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A matte look washes out the shadows and dulls the highlights and shine in an image. It is a popular style for portraits and also adds a vintage vibe to travel images and still life photos. You can apply a matte look with a curves adjustment. For faster results, try the Matte Tool in Luminar AI.

The Main Controls Of The Matte Tool

The Matte Tool has four main controls to refine and shape the matte treatment of your photo.

• Amount: The amount slider controls the overall intensity of the look. Add as little or as much as your photo demands.

• Fade: Increase this slider to add a washed out, filmy look. The shadow areas are more prominently affected.

• Contrast: Increase the separation of the bright and dark tones. Often a nudge of the contrast slider is a needed counterbalance to temper a faded look.

• Vividness: Increase or decrease color saturation.

For matte looks, I prefer to decrease the vividness. I’m partial to a faded, aged look when applying the Matte Tool.

Adding A Color Tint With The Matte Tool

In the bottom half of the Matte Tool is a Color Toning area. These controls add a singular color tint to your photo. There are three controls:

• Range: Control how many or how few of the tones in your photo are affected by the tint.

• Hue: Set the color for the tint.

• Saturation: Set how muted or how rich the color tint is.

Luminar AI offers several other color grading tools, including LUTs in the Mood Tool and split tones via the Toning Tool. The dedicated color grading tools offer more control. Yet for simple color casts, the sliders in the Matte Tool are convenient and work well.

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Don’t Forget About Masking Tools

Most editing tools in Luminar AI, including the Matte Tool, support the gradient, radial, and paint brush masking tools. If the Matte Look is too strong on an element or area in your photo, use the masking tools to selectively tone it down. In this final image, I used the erase mode of the Paint Brush masking tool to slightly reduce the desaturation of the red cross on the better tap at left.