Improve a landscape in five steps

These simple steps can make landscapes come to life

1 Try AI Enhance

The AI Enhance tool is in the Essentials Workspace. It might look like no more than a simple quick fix slider, but behind it are some advanced machine-learning algorithms that split up the scene into different areas and objects which are then enhanced individually. Trying this first can fix or improve a lot of tone and colour problems straight off.

3 Golden Hour

Next, we can use Golden Hour to add a little warmth. Very often, digital cameras can leave landscapes looking quite cold – or colder than we like to think of them, at any rate. Be careful here, because this can also push the saturation quite high. This is another tool that’s smarter than it looks, as it warms the landscape but doesn’t distort the tones in the sky.

5 Masking the effect

Once you’ve applied all these enhancements, you may spot that some areas of the scene look a little over-enhanced. Like most Luminar panels, the Landscape Enhancer has a mask option via the Edit Mask button, so here we can create a Gradient Mask to remove the effect of the filter from the sky and the top of the mountains to produce a more naturallooking background. You position the mask carefully, then click the Done button.

2 Landscape Enhancer

The Landscape Enhancer Panel incorporates three tools that were separate in previous versions of Luminar. Let’s start with Dehaze: this restores some depth and contrast to mountains in our picture by compensating for the slight haze. Luminar’s Dehaze slider is subtler than other programs, so don’t be afraid to push the slider to higher values.

4 Foliage Enhancer

As the name suggests, this picks out all the greenery in a landscape for enhancement while leaving the rest of the image unaffected. This is very sensitive, so even a low value can really make foliage leap out. If you click the Advanced Settings button, you get a Foliage Hue slider, which we can use here to make the trees and grass a much cooler, lusher green.