You also want to make sure the light in the sky image that you choose is coming from the same direction as the light in our scene. The original image we are using is a sunset/golden hour photography which leads me to select a sunset sky. The key to this step is to match the lighting in your image to the sky image you are trying to blend in. My favorite tool for sky replacement in the past has been Mike Kelly’s Ultimate Sky Library offered by Fstoppers, it has such a great variety of high-resolution options for any lighting condition. The beauty of Luminar 4’s AI Sky Replacement is that it offers a whole list of sky options to blend into your photos, ranging from daytime, to sunset, to even starry night skies. Once we are in Luminar 4, select AI Sky Replacement.

From there, right-click and select ‘Edit in Luminar 4’. I am going to add a -.50 Radial Exposure Burn to the image to draw a bit more attention to the subjects. This is going to do everything for me and all I have to do is adjust my Exposure and Temperature to get to my final look. Using Visual Flow’s Lighting Condition Based Development (made in partnership with DVLOP) we selected the HDR Natural preset from our Modern Park. You can either use a preset or dial your look in manually, but get to a good starting place for your overall image in terms of color, temperature, and contrast. Dial-in your Look Inside of Lightroom Edited in one-click using the Visual Flow Lightroom Presets. Let’s discuss how we process an image like this from start to finish, starting in Lightroom and working our way to Luminar 4. In our previous Luminar 4 tutorial, you can see how easy and fast Luminar 4 portrait retouching tools are which completely warrant the purchase of this software for everyday usage.

This could mean 20-30 mins per photograph to get a convincing mask. You can even see my attempt in the video and how much time and steps I have to go through to get to a final product. While this action can be done in Photoshop, there isn’t an easy way to do get everything to blend correctly and convincingly that doesn’t eat up a bunch of post-production time.

This is a fairly complex task if there are multiple elements in the frame that cross through the sky and differs from image to image. When it comes to replacing skies, our best bet is to somehow make a selection of the actual sky.

Luminar ai sky replacement