
However, you have to be careful about default processing choices because it’s easy to get dark skies like this. In this case, I like how the leading lines of the clouds all draw you into Kais’ face. However, this one can’t be corrected this way. As I show in my video below, problems like this sometimes are easily solved by adjusting the horizon in this filter. In this case it did miss a spot in the bottom left corner, so it’s not quite perfect – but it’s still pretty damn good. Take note that I’m using the Blue Sky 4 preset in three images in this article, but the sky is different for all of them – this because this isn’t a simple image substitution but an AI application of the sky that keeps the horizon in mind. With the AI Face Enhancer, AI Sky Replacement and a few other minor adjustments I got a much improved image with about a minute of editing:Ģ015 RX100 IV Photo with Portrait Enhancements & Sky Replacements Here’s a photo I took in 2015 for my RX100 IV review that I never bothered to edit because it would have been too much work to mask around Kai’s hair. However, I wanted to illustrate the power of the AI masking (which is more easily appreciated with darker sky colors) so I had to include it. Now this horribly bad looking photo isn’t believable as we’ve put a bright blue sky into an overcast day, so there’s still work to do. Yeah, but what about…Ĭomplex backgrounds with only one click? Yep, no problem as shown here:

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So yes, I can easily say that this feature is a hit and delivers a huge value in your digital workflow making this a no-brainer investment or upgrade if you do outdoor photography. This s a huge time saver, and I find it quite believable – especially with the wealth of adjustments you can make to this filter: I’ve seen Luminar 4 fans getting the same benefit by using sky replacement on power lines and other distractions in the sky. What’s more, my sensor was as dirty as hell due to changing lenses in the wind so I lucked out and got about a hundred dust spots in the sky removed when I replaced the sky – without any effort on my part. What’s more, it’s feasible for this scene to have clouds of this nature, so I don’t consider this to be a change that misrepresents the area – it just misrepresents my luck with the clouds this day. In retrospect, I think both are believable if you don’t know of the original image. My wife was watching me do this and she encouraged me to use the Blue Sky 6 preset for leading lines that pull your eyes into the mountains:Ĭhanges like these are subjective so I polled my Facebook friends and most found Blue Sky 6 to be the best choice, while some aligned with me found Blue Sky 4 to be more believable. However, I like to tinker so I kept experimenting with skies. In less than a minute I got improvements that were good enough for me to call this one done. This set me up for what I think is one of the biggest improvements – the AI Sky Replacement – where I used the Blue Sky 4 preset for a subtle but believable improvement: Lastly, I used the Landscape Enhancer to Dehaze and boost the foliage a bit. I then used the Color and Details Enhancer filters to make the image feel a bit more crisp.


To address this, I used the AI Enhance feature with an auto generated luminosity mask with the AI Accent light filter to enhance the details and overall color of the image. This unedited version isn’t bad, but it’s a little hazy and lacks the impact of what it felt like when I saw it in real life: Here’s an example of a photo of a beautiful valley in Switzerland that I took this last October. While this isn’t far from the only new feature in Luminar 4, it’s the one that is worth talking about first as this really is breakthrough technology that makes me excited for Luminar now and in the future. Luminar 4 addresses this with what it is calling Artificial Intelligence masking and it nothing demonstrates this better than its new sky replacement feature. While Photoshop and Luminar offer masks to help with this, they are cumbersome to create especially along the edges of the mask against complex subjects like tree branches with leaves or hair.

This is important because often times you want to make local edits to specific features of your photo, but not globally across the entire photo. Luminar is definitely one of those products that has a lot of great photo editing features, but it’s always lacked my beloved U-Point controls in the Nik Collection (now by DxO).
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I’ve been following Skylum Software since its MacPhun days and along the way they have made many products that I’d put into the camp of “good, but still not there yet”.
