hello I'm Robin Whalley welcome to lenscraft today I'm doing a
head-to-head between two popular photo editing packages and I'm doing this not
across all their tools but I'm focusing on one of my favorite effects which is
the Orton effect and I'm going to be using this image to demonstrate though
the image has already been processed in capture one and I then made further
adjustments using the Nik collection I'm at a stage now where I think that the
artifact could add something to this image because I'm finding the rocks in
the foreground just a little bit sharp and I want to emphasize that lovely hazy
feeling in the distant Hills that two packages I'm going to be comparing for
this hour on one photo raw 2020 and luminar 3 I'm starting the comparison in
luminar 3 and the first thing I'm going to do is add a new empty layer to the
adjustment
and in this layer I'm going to add the filter
now in theory luminar 3 should have this competition sewn up it has an art and
effect filter
though the filter gives you quite all just mend and it has two different types
of Alton effect we'll look at the difference in a moment
so to start with I'm just going to push the amount up to quite a high level and
straight away I can see a very realistic Orton effect created now one of the
things I don't like too much about this Orton effect is that it's actually
filling in the shadows and making them quite dark so I could actually reduce
the contrast and that seems to clear up the blocking up of the shadows and it
still gives me a realistic nice effect and I can also up the softness they the
way to think of the softness says watch these highlights here that you see on
the rock they're quite well defined without the
softness at zero if I push the softness up they come more diffused and they tend
to blend with the surroundings a little bit more so that's a nice control that
we've got we can also push the brightness up on this but to be honest I
don't really want to do that contrast as I say will reduce the contrast or
increase there depending on what you want to do so setting of around eighteen
looks quite good and you can increase or decrease the saturation as well on this
layer let's try switching to the other type of
Orton effect that we have now that will straight away doesn't have
as much contrast it doesn't seem to block up the shadows to the same degree
so I may actually increase the contrast very slightly on this
again the smoothness seems to smooth out the highlights and blend them with the
surrounding area so it's almost like a halo control now for me that isn't quite
a Norton effect it doesn't seem to have that traditional aunt and look about it
but it gives a nice softening effect it's more of a soft focus so I'm going
to switch back to type one that seemed to give the best results I'm going to
reduce the contrast back down because I don't want my shadows blocking up I'm
going to just increase the softness slightly and I'll push the amount up
just to increase the softening though that's given me a very nice traditional
looking Orton effect that I like let's now go and take a look at on one and see
what that can do here we have the image opening on one twenty twenty to create
the on effect I'm going to first switch to the effects panel now in the effects
panel you can add different filters now on one doesn't have a specific Orton
effect instead it's got a glow feature now the glow filter that is applied is
quite similar to the Orton effect in what it produces so what you can do is
just create the effect with the amount slider and also you can use the halo
slider now the halo slider is what really produces the glowing effect by
softening the highlights if you watch the highlights on the rocks again as I
push that higher you'll see that they go from being quite well-defined to quite
blurred and the amount just controls the strength of the effect now I push this
up you'll notice that the adjustment does block up all the shadows which is
one of the problems I had over in luminar the third part of the control
we've got here is this blending mode and at the moment it's set to soft light now
you can change that to have different effects so for example you can lighten
the image and if I turn that on and off you can
see this yeah has a glowing effect whilst lightning at the same time very
slightly we can also darken we can multiply which makes everything much
darker you screen to really lighten areas and then you've got the more
traditional overlay and soft light now I like soft light and also soft light
strong and it really just creates a slightly different effect the problem
I've got with this image is where I now push the sliders higher to create a
stronger glowing effect I also block up the shadows so this adjustment on its
own whilst it's really really good and effective it's quite difficult to
control it and create the sort of look that you got very easily with luminar
three if I adjust the opacity of the layer down you can get a little bit more
control over it but it tends to reduce the softening effect at the same time
the better alternative weave on one as with a lot of these packages is to start
to use some form of masking let's add a mask to this and see what we can control
the must surrounded by clicking this icon here and you can see we've got a
white mask so what that's doing is its allowing the effect to be seen across
the entire image the way that I'm thinking about this image is that I want
a luminosity mask and the reason for that is I want to block the effect from
the shadows whilst allowing it to be seen in the highlights so if I just
click the luminosity button that's created a luminosity mask for me the
effect still there but it's now been substantially reduced if I turn it off
you can just about see it and that may mean that we have to push up the effect
higher and also increase the halo slightly now that's created a rather
