Jamie R Mathlin<\/a>, this detailed walkthrough starts with a raw (well, JPEG) moment: Mathlin stops during a ride in Norfolk, England, spots his bike parked in front of a small country church in gorgeous late-day light, and grabs a quick shot on his iPhone 15 Pro with no intention of making a serious photo out of it. No full frame camera, no f\/1.2 lens, no raw file. Just a phone JPEG. What follows is a disciplined editing session that starts in Lightroom with basic tonal adjustments, selective content removal using the AI-powered Remove tool, and then Lightroom’s Lens Blur feature to simulate the shallow depth of field he would have gotten from a fast prime. The Lens Blur section alone is worth watching closely \u2014 Mathlin walks through the different bokeh shape options, explains the focus range controls, and shows how the visualize depth tool lets you paint focus and blur selectively onto specific parts of the frame.<\/p>\nThe edit doesn’t stop at Lightroom. Mathlin takes the adjusted file into Luminar Neo to apply the Mystical effect, which adds a subtle, diffused glow that softens the image without making it look processed. He pairs that with the Light Depth tool to selectively brighten the bike against the background, and then uses Magic Light to add sun rays coming from the church entrance, complete with masking to make the effect read as believable rather than obviously artificial. The combination of these three tools stacks up into something that starts feeling less like a phone photo and more like an intentional, atmospheric image.<\/p>\n
Back in Lightroom, Mathlin finishes the image by fine-tuning blacks and whites using the alt-key clip method, pulling clarity slightly negative to preserve the soft mood, and then does something genuinely interesting with color toning. Rather than going straight black and white, he adds a faint blue tint and adjusts vibrance to mimic a selenium darkroom chemical tone. Then he pulls the vibrance the other direction to get a warmer, muddier look. It’s a small detail, but it shows how much the final character of a monochrome image lives in that toning step, and how different two versions of the “same” black and white can feel. Check out the video above for the full walkthrough from Mathlin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shooting a quick phone snapshot of your motorcycle parked outside a country church might not sound like much,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375805,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-375804","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}