Luminar NEO: How to use the Dramatic Tool

The Dramatic tool in Luminar NEO allows for extra creativity. It lowers the saturation and increases the contrast, helping you achieve a gritty cinematic look in your photos. The Dramatic tool is often used for landscape, portrait, urban and creative photography. Find out more about it in this article.

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In this article:

• What is the Dramatic Tool
• Introducing the Dramatic Toolsliders
• Getting started with the Dramatic Tool
• Video tutorial
• Luminar NEO

What is the Dramatic Tool

The Dramatic tool allows for creativity. It lowers the saturation and increases the contrast, helping you to achieve a gritty cinematic look in your photos. Its effect is similar to that achieved by the bleach bypass darkroom technique. The Dramatic tool is often used in stylized fashion shoots, urban images, and grungy athletic portraits.

Introducing the Dramatic Tool sliders

Standard Settings

Amount

The Amount slider controls the overall intensity of the adjustment.

Local Contrast

This slider adds a targeted contrast adjustment to the finer details of the image.

Advanced Settings

Brightness

This slider darkens or lightens the details in the image. It’s useful for bringing out details in areas like skies.

Saturation

This slider controls whether colors become washed out or are more saturated.

Getting started with the Dramatic Tool

Dramatic Tool: 

• Open the image in Luminar NEO using the Add Photos button (Cmd/Ctrl + O) in the Catalog module (L).
• Move to the Edit module (E).
• Depending on the image, apply a basic development with the tools available in the Essentials section (Develop, Enhance AI, Color).
• Open the Dramatic Tool and start by sliding the Amount slider as far as possible (100) to see the maximum effect. When you start using the Amount slider, the other sliders will become available to use.
• Zoom in to at least 100% to see all the fine details of your photo, and increase or decrease the Local Contrast slider depending on the amount of effect you wish to apply. Zoom out.
• The brightness slider is useful for bringing out the details of your photo. By setting this slider to the maximum (100), you will achieve a minimal white look. By setting this slider to 0, it will darken your image, perfect for a moody and gloomy look.
• The saturation slider will allow you to create a washed-out effect by setting it to 100. Adjust the slider depending on the look you wish to achieve.

Dramatic Tool video tutorial

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

Luminar NEO

Luminar Neo is the latest editing software from Skylum. It was announced back in September 2021, and it's been highly anticipated since.

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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