Luminar NEO: How to use Color Harmony Tool

luminar neo Feb 16, 2024

The Color Harmony tool in Luminar NEO uses the latest technology to offer various advanced options for adjusting colors in your images. With this tool, you can easily control color contrast, adjust warmth levels, and fine-tune color balance across different tonal ranges. Our blog provides a comprehensive guide to using each slider, giving you the knowledge and skills to maximise this powerful feature and enhance your editing abilities.

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What is the Color Harmony Tool

The Color Harmony tool is a part of the Professional suite of tools in Luminar NEO. It uses advanced technology to offer a wide range of options for color manipulation within your images. With this tool, you can easily manage color contrast, refine warmth gradients, and balance color palettes across different tonal spectrums. Although it may initially seem complicated, investing some time to explore its capabilities can help you unlock its full potential.

Introducing Color Harmony Tool sliders

Brilliance

This slider helps create rich colors in a photo.

Warmth

This slider controls the color temperature in the image and can be used to stylize an image. Positive values warm the image, while negative values tone it down.

Color Contrast

This tool lets you choose a color range to apply contrast. Objects of the selected color will become lighter, while objects with opposite colors on the color wheel will become darker. This effect can help make flat images pop based on the colors in the image.

Amount

This slider controls the contrast between color differences (as opposed to luminance). The stronger the Amount, the more contrast between primary and secondary colors.

Hue

Slide to choose the target hue for emphasis.

Split Color Warmth

This tool can selectively enhance the cool and warm tones in your image. It allows you to increase color contrast and vibrancy or create creative toning effects. You can separately adjust the Warm colors and Cool colors. This tool is especially handy for landscape photography.

Warm

Drag this slider to the left to neutralize warm tones such as yellows and reds and to the right to enhance them.

Cool

Drag this slider to the left to cool down blues, aqua, and cyan and to the right to neutralize and warm them up.

Сolor Balance

The Color Balance tool helps change an image’s overall mix of colors for general color correction. It can also be used for creative control within different tonal regions of an image.

Range Selectors

Target the Shadows, Midtones, or Highlights in an image. The image's darkest parts are the Shadows, the brightest are the Highlights, and everything in between is the Midtones.

Target the Shadows, Midtones, or Highlights in an image.

Adjust the balance of Cyan–Red, Magenta–Green, and Yellow–Blue to emphasize specific colors in each tonal region.

Getting started with Color Harmony Tool

Open your image and move it into the Edit module (E).
Open the Color Harmony tool located in the Professional section.
To start, use the Brilliance slider to enhance the colors. Adjust the Warmth slider to make the photo warmer or cooler. Be careful not to overdo it for a natural look.
Then, jump to the Color Balance section. Adjust each slider for the Shadows, Highlights and Midtones.
To finish, adjust the Color Contrast and Split Color Warmth if necessary. Remember that your adjustments will vary depending on your original photo and the desired final look.
During the edit, click the Eye icon to see the before and after results.

Color Harmony Tool video tutorial

Watch the full video tutorial covering all controls in this tool.

Luminar NEO

Luminar Neo is the latest editing software from Skylum. It was announced back in September 2021 and has been highly anticipated.

Luminar Neo is an AI-powered photo editing software. Skylum has said that Neo isn’t replacing their previous release—Luminar AI. But Neo sets out to fix some of the issues users faced with Luminar AI.

We were impressed with the AI tools in Luminar AI. But like many others, we encountered performance issues. Luminar Neo uses the same AI tools, but the new high-speed core engine improves speed and performance.

Luminar Neo isn’t just more of the same. We’re happy to see Skylum has taken Neo in a different direction, adding layer and mask AI tools to the program. This broadens Neo’s appeal, taking it in an Adobe Photoshop direction.

Learn more about Luminar NEO here.

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