Click the Item ( ) button at the bottom of the sidebar and choose Save (Figure 5-3). At the bottom of the sidebar, you’ll see “My Template (edited).” Next, do the following:ġ. Using the Edit tools, apply your adjustments. When you’ve made a lot of edits and want the same look for other photos captured at the same time, or you want to use consistent looks in a project or as a personal style, creating a new template saves a lot of time. Here’s what convinced me that templates can be more than just one-click presets. You can then select the Favorites collection in the sidebar and reveal only the ones you like most. Click the Favorite ( Heart) button at the bottom of the sidebar to add it to the Favorites collection.
It’s likely you’ll return to a handful of templates, which you can stash in one convenient place. Once a template is active, you can adjust its opacity by dragging the slider that appears at the bottom of the panel (Figure 5-2).įigure 5-2: After applying the Silver Flash template (top), I decided I didn’t want the image to be entirely black and white, so I reduced the opacity of the template (bottom).Only one template can be applied at a time, so the next one you choose replaces the current one.
If you want to try another template, select it in the sidebar. Click a template to apply it to the image.Scroll the sidebar to browse the categories and collections, and then click one of the collections to reveal its templates.(Sometimes the AI is spot-on, and sometimes the results seem random.) Select an image and click the Templates button (or press the T key) at the top of the screen to view the Templates options in the sidebar.īased on the content of the photo, Luminar will suggest a few template collections in the For This Photo section (Figure 5-1). I haven’t suddenly become a hardcore templates fan, but I can appreciate how they can be a useful tool in your editing arsenal. Or, at the very least, you can use a template as a starting point and then modify its adjustments to your liking.
You can certainly apply the built-in templates and install new ones, even from Well-Known Photographer X, but the real power lies in easily creating and applying your own. Syncing is great when you have 100 images from the same photo shoot, but templates are better if you capture 100 photos every few weeks.
Let’s say you shoot night skies or portraits on a regular basis, two situations where you apply many of the same edits as a baseline (adjusting blacks, whites, and color temperature for the former, and face lighting, smart contrast, and skin smoothing for the latter). That’s different from syncing adjustments between shots (see Chapter 8).
(Well, some are definitely gimmicks, but stay with me here.) The power of templates is to make a complex series of edits that you know you’ll want to replicate on many other photos. Think of them as automation, not gimmicks. I was looking at templates the wrong way. I’m not interested in what Well-Known Photographer X thinks is an awesome color treatment.īut then it clicked. Still, why would I want to make my photos look like someone else’s? I’ve always been more comfortable editing each photo based on what the image needs. When you open a photo in the Templates interface, Luminar examines the image and makes suggestions based on what it finds, such as sunset landscapes or portraits of people. And unlike similar implementations in other apps, templates in Luminar AI are given a boost by the AI engine. Luminar includes many pre-made templates that apply specific appearances simply by clicking one button. Here’s one of my editing biases: I don’t gravitate to presets, or in this application’s parlance, templates.