How To Edit Summer Photos In Luminar Neo

With summer fast approaching, it’s time to start looking away from spring photos with their cherry blossoms and pastel colours, and towards the vibrant and punchy shots of summer. It’s the time when the bold and brilliant tones in your images really shine through and give the viewer a sense of exuberance and joyfulness, which is exactly what sets summer photos apart from other seasons.

But summer is not without its challenges, because while the sun helps bring about this energy in your shots, it can also work against you, especially when it comes to the tones in your image.

So we are going to jump into Luminar Neo and make sure your photos hit the right vibes and give people that urge to get outside. Let’s get started.

Understanding the Summer Look

The trick to summer editing not only lies in the colours, but in the overall balance of the image. In wintertime, I opt for deeper shadows and reduced exposure to enhance the moodiness of a scene, but summertime is all about bright and clean tones that reflect the sunny atmosphere.

We also tend to see a warmer white balance to reflect the hotter temperatures, which in turn subtly gives the impression of more joyful energy in your shots. To help those warm tones stand out even more, the shadows often lean cooler, but more on that later.

But mostly, summer editing is all about the colours. We want the tones of the image to feel bright, vibrant, and cohesive. We don’t want to go overboard and end up with colours clashing or dominating each other. That’s when an image becomes too loud and ultimately ruins the quality of the photo, or causes your subject to become lost in the frame.

So let’s hop into Luminar Neo and get the best out of your summer shots.

Start with a Good Foundation

In every edit I do, no matter the season, I make sure the foundation of the image looks good through a balanced range of tones, giving me a much stronger starting point.

Hopping into the Develop menu, I’ll usually pull the highlights back slightly and maybe deepen the shadows to improve depth.

I prefer doing this through the Tone Curve because I love the control it gives me, especially over the midtones.

But speaking of depth, I actually tend not to touch the Smart Contrast tool here because I absolutely love Supercontrast, which can be found in the Advanced menu at the bottom of your tools window.

This really allows me to shape the overall balance of my image, helping preserve detail in the shadows, midtones, and highlights while also deepening shadows and pushing highlights to create an image full of depth that really stands out.

This is especially important in summer photography, which is exactly what we are going to look at next.

Fixing Harsh Summer Light

Remember when I said the sun can also work against us during summer? Well, with the summer sun sitting at its highest point in the sky around midday, we get extremely harsh light. This creates bright conditions with minimal shadowing, as the shadows are at their shortest length of the day.

Short shadows mean less depth, so we risk flat images that can look dull and uninteresting. I try to avoid shooting during the midday sun whenever possible, but sometimes, like when you’re travelling, you simply have to make do with what you’ve got.

The Supercontrast tool is essential here because it allows you to separate the shadows and highlights further and bring back much-needed depth into your image.

Another great method is using the Light Depth tool, which I typically apply after Supercontrast. It adds light into your image while working in a 3D space, ensuring that the light behaves naturally according to the environment in your shot.

Your subject may already be well lit, but even adding a subtle amount of light around their outline can help draw the viewer’s eye more effectively.

It also has tools to darken the foreground and background, helping create even more depth within the image.

Enhancing Summer Colours

The most important, but also the most fun, part of a summer edit comes when working on the colours of your shot. I always leave colour work until last, as by that point the rest of the image is already looking almost complete.

We want to enhance the colours associated with summer and promote the right kind of energy in the image while still maintaining a pleasing harmony of tones. The main colours to look out for are warmer tones such as oranges, yellows, and reds, alongside greens for summer foliage and blue for the sky.

A typical beginner mistake in this situation is to boost saturation heavily in an attempt to make the image feel more colourful. Doing this instantly makes the image feel unnatural and lowers the overall quality of the shot. Every colour starts screaming for attention, and your subject becomes lost in all of that visual noise.

Instead, we want to work on colours separately, which is exactly what we are going to look at in the next section.

Summer Colour Edit Workflow

The first thing I do is head into Colour Harmony in the Advanced menu and move to Split Colour Warmth. Here, I’ll make my warmer tones more golden and my cooler tones slightly bluer. This helps create strong colour contrast, which is essential for allowing colours room to stand out properly.

Then I move into Colour Balance. Here, I cool my shadows and midtones slightly, usually by around three or four points, while warming the highlights. That means leaning towards cyan and blue in the shadows and midtones, and adding more yellow into the highlights.

Again, this helps strengthen colour contrast, but it’s essential that you push these values only slightly, as a little goes a very long way.

Next, I head into the Landscape tool, no matter what genre of photography I’m editing. Inside, you’ll find the Golden Hour tool, which enhances only the warmer tones in your image instead of warming the whole photo globally. Again, only a subtle adjustment is needed, but it instantly gives your image a much stronger summer feel.

Now on to the final, and most important tool: Colour, and specifically HSL. HSL, which stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luminance, allows us to work on each tone separately and create a much stronger balance throughout the image.

A good understanding of colour theory goes a long way here, helping create harmony while avoiding clashes and overly dominant colours.

First, I start with Hue. This helps remove distracting tones and creates a much more cohesive colour palette. I can also use it to get the sky looking that perfect summer blue.

Then it’s on to Saturation, where we need to be very careful not to go overboard. Certain colours may only need a slight push, particularly those warmer tones, greens, and blues associated with summer scenes.

We can then work on Luminance as well. This depends on the image, but I like to increase luminance slightly on warmer tones or colours related to my subject, helping them stand out more naturally.

After that, we can add a touch of vibrance using the Vibrance slider, and your image should now look warm, colourful, and full of summer energy.

Editing Summer Portraits

Summer portraits are great fun to work with, but once again, the sun can work against us.

The main issue comes from harsh midday light and what it does to the skin of your subject. It can produce very unflattering results and may even ruin important skin detail. That’s why it’s important to slightly underexpose your image while shooting, helping preserve those details for editing later on.

To help soften harsher skin texture, head into the Skin tool menu and work with Skin Smoothing. This instantly helps reduce the appearance of pores and uneven texture that become much more noticeable under strong sunlight.

I also like adding warmer tones to skin during summer edits. You can use masking tools to isolate the subject and then boost warmer tones using tools such as Colour Harmony, Landscape, or Colour.

If your image is lacking depth because of those shorter shadows, try boosting contrast only in the background by going into Layer Properties, Masking, and then Portrait Background. This allows you to work safely on the environment without negatively impacting the subject.

The Bottom Line

Your summer shots are going to look fantastic this year thanks to Luminar Neo’s editing tools, which help bring out the vibrance and energy in your scenes.

It’s all about working with those seasonal tones and enhancing them in a balanced way to give people that urge to get outside and enjoy the sunshine.

But summer is not always easy to shoot in, particularly around midday when harsh light and short shadows can leave colours looking washed out and lacking depth.

By using essential tools such as Colour Harmony and Supercontrast, we can give our images the right treatment to help them look vibrant, balanced, and full of summer atmosphere.

Enjoy the weather, and enjoy your time shooting this summer!