With a simple composite technique, we’ll show you how to create the transparent phone effect using Luminar Neo. Let’s jump right in.
What You Will Need for a Transparent Phone Effect
You’ll need two basic files for the transparent phone effect in Luminar Neo. First, you’ll need the main image, a grand landscape or urban scene, something worthy of taking a photograph of. And secondly, you’ll need a picture of a hand holding a smartphone. This can be a picture you’ve taken yourself or one downloaded online.
If you want to follow along with our tutorial, download the landscape image from Unsplash, and the picture of a person holding a phone also from Unsplash.
Step 1: Set Up the Layers
In the first step, we’ll load the main landscape image into Luminar Neo. Next, we’ll add the smartphone image on top as the second layer. Then we will mask out the unneeded pixels from the smartphone layer to achieve the basic transparent phone effect.
Load the main image into Luminar Neo under Edit. Click on the Add New Layer icon (+) and select your phone image. Use the handles to align the phone so that the distant mountain is nicely placed on its screen. Under Layer Properties, click on Masking. Click on Brush. Click on Erase. The Brush should appear with a minus sign. Erase the background of the phone image so just the hand and phone are visible. Reduce the Brush Size as you erase closer to the edges. Use Ctrl + and Ctrl - to zoom in and out. Press the Spacebar + Left-click to navigate around the screen. If you make a mistake, click on Paint to add pixels back. It might become difficult to see the background close to the phone, so click on Properties and increase the Opacity slider to 100. Click on Masking once again. With the Erase function active, carefully remove the rest of the background. Decrease the Softness to around 20 as you get closer to the edges. A handy tip: to erase in a straight line, click on the start point, hold the Shift key, and then click on the endpoint.
Making selections can be difficult. Advanced photo editors like Photoshop make it a lot easier to mask using the Subject Select tool.
Step 2: Make the Phone Transparent
As you can see, we still have the unwanted pixels on the inside of the phone that we need to erase. While the process is the same as in the previous step, we’ll start by making four straight lines inside to create borders. This will make it a lot easier to erase with a bigger brush size.
Under Properties, reduce the Opacity to around 50 to see the landscape. Click back on Masking. Make sure Erase is active. Reduce the Brush Size to 12. Click on the top right, then hold Shift, and click on the left side in order to make a straight line just underneath the battery charge indicator and the clock, as shown. Repeat this same step for the three other sides. The idea is to create a border around the rest of the pixels that we’ll erase in the next step. Repeat making straight lines and erasing to delete the pixels. Also, you can use the Brush free-handedly to erase around the curves. Adjust the Brush Size as needed and delete the rest of the pixels to reveal the mountain scene within the phone.
We also show you how to remove the background from a portrait in Luminar Neo.
Step 3: Final Tweaks
We could leave the image as it is, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that the hand is too bright for its surroundings. In this step, we’ll lower the exposure and adjust other sliders in the Develop and Color menus.
With the phone layer active, right-click and choose Duplicate Layer. Under the Essentials tab, click on Develop. In Develop, make the following slider adjustments: Exposure -38; Smart Contrast 30; Highlights -100; and Shadows -100. In Color, make the following slider adjustments: Temperature -25 and Tint -15. Click on the Add New Layer icon (+). Under Flares, choose the third box called Feather. Use the handles to place the mask over the phone’s surface, as shown. In Properties, change the blend mode to Soft Light.
And that’s it! In a few simple steps, we’ve created the transparent phone effect. Here’s our final image:
We also talk about how street photographers can use Luminar Neo to make quick edits.
The Transparent Phone Effect Made Easy With Luminar Neo
Luminar Neo has progressed since its release and has become more than just a creative photo editor by providing tools that only professional editors like Photoshop offer. Thanks to the addition of Layers in Luminar Neo, you can now create complex composites and create fantastic transparent phone images.
