Tuesday 15 August 2017

Landscape Pro 2 Review

Anthropics Technology Ltd.
https://www.landscapepro.pics

So you take a photo. Everything looks great. The arrangement of the sea, the mountains in the distance, the people in the foreground is just as you want it. The trouble is, it’s all a bit dull. The lighting is flat. The sky is dull. The water is as flat and boring as a mill pond.

That is where Landscape Pro can help out. This program can change the lighting, the colours and the atmosphere of an image. It does this by letting you select different image elements – sky, water, mountain, grass and so on – and then changing its visual properties such as the colour and brightness or by dropping in completely new images to, for example, substitute a dramatic cloudy sunset sky for a boring cloudless afternoon sky.

My boring holiday snap loaded into Landscape Pro 2. What can I do to add some drama to it?

I reviewed the previous version of Landscape Pro HERE. For a quick overview of its features, be sure to read that review.  This latest release is broadly similar in both look and operation to its predecessors. Some small improvements have been made to the user interface (including the addition of separate icons for the Save and Save As buttons which I criticised in my previous review).

However, the most significant changes include a large expansion of the number of ‘presets’. So, for example, there are now over 100 new skies – that is, images of a daytime and night-time skies, sunsets, storms and unusual skies including rainbows and auroras. The selection tools have been improved and there is a new 3D lighting brush that lets you ‘paint’ lighting effects onto selected surfaces of structural objects and scenes.  And one of my favourite improvements is the ability to make lakes and seas reflect the sky, producing more convincing results than hitherto.

First you need to select important photo elements such as water, buildings and sky. Landscape Pro does this automatically and you can extend regions if it fails to get the boundaries exactly right.
Then you can select presets from a panel on the left or use sliders to make fine adjustments to specific image elements, tones and colours.

You can switch instantly from one preset to another. Notice here I have chosen to reflect the new sky in the water of the lake.
And here I have selected a new sky to put my once quite dull scene into a dramatic sunset!
All in all, this is a great product for anyone who wants to fix faults or add dramatic effects to landscape photographs.  The regular price of £59.90 is quite reasonable but the current offer price of £29.95 makes it a really good buy.

There are also some higher end editions.  Landscape Pro Studio (£99.990 but on offer for £49.95) supports some additional camera and image output formats and also works as a PhotoShop or Lightroom plugin.  Landscape Pro StudioMax ($199.90, on offer for $99.95) has everything in Landscape Pro Studio plus batch mode for quickly processing multiple images and a histogram panel. See the feature lists for full details: http://www.landscapepro.pics/editions/

System requirements:
Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Vista or Mac OSX (10.7 or later)