About two years ago, on the way home from vacation, we stopped at an old sanatorium in the Swiss mountains. I started several times to work with the pictures – but was never satisfied with the outcome: we had blue sky without any hint of clouds. It just never matched with what I had imagined as a result.
Finally Skylum released Luminar 4 with an amazing feature: AI Sky Replacement! With a previously edited picture I didn’t like too much, I opened it in Luminar 4 and just a few minutes later I was really happy with the outcome (I used one of the skies included in the software but I will have to collect some of my own now). Masking? Nope: just select the sky and adjust a few sliders to fine tune. There is no manual masking needed!
Here is my old edit compared to less than 5 minutes after Luminar 4:
For the curious ones, here is the original picture (the middle of a bracket with 0EV, +3EV and -3EV) I used here:
And the middle of the bracket I used for Aurora first:
The initial version: