AI-powered
Image Editing
1
RELIGHT
Once you’ve got an image open, it’s time to see what the app
can do. One of our favorite features is Relight, an AI tool that
splits your image into near and far layers and allows you to alter
the brightness of each individually. It helps if you give it a photo
that plays to its strengths—perhaps one in which your subject
is standing between clear foreground and background objects—
and use the Depth slider to set the point at which they’re fully
diverged [Image A]. Then you can play with the Brightness Near
and Brightness Far sliders, to see what effects they will add.2
PORTRAIT BOKEH
Forgotten your f/1.4 lens? No matter. Luminar Neo can
identify the subject in your picture and blur the background
away in just a couple of clicks. Open the image you want to work
on, then scroll down to Portrait Bokeh AI, which is on the right
below Relight in the Portrait section. To set it in action, just move
the Amount slider to the right. Drop down the Brush Control
section to adjust the mask that’s been automatically produced
for the effect if it’s blurring bits that shouldn’t be blurred, or
leaving the wrong parts of the image sharp. We find that as long
as there’s a strong subject to the photo and not too much in the
way of leafy branches or curly hair to confuse it, the AI engine
does a good job [Image B]. Thankfully, the Focus, Defocus, and
Restore brushes offer a chance to fix any mistakes.LUMINAR IS AN IMAGE EDITING APP that we’ve covered before through a couple of previous
incarnations and now the time has come for another new version. Luminar Neo is the latest
edition, due for release later in 2022, but Maximum PC has managed to get hold of a special
pre-release version to show you the kinds of things its AI-powered tools are capable of.
Neo brings together features from the previous Luminar 4 and Luminar AI releases and
adds some new stuff of its own. Since its launch in 2016 as a Mac-only app, Luminar has
gained features and Windows compatibility, concentrating on effects that can be achieved with
sliders and automatic selections rather than requiring a great deal of manual input. Its last big
innovation was sky replacement, which automatically selected the area of sky in an image and
replaced it with a new sky from a cache of sample photos, or from one you’ve taken yourself.
Then there were the giraffes—indeed, the ability to add tall African herbivores to an image
turned out to be the sort of tool many photo manipulators didn’t know they wanted.
There’s more of that sort of thing than ever before in Luminar Neo, which is turning out to be
an intelligent rethink of what makes the app unique. –IAN EVENDENYOU’LL NEED THIS
LUMINAR NEO
(OUT LATE 2022)
https://skylum.com/
Images to edit>> Below that are Background options. These control
the quality of the background blur you’re creating and
cover its brightness compared to the subject, the glow of
any highlights in it (don’t expect the kind of bokeh balls
you’d get from a real fast lens), and the white balance
(‘warmth’). There’s also the ability to change the depth
that the AI has perceived and mapped in the image,
defining more clearly what the background is if needed,
and the edge of the mask can be expanded or contracted
too, with Edges Correction.3
SKIES
Look at this incredible sunset [Image C]. It’s totally
fake. The original (see boxout) was a rather lovely
blue sky from near the middle of the day, with little in the
way of shadows and a few clouds and airplane contrails.
Using Luminar Neo’s Sky AI—found just below Relight AI
in the Creative section—we can replace the whole sky,
then relight the rest of the image to match. There are
a large number of skies built into the application, from
sunny days to sunsets and nightscapes. You can choose
to add your own or you can follow the ‘Get More Skies’
link to the Skylum marketplace, where you’ll find packsBA© LUMINAR-NEO62 MAXIMU MPC APR 2022
R&D