them except the toolbar and the image. You can also choose View > Show All Toolbars, which reads Hide All Toolbars when everything is visible.

       •Full Screen Preview (macOS): Press the F key to hide all of Luminar’s tools and view the image at its largest size on your display, zoomed to fit. You can also choose View > Enter Full Screen Preview. This also activates Full Screen mode, which puts Luminar into its own screen space, hiding the menu bar and any other running applications. Press F again, or choose View > Exit Full Screen Preview, to go back to editing.

       •Full Screen (macOS): Separately, you’ll also