In this article and video, I’m going to show you Skylum’s new drone specific software, AirMagic, for taking your drone photos, both JPG and DNG RAW, and quickly producing beautiful results with them.

How does it work?

Here’s how Skylum describes it:

There’s no doubt drone photos look breathtaking. You can see our world from places previously unreachable. But drone photos often lack quality. You may spend ages getting that one shot with a drone, and then you may spend even more time making it look perfect with manual editing.

That’s why we’ve created the brand-new AirMagic, an automated photo enhancer tailored for drone and aerial photography. It resolves all issues inherent to aerial photography in one move — no more haze, low or extreme contrast, lack of sharpness, undersaturation, and chromatic aberration.

All you need to do is drop your aerial photos into the app and the software takes care of the rest. AirMagic detects the drone camera used and then, with the power of AI and smart algorithms, evaluates each photograph, applying different adjustments to make it its best. You also can create a unique look for your photos by choosing from one of five different Styles.

Watch the video

Two things that I want to mention that I didn’t put in the video. First if you apply a style to one photograph and want to apply to all the photos on the main screen, all you have to do is right-click on that photograph and select Apply to these settings to all images. The other is that with the RAW files, I found the images a little soft, meaning that they needed some additional sharpening. I contacted Skylum about this and they have promised to address this in a future update.

Before and after

AirMagic Image 1

AirMagic Image 1

AirMagic Image 3

Conclusion

For my professional work, when I go out on a drone shoot I typically have anywhere from 50 to a few hundred photographs to review. And because I shoot in RAW it is nice to have a tool that can create a good looking first cut of the photographs for me. I find that the AI used by AirMagic to enhance the skies, show details and boost colors does a very good job. The fact that the software adjusts itself based upon the camera/camera I’m using is also a plus. This means that it applies adjustments differently based upon what drone and the camera used on that drone.

With the ability to apply styles to select photographs and control how much it applies, gives me additional flexibility. Then I can take these processed photographs and use them to show to my client. From there we can decide which we use as is (processed by AirMagic alone) and which I’ll take and process further, or redo the process manually using one of my full featured editors like Photoshop, CaptureOne, Luminar or Aurora.

When I’m going out and shooting just for fun, this is a great tool to take and process my photographs quickly and easily, so I can share them with friends or post to social media.

A couple of things I’d like to see are having the option to see the filename and file type (JPF, DNG, TIFF) of the photographs on the main page. I’d also like to see the options panel already opened when I export all the photographs at one time from the main screen. Currently, I have to click the options button to see how all the images are being exported.

Click here to get your copy of AirMagic for just $39. Get an additional 20% off with the code PHOTOFOCUS.

Fly safe and have fun!