Editing with Lightroom and Luminar

I took in my first fire of the year this week (26 days into the new year!) I arrived well after the dramatic smoke and flames had been dealt with. Nonetheless, I looked for interesting opportunities for images. Here’s a shot that I took while standing alongside a group of firefighters in the street. In the center was one firefighter kneeling while operating a street-level deluge gun. There were flames visible through the roof in the middle of the group so I knelt down with my camera close to the street and grabbed a few frames to see what it would look like. Then I went about editing with Lightroom and Luminar.

Firefighters standing by at a building fire
This is the rough capture straight out of the camera … slightly off center due to the way I was holding the camera at my side. Larry Shapiro photo

I ran the file through Adobe Lightroom making a series of adjustments to create a stronger and bolder feel. I wanted to accentuate the detail in the gear and tools along with correcting for contrast and saturation to offset the gloomy overall feel of the image. This took about 45 seconds to a minute.

image of Firefighters adjusted using Adobe Lightroom
Cropping, clarity, blacks, whites, shadows, highlights, contrast and saturation sliders were all adjusted for this image. Larry Shapiro photo

Here’s another version of the same image using another method. I loaded the file into MacPhun Luminar and created this similar feel using two presets. Once the image loaded into the plug-in, the edit was complete in about 15 seconds.

image of Firefighters adjusted using MacPhun #Luminar
An image edited with MacPhun Luminar using presets. Larry Shapiro photo

The time difference may seem insignificant for an image, but when there are hundreds of files to edit, every second counts.