88 DIGITAL CAMERA^ APRIL 2020 http://www.digitalcameraworld.comPerfect skies with AI Sky
Replacement in Luminar 4
When nature doesn’t give you the sky you want, Luminar can!
How to get
a copy of
Skylum
Luminar 4
If you don’t have Luminar
4 already, you can
download a free 14-day
trial from the Skylum
website. It’s available in both macOS and
Windows versions and as all the features are
fully functional, you can follow this tutorial
yourself. If you decide to go ahead and
buy Luminar 4, you can use the exclusive
discount code DCW20 to save £10/$10
on the full purchase price.skylum.com
he AI Sky Replacement
filter is one of the
major new tools in
Luminar 4 and has
been enhanced in
version 4.1. It does a job that
photographers have been doing
manually for a very long time,
and it does it so effectively that
it almost feels like cheating.
You can replace skies in Photoshop
and other image editors, of course,
but it often requires a good deal of
skill, patience and expertise. If you
have a nice, uncomplicated horizon
line it’s not too difficult, but if you
have a highly detailed treeline or
city skyline, with lots of fine edges,
gaps and ‘holes’, making a perfect
selection can be so time-consuming
that eventually it’s easier to give up.
Luminar’s AI Sky Replacement tool
changes that complicated process.It can automatically identify and
separate the sky area in your original
image. This is impressive enough,
but it can also mask the sky area
so effectively that it’s actually quite
difficult to find any faults in the
selection. AI Sky Replacement
follows even the most detailed
treelines perfectly and finds the gaps
between trees that a regular Magic
Wand tool would miss. There are
sliders for fine-tuning the results
to make the masking even better,
but you usually don’t need them.
To make replacement skies look
how you want them to, so they truly
feel like part of the shot, you need
to pay attention to the lighting, the
colours and the exposure. We’ll
show how this process works,
and how a few simple tricks
and techniques can make a
big difference to the final result.T
After
Before
ADVERTISING FEATURE