The two images below are a before and after headshot portrait edit of the very lovely Stephanie. The edit was done on a JPG to show what you can do using Luminar AI. The editing time was roughly 5 minutes. There were no presents or templates used for the edit, all editing was done using the edit features in Luminar AI. To be perfectly honest, Stephanie is beautiful and a properly captured image of her needs very little post-processing.

So, what did I do in the post-processing of this image? The first thing I did was some tweaking with the exposure. The highlights were a little hot, notice the hat and the ribbon on the hat are close to being blown out. I lowered the exposure on the highlights to bring that area down. Next, I did some color correction, the skin tones were slightly magenta, so I corrected them to warm the skin tones slightly. Then crop the image to give this headshot a stronger composition. The crop brings the eye level higher in the image, gives her face more coverage in the frame, and takes away the sense that she’s sliding down the frame. Next up was to add a little more punch to the eyes by brightening the irises and a slight sharpening to the eyes only. I did a slight saturation adjustment to her lips to bring them out more. Cloned out some stray hairs on the face and removed a couple of facial blemishes. Lastly, I did some burning around the edges of the image to bring the viewer’s focus to her lovely face.

As previously mentioned, all these edits were done with Luminar AI. I highly recommend this program for new photographers that are just getting started in editing their images. The learning curve is much easier than PhotoShop and other quality editing software. Granted, this program isn’t as full-featured as the big boys. There is no digital asset manager either, but it has everything you need to produce professional-quality images. One of its great strengths is how intuitive the program is to learn. There are tons of templates that you can purchase to basically give you a one-click and done edit. Plus, the price is very reasonable and it’s not a monthly subscription like PhotoShop.

If you’re interested in giving Luminar AI a free 30-day trial, just click the banner below.

Photographically yours,
Larry