A Positive Experience

So mostly I have been pretty happy with the new version of Luminar, provided that they keep revising it and adding features. It does produce some very nice results, and the Library feature, while not all done yet, shows great potential. But mostly so far, I have posted issues I have had with it. I was disappointed that they released it before it was ready.

I was using Luminar yesterday along with PixInsight to process my Eclipse photos from Sunday night. I took a sequence of 360 pictures, one every 30 seconds, and wanted to turn it into a movie. As usual, I did my initial calibration work in PixInsight. Then I brought it over to Luminar to finish it off. I needed to be sure that I did the same adjustments to all the photos and I figured Luminar's new Library features could do that nicely. I was correct, it did produce decent results. Then I made my movie and posted it.

Then I decided I wanted to improve it more. I aligned and stacked 130 of the frames during the total phase of the eclipse and enhanced it with wavelets in PixInsight and extracted the Luminance channel. Then I wanted a nice way to either use that image as the Luminance of all of the eclipse photos, or somehow blend it with all the photos. I could not come up with a nice way to do that in PixInsight (I did NOT want to do it 130 times). So I thought maybe there was a way to do this in my final processing in Luminar.

So I brought the enhanced luminance photo into Luminar and put it in another layer above one eclipse photo. I made it 20% opaque. That seemed to make a nice blend between enhancing the detail and keeping the unique features of that particular photo. Then I was afraid I would have to do that 130 times. But on a whim I tried syncing the adjustments to another photo. It not only copied all the adjustments, it also copied the second layer and blended it automatically!! So then I tried syncing all the rest in the sequence and it was done almost instantly!! It looks awesome. The movie is so much better now.

Syncing the adjustments was something that I expected to work coming from Aperture and I love that feature. But syncing a second layer into all of the photos in the sequence and then properly blending it. That is worth the price for Luminar right there!!!!

Angela Andrieux

January 22, 2019 16:29

Hi Robert,

Thanks for sharing your success story!! Do you have link to your video? Would love to see it!

Robert Lancaster

January 22, 2019 16:55

Not yet. I have the old version posted, but not the updated one yet. I will in a few hours.

January 22, 2019 20:57

Ok I have posted the updated video:

https://www.facebook.com/rlancaste/videos/10100475972539184/

January 22, 2019 22:21

That is very cool! Thanks for sharing! :)

January 22, 2019 22:47

sure

January 24, 2019 02:53

I also enhanced the photo that was the stack of images during the total lunar eclipse portion. I ended up just using 117 of the 130 though because some of the images degraded the overall image, especially one where a plane got in the way.

A Positive Experience

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