Announcing "Cityscapes", a HUGE new preset pack for Luminar!
Another preset pack for enhancing your Luminar experience - my biggest preset pack yet! Here are 40 shiny new presets designed for urban environments!
Hello friends, I am back with another preset pack for Luminar - this time, it’s all about cityscapes! You can find my other preset packs right here if you would like to see them all.
Don’t have Luminar yet? Shame on you. ;-) You can click on the banner below to buy it from the Macphun website. Trust me when I tell you that you will love it. You can also download a free trial at their site if you want to test drive it first. You can do SO MUCH with Luminar that it will blow you away. It has completely changed my photo editing, making it faster and better!
I spend nearly all my time in Luminar now. While my photos are managed in Lightroom, I take them into Luminar for the majority of my edits. I find Luminar to be more powerful and capable than Lightroom, with more filters to experiment with, too. In fact, I recently shared my thoughts about 5 of my favorite Luminar filters that don’t exist in Lightroom, in case you would like to read that.
I love to create these preset packs. It’s not just fun for me, but educational as well. It makes me really dig into the product deeper and forces me to get out of my habitual edits to craft something new and interesting. I also use my presets ALL THE TIME. Sure, I create them and sell them here, but I also use them on all my images. I love them, or else I would not put them out there. I hope you feel the same!
I think of presets as the “easy button” for photo editing. Sometimes it really just takes that one click to get your shot looking exactly how you imagined it, although of course there are times when a preset is a great starting point to send you off in a new creative direction. Either way, I know you will enjoy this new preset pack and get a lot of mileage out of it.
Introducing Cityscapes
I have long been a fan of shooting in cities. While I yearn to photograph epic landscapes such as those in New Zealand or Iceland - like everyone else that has ever held a camera - the truth is that I rarely get an opportunity to visit those sorts of places. I tend to visit cities, and I learned long ago that cities are rich with photographic opportunities. There is an overabundance of shots to be taken in any city. You just have to step outside.
Over the years, cities have become my favorite photographic playground. I actually prefer them at this point. I think a city offers an unlimited amount of great subjects, and that’s why I like them so much. In a city you can shoot skylines, street scenes, light trails, portraits, architecture, graffiti and urban grunge, neon and other signs, churches, bridges, rivers and more. And many of these subjects can be shot in just about any light, from early sunrise on into the late night.
So as my adoption and use of Luminar for photo editing has evolved, so has my eye for editing these urban shots in Luminar. I have taken dozens and dozens of my city photos and brought them into Luminar to build these presets. I have experimented with a lot of different looks on a lot of different types of photos. There is a lot of variety in this pack, just as there is a lot of variety in a city.
These presets range from something you could use on a sparkly skyline shot at sunset or blue hour and go all the way to a grungy, disused alley full of graffiti and grit. Yes, several of these presets are designed for grungy and gritty scenes, because they are frequently encountered in a city and frankly, I find them beautiful. I love to photograph the obviously beautiful stuff, but I get an equal amount of enjoyment from the non-traditional beauty you can find only in a city.
Assuming you have seen some of my work, then you know that I like bold, colorful and expressive photos. In this pack, I also have created presets with a lot of structure and detail to enhance those urban scenes. These presets are designed as big moves, and not just barely-noticeable minor adjustments. Big moves are good. Minor changes are a waste of time.
Don't forget you can stack presets for more fun and experimentation! I often stack 2 presets and adjust the opacity levels of each layer to get interesting and beautiful results. Or stack them and just mask in the part of the preset that fits with your photo. Your options are limitless! Just experiment and have fun. That's what this is all about, anyway. Create something interesting and have fun doing it.
There are 40 presets in this pack - yes, 40! - and once loaded in Luminar it will be displayed as it’s own category of presets, right alongside all the other categories that are built into Luminar (see below for installation instructions).
I even recorded a video showing many of the presets in action. Take a look!
How To Install A Custom Preset Pack
When you import a custom preset pack such as this one, it will create a new category in the Presets category window, and the presets will be displayed within that category.
See the example to the right. -->
To add a custom preset pack, select the menu item File > Add Custom Presets Pack. An open dialog box will be displayed, allowing you to choose the pack you wish to add.
After you receive your email with the download link, download the preset pack file to your desktop and that allows you to easily find it and select it.
Then you start making awesome photos!
Show me some samples, Jim!
Ok, it’s about time to do that, don’t you think? Take a look at all the screenshots below and any of them can be viewed larger with a single click. I included the split screen Before/After view so you can see the impact each preset has on an image. You will also see the preset name in the screenshots below. Many of these are the same as shown in the video above, in case you didn't watch that.
