Want to show off your shots in a unique and creative way? Make a transparent phone effect. Here's how in Luminar Neo.

You've probably seen these transparent phone images all over the internet, of someone holding up their device from a first-person perspective, looking like they are taking a picture of a beautiful landscape. Have you ever wanted to create one of these images?

With a simple composite technique, we'll show you how to create the transparent phone effect using Luminar Neo. Let's jump right in.

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.

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.

Making selections can be difficult. Advanced photo editors like Photoshop make it a lot easier to mask using the Subject Select tool.

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.

We also show you how to remove the background from a portrait in Luminar Neo.

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.

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.

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.

Craig Boehman is a Mumbai-based American photographer. He writes articles about Photoshop and photo editing for MakeUseOf.com.

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