This unedited version isn’t bad, but it’s a little hazy and lacks the impact of what it felt like when I saw it in real life: Here’s an example of a photo of a beautiful valley in Switzerland that I took this last October. While this isn’t far from the only new feature in Luminar 4, it’s the one that is worth talking about first as this really is breakthrough technology that makes me excited for Luminar now and in the future.

Luminar 4 addresses this with what it is calling Artificial Intelligence masking and it nothing demonstrates this better than its new sky replacement feature.

While Photoshop and Luminar offer masks to help with this, they are cumbersome to create especially along the edges of the mask against complex subjects like tree branches with leaves or hair. This is important because often times you want to make local edits to specific features of your photo, but not globally across the entire photo. Luminar is definitely one of those products that has a lot of great photo editing features, but it’s always lacked my beloved U-Point controls in the Nik Collection (now by DxO). I’ve been following Skylum Software since its MacPhun days and along the way they have made many products that I’d put into the camp of “good, but still not there yet”.

Skies for luminar 4