Joe Blackwood sends me links to deals, and recently he came up with a great one. The MacPhun folks were allowing free downloads of their Windows beta version of the Luminar software. I snagged a copy and installed it.

Luminar is a digital image post-processing tool that has several dozen canned “actions” that can be applied to an image. These essentially do for you what you otherwise could spend a not insignificant amount of time applying filters in PhotoShop or similar packages to accomplish. Plus, you can scale back just how much of the action to do on a percentage scale. Handy thumbnails indicate the full effect of the available actions. For someone like me who has been pretty reserved in exactly how far I take modifications of images, it is a bit of a revelation in that it easily shows what the extreme actually does.

For much of what I have posted to social media recently (and all of the images in “Series 2017” via the home page here), my process has been to run the image through Luminar, save it at max quality, then use GIMP for image scaling, final sharpening, and adding a watermark.

I haven’t evaluated this for large size printing. Since the export is in JPEG, it might be possible that artifacts will interfere with printing big. I’ll try to remember to update this later.

Buck Dharma of Blue Oyster Cult, 2017-10-04 at the State Theater in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Weather over Topsail Beach, North Carolina, 2016-09-15.

Gladwin field trial grounds, puppy stakes release area, 2017-10-07.

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