Skylum announces Luminar 4 image editor and shows off AI-powered automatic Sky Replacement tool
posted Tuesday, July 23, 2019 at 1:00 PM EST
Skylum Software has announced that the next iteration of its flagship image editing software, Luminar, will be arriving this fall in the form of Luminar 4. While more details on Luminar 4 will be available as we approach its launch, Skylum has shown off one of the software's primary new features, AI Sky Replacement.
Before digging into this new feature, however, let's hear about Luminar 4 from Skylum CEO Alex Tsepko:
With Luminar 4 we continue to empower everyone who loves photography to make incredible images faster and easier. No one needs a 'simple another photo editor' these days. That's why with every Luminar update we bring photographers something truly meaningful, something that will really level up their creative skills.
Returning to the new AI Sky Replacement announcement, it may sound familiar to Luminar users. In Luminar's 2018 version, Skylum added the AI Sky Enhancement filter, which allowed users to quickly add depth and color to blown out skies with a simple slider. Additional artificial intelligence-powered editing tools were added to Luminar 3 via the Accent AI 2.0 filter. Now, with Luminar 4, AI Sky Replacement offers the first automatic tool for fully replacing the skies in your images, which Skylum hopes will save photographers hours of manual retouching and image editing work.
AI Sky Replacement allows you to bypass tools such as manual selections, luminosity masks, overlays, layers and more by Luminar 4 automatically detecting the sky and the objects in the scene as a whole. The software creates a mask for the sky, detects the horizon line and the orientation of the sky to aid in creating realistic results, which you can see a sample of below. It's one thing to replace the sky, it's another matter entirely to create a natural-looking result. This is where Skylum's scene relight technology comes into play, by making the rest of the image match the lighting and tone of the sky.
Skylum Software's Luminar 4 software is set to be released this fall and you can learn more about preordering the software by clicking here. Pricing for new users and for upgrades will be announced at a later date.
