Today’s photo reminds me that I used it as an example to show some of the new features of the new Luminar. There are about 20-30 different skies you can automatically swap out. One of the cooler aspects of the tool is that if you choose a sunset sky, it actually changes the tone of everything not in the sky as well. It’s adjustable so you can make it look incredibly realistic.
I wanted to give you two free videos that we released to Stuck In Customs Passport Members earlier this year! This is obviously an incentive to get you to join. When you do, you’ll get fresh videos every Sunday! Also, I’d appreciate your support… it keeps the website going and we can keep feeding the machine! 🙂
This organ is one of the only organs the Catholics are allowed to touch and look at during services. I have all sorts of ways I poke fun at the Catholics… probably because I went to an all-boy Jesuit school for four years where they tried to brainwash me. But, it didn’t work! However, having just poked more fun at them, I do actually have a decent amount of respect for the Jesuits. They at least have a lot of critical thought and philosophy that makes up the backbone of their teachings. There are a few logical fallacies here and there where it breaks down for me. But hey, that’s just me. I want to go back and do some DMT with some of my old teachers to see what they think.
Well, Luminar 4 is now ready for pre-order and it looks like they’re really going for Adobe’s throat! It already had a ton of features and tools that are sorely lacking in Lightroom. This one has a bunch of new tools that are pretty wicked-smart and fast!
One is the AI Sky Replacement. Below is a picture I took of those famous Baobab trees I visited last week in Madagascar. I went all the way to Madagascar and the sky was so boring… what a bummer! Anyway, this AI Sky replacement is pretty rad because there are a ton of different ones to choose from (or use your own), and it’s a simple one-click operation. Besides blue skies, it’s also easy to choose from a ton of sunsets and other dramatic skies. You can make a few other adjustments too as you can see in the screenshot.
The second cool feature is the AI Portrait stuff. It’s pretty amazing how simple it is to change someone’s face – either a little or a lot. Some people like their faces to get a bit of fluff and others don’t. Who am I to judge? In the example below, this was actually a picture of the Unabomber that I turned into my previous assistant Tane. You can see all the sliders on the right. It’s really quite incredible.. and if you’re a portrait kinda person, don’t miss it!
The third sweet tool is the AI Structure enhancer. The cool thing about it is that it doesn’t make any adjustments to humans in the scene. AI Structure can really make textures and other elements “pop” without making the humans in the scene look overly sharp, gritty, or illustrative. As you can see in the screenshot below (another one I took a few weeks ago in Zimbabwe), it’s just two simple sliders!
Grab it here today for a discounted price before it launches in November.
Today’s photo uses one of my favorite techniques! Make sure you pick up my Textures Tutorial in the store. It comes with a ton of textures that you will love too!
Finally, something not from the USA! I’ve been sharing a ton of photos from my USA tour recently… mostly because I’ve been away from home in NZ for three months and don’t have access to my mother lode of photos! I edited this photo for a few hours on the plane. I love using textures… I hope you try out the tutorial above and enjoy it too!
Just in case you don’t have the new Aurora for Mac of PC, here’s a little promo video I made for it!
I was down by the docks at Lake Wakatipu one morning and I was greeted with this rather amazing sunrise! I didn’t have my tripod with me, but I squeezed off three quick brackets to get this scene. It was edited in Aurora HDR 2019… man, that program is amazing. And I’m not just saying that because I helped make it with the team from Skylum!
I recently made some videos that show off Luminar and my Luminar Looks. By the way, they are called Looks now… not presets, but I still say it wrong all the time.
Here’s a fun new photo I’m quite happy with! I took it about half a year ago when I was in Hong Kong, but haven’t processed it until recently. I used one of my Luminar presets from above!
The amazing team over at Origin PC custom-built me a new PC! I was soooooo excited to receive it! Here is my rather random and silly unboxing video. It’s probably the WORST unboxing video they have ever asked someone to do. But, nevertheless, I finally got it done and I absolutely love the system.
This machine is screamingly fast, and it was a great move to put my main Lightroom library on here. It’s great to have my ~800K photos all in one place with no external drives (except for backups). And the speed… the SPEED! It’s so fast that not even the sloppy programming of Adobe Lightroom can slow it down!
Here’s the 360 video of the unboxing (you can move the camera around). I’ll put the specs below!
ORIGIN PC M-Class Desktop (Black)
Today I’m sharing a free Passport video with everyone. If you’re a Passport Member, then you get access to over 100 of these videos and a new one every Sunday! Some of my favorite ones are the six videos I released from Antarctica where you get to see all sorts of behind-the-scenes tomfoolery!
Here’s a video I recently made that shows how I edited a photo from a location very close to where I took today’s daily photo. Of course, I used Aurora HDR 2019 to do all the editing.
I came to this place with one of my worst plans, but it totally worked out!
Planning for this Japan trip was very difficult because I was going to many remote towns that a) do not take online booking b) where I stay in small hotels where no one speaks English. This makes getting reservations directly almost impossible!
I tried to get reservations via the bilingual concierge at the Ritz-Carlton in Tokyo, and even though he was very resourceful, he said it was 100% booked. But I decided to go anyway and knock on every door of every ryokan until I found a room. I knew it would be hard because nobody speaks English in these places. Anyway, after I knocked on the door of ryokan #4 I finally found a room! Even better, they had private baths fed by all the steaming water from the nearby hot springs. It was incredible to be soaking in steaming hot mineral water while watching snow fall all around me.
Try out that Garry Shandling documentary. It’s very interesting! I always liked him… but never knew much about his story until I saw this thing… It’s called “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling,” so check it out!
Happy Sunday! Here’s a very simple and quick edit, showing how I used Aurora HDR to finish off this Disney Castle photo.
Are there any bad photos of this thing? I mean, come on. But the challenge for me is to try to find new angles and new contexts. I like this one because it’s both a little haunted-looking and I like these repeating lamps that add more depth to the shot.
Based on today’s Venice post, I was thinking about the time Rene fell into a canal in Venice, Italy. This video below never fails to make me laugh. I mean, you know what’s gonna happen, but it still always cracks me up.
Last time I was in Venice, I was there for a long 3 weeks. That’s a long time to be in a place! Hey, but I got to know it really well! It took me about 10 days before I stopped getting lost. Well, sometimes at night when I would walk around my friends, taking a drink of wine every time we crossed a bridge (we call it bridge-wine), we would end up getting quite lost. That may have been a contributing factor to Rene falling in a canal one night.
