Creative Studio 6.0: go wild
The latest version of the beloved Creative Studio photo-editing app is now available. The new redesigned CS6 brings high-quality filters, easy to use image enhancement tools and non-destructive editing to all Lumia photographers.
To get under the hood of what’s new in CS6 and how to use the different settings, I sat down with Martin Sommerschield, a Helsinki-based photographer, who was involved in the design and creation of the app.
Filters
“When we started the project we were only talking about filters, but quite quickly we noticed it’s more about creating styles and pre-sets for post-production, ” says Martin.
The team started out by defining situations where people may want to use a filter to enhance or change the mood of an image. As a result, ten high-quality filters were created:
- Warm copper
- Retro fade
- Retro cool
- Vivid
- Pure
- B&W Strong
- B&W Antique
- B&W Fade
- Nightlife
- Warm Horizon
“There is this Retro fade filter that has the look that I like the most. It has low contrast and sort of faded imaging. It’s something that really feels close to my own visual aesthetics. “
“It was the first filter I started working on because I thought if I create this and if I make something I’m really pleased with, it will help me in the process of creating the other filters,” Martin explains.
But there’s more to CS6 than filters. There are also easy to use photo enhancement tools to adjust the vibrancy, shadows, brightness, clarity and temperature of the image.
If you don’t want to play with the individual settings, you can use the auto enhance option too. You can also add blur or reframe the image to create the effect you want.
Martin is going to guide us through the settings one by one..
Brightness
“To me, one of the most important enhancement features is the brightness. A lot of the times you’ll get a picture where the foreground is either too dark or too light. But otherwise the subject has the lightness it needs.”
“Normally when you use a brightening feature, the darker parts get even darker and lighter parts even lighter. We played around and decided to create a feature that locks the light and dark parts and only modifies the mid-tone parts of the image.”
“When you take a picture of someone where the light is coming from behind, it usually ends up leaving the foreground subject completely dark. But with the brightness setting you can brighten the darker parts and still leave the image feeling the same.”
Clarity
“Clarity is nice when you have a low contrast image and you don’t want to increase the contrast, only the sharpness of the image.”
Shadows
“Shadows can be used really well to brighten up the really really dark parts of an image. When parts of an image are too dark, the Shadows feature can be used to lift up those dark parts without brightening the image at all.”
Vibrancy
“Vibrancy is good for increasing or decreasing color vibrancy. It’s not as harsh as a traditional saturation slider.”
Temperature
“Temperature is a great tool for correcting color casts or simply adding warmth to images.”
Blur
“I like to use the circular blur option a lot. It’s actually something that can emphasize the subject when you want to get the viewer to notice something specific in the image. “
“Same goes for the tilt-shift. It’s an emulation of when you use a perspective correction lens to make the focal plane even narrower.”
“And finally with the background blur you can do a very selective selection to achieve a nice bokeh.”
Reframing and non-destructive editing
Reframing, is a great Lumia feature that allows you to zoom in, zoom out, rotate, straighten and change the aspect ratio of an image after you’ve captured it, without losing any quality. And it’s now integrated into Creative Studio, putting all your editing features in one place.
The CS6 also comes with non-destructive editing, allowing you to apply the filters and adjust the image enhancement settings as many times as you like, without destroying the original image. It encourages you to be more creative and try out different things as you can always revert back to the original, and start again.
“One of my favorite features in modern photography is non-destructive editing and the possibility to create different virtual copies of an image. Using non-destructive editing is the best to way to test different looks and different settings in images as you can always return to the starting point.“
“The one thing I’d like to ask everyone to do with the new Creative Studio is: Go wild – it’s non-destructive!”
And that’s exactly what we’re asking you to do. Download Creative Studio 6 now (works best with Lumia Cyan update) and go wild! And share the artwork with us!