A First Look at the new Sky Enhancer Filter in Luminar
The latest update to Luminar has just been released and it contains the new “Sky Enhancer” filter which Skylum have been plugging for a little while. The feature is another of the companies AI tools and it is specifically designed to enhance skies.
I’ve had access to the beta, but because of my current workload, I’m a bit behind with things, so here’s some of my findings. In order to best demonstrate it I figured it would be easier just to show you, so here’s a quick video of the feature in action
First of all, it’s not something that I think is going to blow anyone away, although I do think there’s some clever technology behind it. If you’ve used the Enhance AI filter before it provides results that are kind of similar to that, but limited to the sky. It also does a kind of polarising effect. It can over-do it too, so you probably never need to use the slider up full.
The clever part here seems to be the automatic masking that’s going on. The effect is limited to skies, and even if you have things like buildings protruding, it will still only apply it to the sky. It doesn’t matter where the sky is in your image either, it still knows it’s there. Zooming in you can’t really see any dodgy edges, so from that perspective it’s pretty impressive. Having said that, there was one shot I tried with a tree in it and there was a degree of a halo around the tree, although there was some of this in the image already.
Overall, Sky Enhancer is a handy tool to have in the Luminar toolbox, but I think that it may have been overhyped a little. From a technological perspective it is impressive, but from a creative perspective, it’s useful, but a little underwhelming.
Uou can learn more about Sky Enhancer on the Luminar website. If you don’t have Luminar and are considering it, if you do go to purchase the software, don’t forget to use my discount code to get $10 off. Just use the code TFP10 at the checkout.
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