This morning, Skylum announced the upcoming release of Luminar 4, set to ship this fall. With this release, Skylum continues to push forward with its machine learning tools, introducing a new Sky Replacement feature.

In Luminar 2018, Skylum introduced the AI Sky Enhancer filter, helping to add depth and color back into flat or blown-out skies. And earlier this year, Skylum added the new Accent AI 2.0 filter to Luminar 3, helping photographers automatically enhance images. Now, with Luminar 4, AI Sky Replacement offers the first automatic tool for replacing skies, allowing users to select from a variety of skies to apply to their images.

Sky replacement has become popular in recent years, especially with landscape photographers. It’s great to bring life into vacation photos where the weather wasn’t perfect, or surprise moments where you couldn’t plan for the perfect conditions. The process usually involves tools like Smart Selection, Luminosity Masking, Overlaying, Layers, Masking and more. With Luminar 4, photographers can now replace skies with just the click of a button, simplifying and speeding up a process that often took hours to complete.

The technology behind AI Sky Replacement

AI Sky Replacement works by automatically detecting not only the sky, but also objects in a photograph’s scene. This helps make sure the photo ends up being as realistic as possible once you insert a new sky. It removes things like halos, artifacts and edges of transitions, problems that often were present in existing sky replacement techniques. With the AI Sky Replacement you will also be able to adjust the sky to fit the rest of an image — things like depth of field, tone, exposure and color — making it great for not only landscapes, but also portraits.

AI Sky Replacement also correctly detects the horizon line and the orientation of the sky to replace so that it looks as realistic as possible.

Additionally, with the scene relight technology, you’ll see the rest of your photo change in terms of light and color when you select your sky of choice. This makes sure that an image and sky match so they appear they were taken during the same conditions. Because of the toning that AI Sky Replacement does to an image, it looks as natural and smooth as possible.

Luminar 4 is set to be released this fall, but early bird pre-order pricing is now available. Users can purchase Luminar 4 and the Signature Looks bundle for $59 (normally $138), or get the Luminar 4, Signature Looks and Luminar 3 bundle for $99 (normally $207). Click here to pre-order your copy!