nice look just check it now whilst I like this I think we can
probably do more to refine the mask and give ourselves a better in fact one of
the good ways to do this is with this levels adjustment that works on the mask
if I turn the mask on to view so you can see it what we can do is now move the
levels adjustment for the black point over to the right now what that does is
it restricts the mask in the shadow areas more at the same time we won't
want to make these areas that are sort of mid-tones lighter and we can do that
first by getting the white point and dragging that over so that lightens
these areas and then we get the mid-tone slider here and we just move that over
to the left and that opens up these areas that may not have been getting in
as much of the effect if I click the View button again you'll see what we've
now got and that's created quite a nice effect in terms of where we were
previously if I turn it off and turn it back on you can see that it's not having
the darkening effect on the shadows to such a great degree it's also softening
the rest of the image in a really nice way and this is now in my opinion a
better look than luminar 3 was giving and that's purely because of the masks
I can probably refine the muscle a little bit further the density slider
for example would bring the blacks back into the adjustment and the reason for
doing that is if I go back to the mask you can see that it will lighten the
shadow areas I could also use the feather adjustment to just blur these
areas and blend them in a little bit further if I want to so go back to the
adjustment and you can see that really is quite a good look at this stage
so having used a mask in um one it's only fair to go back to lumen r3 and see
what we've got there in terms of masking tools that could help refine the
artifact further I'm now back in lumen our three and this time I want to look
at what masking tools I've got available in lumen are the masks are attached to
each of the filters individually so in the artifact we can access the maps by
clicking this paintbrush here this gives you a little drop-down that that allows
you to choose the type of mask that you want in this case I'm also going to
create a luminosity mask just as I did in on one so that's the mask created
immediately is removed a lot of the effect from the image if I turn the
filter off you can see the effect I turn it back on now if I want to view the
mask this is where the problem comes in I can't actually do that in luminar and
that really is a bit of a limitation because I'd like to see how strong the
mask was and then adjust it just as I did in on one but I can't do that this
means I probably have to push the amount slider up to give this more strength and
possibly even the softness slider a further adjustment
that's achieved a better look but I'm still not entirely happy it is possible
if I was to select for example the radial mask or the brush mask that gives
me an option of additional masking tools and once I'm in there I've got this
option to turn on the mask so I can now see the luminosity mask that was created
if I think that wasn't quite strong enough things from areas I could try to
paint it in again so select the option to paint in rather than erase I'll set
the opacity of the brush tool to around 40% I've got quite a soft brush here
I'll just make sure that that's still quite soft and and now I can just paint
over the areas that I want the effect to be seen it
now I could continue to view the mask but I don't touch you like this read
view of the mask I don't think it's very helpful so what I'll do is I'll return
back to viewing the image and now I'll see how I can just paint in
the effect to be stronger in some of these areas
you
and I might painting a little bit more just on these rocks here
and we'll just check that
and I think that's possibly a little bit strong so I'll just reduce the amount
slightly and that looks now about right okay so that's the adjustments done in
both of the tools let's create an image to view them side by side and then we'll
make a decision about which is the best result
I now have both of the images I produced open in Photoshop and then looking at
them side by side the image on the left is the on one and the image on the right
is the lumen our image now the first thing I notice is that the only effect
on both of them is extremely similar and I really can't at this stage tell the
difference if I think back to how I produce these luminaire gives me much
more control over the effect itself using the filter whereas on one there's
a fairly standard glow feature that I didn't have a lot of control over the
difference came in when I then started to use the masking tools in on one the
masking tools were much more precise and gave me a lot more control in terms of
how I could adjust the image in lumina the masking tools were a little less
refined but still did an adequate job let's try and overlay the two images to
better see the results
so the image I've got opened at the moment is luminar 3 if I go to on one
actually there is a slight difference but it really can't be seen unless you
switch between the two what I'm seeing is that the definition here in the
landscape is a little better in the on one version and that's probably because
of the masking tools and the way I couldn't really do much to control the
masking in the luminar version so overall I would suggest that both of
these tools produce an excellent Orton effect on one winds out simply because
the masking tools are much better developed than in luminar I hope you
found this comparison useful if you've got suggestions for future comparisons
not just with the Orton effect but with other filter effects let me know and
I'll see what I can do I'm Robin Whalley you've been watching
lenscraft I'll see you soon for another video