Fargo, North Dakota.

While going through some family photos, I came across one of my brothers who served in the Navy. I am not a US Navy veteran or an Armed Services veteran of any kind, but most of my brothers served in one branch or another. Two of them, a brother-in-law and his brother, all served on the USS Rochester, CA-124, an Oregon City-class heavy cruiser. When I went looking for images of the ship, I found plenty. I found a lot of history on the ship as well. Commissioned in 1946, she served in Europe, then the Pacific, eventually taking an active part in Korean War operations. It was during those Korean conflict years that my brothers served on her.

But this post isn’t about the ship; it’s about the tool I used to improve one of the images I found online of the cruiser. Prior to Luminar 4, a version of Luminar called Flex was offered as a free add-on for Luminar 3. It includes most of 3’s functions but lacks the catalog. The tool works nicely as a plug-in to Lightroom. Since it’s smaller, exporting an image to Flex is faster than in Luminar 4. I still use Flex when I just need to make basic adjustments to an image that doesn’t need much work.

Here’s the original photo I found online of the Rochester. I processed it in Flex before Luminar 4 was released. You’ll note that the reworked image brings out a lot of detail in the sky and water. Luminar Flex doesn’t have sky replacement. I used the tools built into Flex to bring out the details in the sky that were “hiding” in the gray background. Obviously, the image was captured from another ship, a bit of that ship’s structure showing in the upper left. I cropped it slightly to eliminate that distraction and used the AI tools in Flex to bring this old image to life.

John Steiner