

Sky Replacement Does Come With a Big Caveat We'll be giving the product a full review when it comes out to see if it delivers. This animated GIF provides a sample of what Skylum is promising Luminar 4 will be able to do: Luminar 4 promises to make replacing the sky in your images as easy and realistic as this example of the New York skyline. You can get a quick look at how Luminar promises the filter will work from this teaser video: In another clever twist, the filter is designed to detect the horizon and orientation of the sky, so the replacement sky will look as natural as possible. The new filter will also allow you to adjust its effects to control elements like depth of field, tone, exposure, and color.

Since we're starting with just a photograph, it is difficult to completely estimate lighting. We'll see how well that works in practice, as doing it perfectly also means removing the light from the original sky first. Luminar's new filter promises to handle that task automatically.Įven more impressively, Skylum claims the new feature will actually relight the existing scene to match the light that would be coming from the replacement sky. However, blending the edges of your existing subjects and the new sky is much harder, especially if some of the subjects are translucent or have fine detail such as leaves or hair. Manually pasting a different color sky into a photo is a painstaking, but relatively simple process once you understand layers and masks. Now, Skylum says it has created a simple, one-click, AI-powered, sky replacement filter that the company will unveil as part of its upcoming Luminar 4 release.

More recently, we've seen smarter masking tools to help with the job.

Originally the process for swapping out the sky in a digital or digitized image involved using layers in Photoshop and carefully painting a mask. While not appropriate for documentary images, it can make quite a bit of difference to whether an image is so-so or appears amazing ("appears" because, of course, it isn't strictly a photograph at that point). One of the most popular image editing "tricks" is swapping out the sky in a photograph.
