Day: April 12, 2018

long exposure, nature, photography, postprocessing, review

Throwback Thursday: editing cranes with Luminar 2018 Jupiter!

solaner

Recently, I got a review version of the upcoming version “Luminar 2018″ V. 1.2.0 Jupiter. for a short time.

Upgrade was as easy as usual: simply drawing the app in my Applications folder. I had the feeling, the software start doesn’t need as long as before. The interface seemed familiar without any noticeable changes. All presets seemed to be still available. Also, the workflow is the same.

So, I took some of my images for my crane trip last fall and developed them from raw again.

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APS-C, 800mm (~1200mm), f8, ISO 400, 1/6400s
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35mm, 155mm, ISO 800, f7.1, 1/500s
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APS-C, 800mm (~1200mm), ISO 3200, f5.6, 1/125s

I was quite impressed by the results when comparing the outcome with the one from last fall using Luminar V. 1.0.0: more details, better results in the mid-tones and much better noise-reduction. The noise reduction is so good now, than I’m considering deleting the old app “Noiseless CK”.

For me, a good noise reduction is crucial. When doing wildlife photography, I have to use high ISO settings because I want very short shutter speeds for getting sharp images. You know the apertures triangle: ISO, shutter speed and aperture. As I usually have to use long focal lenses, which are not so fast as shorter focal lenses because of physical limitations. Additionally, the longer a lens, the smaller the field of depth is. This brings in another level of light shortage.

Some of the other new features are:

  • higher speed during import and processing
  • automatic distortion correction
  • improved Demosaicing and green balance
  • support of DCP profiles (Mac)
  • higher speed when importing raw images (Mac)
  • the functionality of the Windows version is adapted to the Mac version by adding support for batch processing, free transformation, rotation and mirroring

Luminar 2018 Jupiter comes as a free upgrade for all current users of Luminar 2018. Users having a previous version of Luminar are eligible for upgrading on a reduced rate. For those of you, not having Luminar already, might consider giving it a try. There’s a free evaluation version available for download for MacOS and for Windows.

When using this code “SOLANER” you can save some money and get your perks anyway 😃.

Take care!