Messing around with Photolemur 3, Luminar 3, DXO 9

[Jock Elliott]

Early this AM I received an email inviting me to enter a contest and receive a free copy of Photolemur 3. So I did. It appears to be a fully automated program for improving photographs. I then played with the same photographs using DXO 9 (using one of the HDR presets) and Luminar 3 (using a couple of the quick adjustment sliders, adjusting to what I thought looked good).

The original, one of my typical "fascinated with the sky" shots where everything else tends to go black:

Photolemur 3:

DXO 9:

Luminar 3:

The original. What struck me here was the patch of leaves in the woods that appeared to be glowing, contrasted with the gravestones:

Photolemur 3:

DXO 9:

Luminar 3:

Both Photolemur and DXO will automatically export a processed photo to the folder from which it originated. Luminar does not; you have to navigate to that folder, and Luminar will continue to export to that folder until to tell it to export to a different folder.

Cheers, Jock

 

[Bobby Tingle]

First shot I prefer the Luminar 3 edit. Second shot I prefer the DXO edit. Which I'm sure does not help at all.

 

[Jock Elliott]

At the risk of making a Huge Deal out of not-very-much-at-all, perhaps some explanation is in order.

To start, I am an opportunistic photographer. That truncated quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson -- A photograph is not taken . . . it is the photograph that takes you -- in my signature pretty much sums up my philosophy. I try to make sure I have a camera when I travel about, and when something captures my eye or moves me inside, I try to capture it.

At the moment when I trip the shutter, that's when The Problem arises. Quite simply, the sensor of the camera reacts differently to the light that is striking it than the human eye does when the same light strikes it. So what the camera captures often doesn't represent what I saw.

In the case of the first image above, the sky was striking, but the foreground had not gone totally black, and a fair amount of detail was dimly visible. In the case of the second image, the clump of leaves in the background seemed to glow a great deal more than the image shows.

So that brings us to post-capture image processing software, the purpose of which (in my mind) is to attempt to get back to what I saw in my mind's eye when I clicked the shutter. And, to be candid, I'm not particularly interested in fussing with post-processing.

Photolemur, which was a freebie for signing up for a contest, does OK, but (in my view) not great, so I uninstalled it. DXO 9 I paid for long ago, and I used it and liked it until Luminar 3 came along, which I also purchased. The thing that makes Luminar 3 particularly attractive for me are the Accent AI filter and the AI Sky Enhancer.

Take a look. Before:

After:

And here are the fullsize images. Before:

After:

Cheers, Jock

 

[Bobby Tingle]

I agree about not wanting to spend much time in editing.