The ‘Pluto’ update to Luminar brought a selection of new tools including a new Golden Hour filter. If you want to know more about it, you can download the Luminar trial version. This filter is designed to simulate the warmth of a late afternoon sun, something which is actually a lot more difficult to do digitally […]
Warmth
Warmth is an image characteristic that people often respond to. Landscape photographers like to shoot in the 'golden hour' when the sun is low in the sky, and people generally prefer portrait shots to have a little warmth to the colour rendition.
You can introduce this warmth by your choice of lighting or by adjusting the camera's white balance. You can also add it digitally later on, though it's not always easy to make it look realistic and pleasing. Filters generally add a flat, global colour adjustment that doesn't really reflect the way that natural light works. In a landscape shot, for example, you'd expect the landscape itself to have warm tones but not necessarily the sky – and yet a simple warm-up filter will add warmth to both.
Nevertheless, it's worth trying out different digital techniques to add warmth to photographs which would really benefit from this kind of rendition.
Budapest parliament
It’s all very well giving advice about how to achieve certain effects using this software or that software, but it always strikes me that no-one ever talks about WHY you should use a particular effect with a particular subject. Books and magazines are very tied up with the mechanics of photography but rarely stray into […]
Try Color Efex Pro 4’s Photo Styliser for a rich, warm landscape
Color Efex Pro, part of the DxO Nik Collection, is a terrific plug-in with an amazing array of filter effects, each of which has its own controls. Some of them have uses which are obvious straight away, but some… well, not so much. So now and again I have a trawl through the list to […]
Add some sunlight with Color Efex Pro!
I’ve got to be honest. I’m compiling a list of my top ten worst Color Efex Pro filters (yes, there are some duds in amongst the great ones), and the Sunlight filter was on it. But in a spirit of fair play I thought I’d better find out for sure what it actually does and […]
Boost your landscapes with HDR Efex Pro
HDR Efex Pro isn’t just for special effects. It can enhance your images in much more straightforward ways, improving the tonal balance, sky detail and colour saturation. I like to use it on landscapes, where professionals can wait for hours for the right lighting, but the rest of us have to grab shots when we […]