On November 18, 2019, Skylum will release Luminar 4, the AI photo editing tool for anyone who makes pictures. At PhotoPlus in New York, I talked with Dima Sytnik, chief product officer and co-founder of Skylum about the new artificial intelligence tools in Luminar 4.

Four AI tools for faster photo editing

Interview transcript

Hi. I’m Dima Sytnik. I’m a chief product officer at Skylum, and I’m one of the co-founders of the company. I’m responsible for Luminar 4 development and new technology research. We’re working with engineers to bring you the best technologies possible to make your photo editing workflow flow easier and faster than ever.

The new technological advances in Luminar 4 is our new AI engine. We call it Artificial Intelligent Engine Skylum 2.0 and we have 4 AI-powered filters in Luminar 4, which is very unique to the market. It’s AI Sky Replacement, AI Skin Enhancer, Portrait Enhancer, and AI Structure. So, photographers now can achieve the results much faster and much easier than before, but the quality is very high. It’s a quality of high professional photo retouchers and it’s available for everyone.

AI Sky Replacement

The first technology is AI Sky Replacement. It’s an AI-powered tool to replace the sky, even with the most complex cases, with a lot of semi-transparent objects. We’ve been working on this technology for two years, and now we’re ready to launch it. With this technology, everyone can replace the sky and have very realistic images in seconds, and everyone can use even their own sky to create something great in a very easy way.

AI Structure

The second technology is AI Structure. It’s very smart technology to improve local contrast and structure an image, but it’s very smart because it’s content-aware. This tool looks at the image and the text where is the best areas to extract details to create the most pleasing image for the human eye, and it’s very awesome because you don’t have to use any brushing or masking or care about extra noise or halos. With just one slider, you can get great, high-professional results, and the image will stay realistic but just get this extra punch of detail, and everyone can make it in a very easy way.

Kevin Ames: Will AI Structure make skin look crunchy?

Dima: No, it’s very smart. It knows where is person, where is skin, so it works very intelligent with the sky, with the building, with the structure, with the water, and apply different adjustments for different objects because it’s content-aware.

(AI Structure affects the hair and painted skin but leaves the model’s face untouched. Look closely at the dirt on the model’s chest. It is part of the look. AI Structure makes it grittier yet the skin on her face remains as smooth as it is in the before example)

AI Skin Enhancer

[The] third technology is AI Skin Enhancer. So, we made a very great technology to achieve high-quality, professional results of skin retouching in seconds thanks to AI-powered technologies. Our AI technology is able to detect full-body skin and automatically retouch everything in seconds, and you’re able to remove all the skin blemishes and imperfections with just one click.

The result is amazing. We keep all the sharp objects like hair, eyebrows, eyes, nose, and lips untouched. Keep all the pores, but remove all imperfections with just one slider, and the quality is equal to the quality of high-professional re-touchers that are available on the market.

Portrait Enhancer

The last technology is Portrait Enhancer. It’s a very easy way to not just improve skin, but to edit your portrait to make them much more beautiful because portrait retouching is actually all about making the portrait look natural but more beautiful. With this technology, you don’t have to use manual selection of the faces or face features. AI does it for you.

You just have to select what kind of style they want to have with your face. You can enhance eyebrows and eyes. You can widen the face, you can enhance mouths, you can actually slim the face, and get these results in seconds. It’s great technology, and as the previous technology, can synchronize this adjustment and get much more beautiful portraits in seconds.

Kevin: Does Luminar 4’s AI technology require the cloud, or is it local?

Dima: All Luminar has a lot of different AI technologies, but all of them will work just on your machine. We used the pre-trained AI models, and your images will stay yours. They will not be uploaded in the cloud, and all processing will be done on your machine, so that’s why we need more resources from your computer, but you can be safe about your privacy. I was really excited to tell you all about all these features that we have for you, and I hope you’ll like them.

Photos: ©Kevin Ames (Replacement skies courtesy of Skylum Software.)

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