Under The Hood Of Luminar AI, Skylum’s Latest Photo Editing Tool
In December 2020, Skylum—a software development company based in Bellevue, Washington—released the highly anticipated Luminar AI, the world’s first image editor entirely powered by artificial intelligence. The application is available as a standalone product for Windows and Mac and can be used as a plug-in for Photos for macOS and Adobe platforms, Photoshop and Lightroom. Luminar AI has four categories- catalog, templates, edit, and export. Catalog allows the user to see all their photographs, the recently added and recently edited tabs, folders, albums, and trash. Export, as the name suggests, allows one to save and displays options for sharing your work. The two main workspace options Luminar AI offers are the Template and Edit tabs. Templates The Template tab is ideal for beginners or for a quick edit. Here, one could go through the many collections of templates the software offers for different picture types. For example, the portrait category on Luminar AI offers four template collections, of which the Easy Portrait collection showcases five templates. Moreover, users have the option to buy more template collections on the Luminar Marketplace. The AI-based tab suggests templates based on the photo imported. For instance, an image of a garden at sunset might result in the landscapes and sunsets templates being suggested. The Template runs the image and uses AI to tweak the photograph until it fits. The software usually suggests more than one template for each image. You can also find a slider on the bottom right corner of the Template tab that allows you to soften or make more visible the effects of your chosen Template. Edit tab While Templates do allow for some great pictures, Edit tab is the real deal. The Edit workspace offers essential editing tools such as exposure, contrast, and supplementary AI-based effects, which take care of otherwise time-consuming activities such as ‘masking’ layers (in Photoshop). Let’s look at some more time-saving AI tools used in Luminar AI. The tools are divided into four tabs- Essentials, Creative, Portrait and Professional. Essentials: This includes the Composition AI, Structure AI and Enhance AI. The Composition AI adjusts your image’s composition and perspective and crops it to a perfect frame, saving a lot of time. Enhance AI consists of two settings, Accent AI—which operates with a slider that takes care of contrast, highlights, shadows and saturation—and Sky Enhancer AI—which is the same as Accent AI, but for skies instead of the whole image. Finally, Struct AI’s settings, Amount and Boost, work to sharpen or flatten the detail in an image and give it an HDR-like look. These features, like the others, work with a slider that can be dragged to dull or enhance its effects. Creative: Here, we have the Sky AI, Augmented Sky AI, Atmosphere AI, Mood and Film Grain. The Sky AI lets its user replace the sky in your image with a premade sky (which you can choose from). The Augmented Sky AI lets the user add birds, planes, balloons, etc., in the sky—but is purportedly not the most natural-looking. Atmosphere AI adds fog, mist, haze, etc., to an image which could be helpful in landscape photography. Mood applies a LUT to an image, which changes the image’s colour. Finally, Film Grain works like the grainy old moviesque filters on Instagram. They add nostalgia and aesthetic to images and can be adjusted for amount, size and roughness. Portrait: The Face, Skin and Body AI make many cumbersome functions, such as removing red eyes, whitening the subject’s teeth or perfecting their skin, making them thinner, etc., more straightforward. Besides, the AI also allows for funny or gimmicky alterations, such as adding cat eyes to the subject’s face. Professional: The Supercontrast and Colour Harmony AI adjust total contrast with six distinct controls spanning highlights, midtones and shadows to fine-tune results. Supercontrast allows more control over contrast. Similarly, Colour Harmony can be used to adjust colour. Some editors prefer the editing tools like Adobe Lightroom, but since Luminar AI can be used as a plug-in for such platforms, these users stand to gain from Luminar’s AI tools.All in all, Luminar AI is a game-changer in photo editing. The software is not only faster than its predecessor, Luminar 4, but more accessible. If you are a dyed in the wool photographer or too classicist to take AI’s help, LuminarAI offers conventional methods like ‘Edit Mask’. With Adobe and smartphones such as the Google Pixel embracing AI, photo editing as we know it is fading away.
In December 2020, Skylum—a software development company based in Bellevue, Washington—released the highly anticipated Luminar AI, the world’s first image editor entirely powered by artificial intelligence. The application is available as a standalone product for Windows and Mac and can be used as a plug-in for Photos for macOS and Adobe platforms, Photoshop and Lightroom. […]
Luminar AI has four categories- catalog, templates, edit, and export.
[]
["Go", "artificial intelligence", "programming_languages:R", "AI", "programming_languages:Go", "RAG", "ViT", "R"]
["AI", "artificial intelligence", "RAG", "R", "Go", "ViT", "programming_languages:R", "programming_languages:Go"]
I am an economics undergrad who loves drinking coffee and writing about technology and finance. I like to play the ukulele and watch old movies when I'm free.