Luminar 2018 has been updated with brand new features:

• AI Sky Enhancer
• Accent AI

What are they? Here’s what Skylum say about them:

Luminar uses Artificial Intelligence to make the sky on your photos look incredible automatically

and

The Accent AI is a secret “weapon” of thousands of photographers. It analyzes your photos and applies enhancements instead of a dozen manual adjustments.

Well, that’s the theory. But how do they work in practice? First impressions are good – you apply these effects simply – just choose a setting from 0 (off) to 100 (max).

I threw some RAW images at them, most of which had skies that needed ‘work’ and a couple with skies that were already decent. See the results for yourself…

The results

The only Luminar effects applied to these images are the Sky Enhancer and the Accent AI. The results are impressive…

Conclusion

AI Sky Enhancer acts like a polarisar on blue skies but, in addition, brings out hidden details. It does so without introducing nasty artefacts into the photos and does not affect other areas of the image. Accent AI enhances the whole image, including the sky, improving clarity, colours, contrast and detail. And you can apply both these effects in seconds.

These two effects alone are worth the price of the software, but it features so much more and in December a free, for existing users, update will add Digital Asset Management capabilities. At just £53 this software is affordable and far better than some expensive alternatives I could mention.

Visit skylum.com for more information.