Well, Adobe has gone and done it. Sky replacement is now a featured part of the just-released Photoshop 2021. For about a year, Skylum has been the leader in sky replacement with Luminar 4, but the story isn't that simple anymore.
Today, DxO is taking the wraps off their latest update to their PhotoLab series, PhotoLab 4. It's a major update of its multiple award-winning photo-editing software. This latest version features DxO DeepPRIME, a revolutionary demosaicing and denoising technology based on artificial intelligence and trained with deep learning.
When Skykum gave us sky replacement features in Luminar 4 in 2019, it was a breakthrough that didn't require masks and a lot of work. A whole lot of landscape photographers and real estate photographers loved the feature.
I took a look at Topaz DeNoise AI earlier this year and found it effective at removing noise without killing the details in your images. My only complaint was that it was not a speed demon. On some large images, I had to wait almost a minute before the image was cleaned up. Is that better in the latest version?
Luminar software from Skylum has had a tremendous impact with many photo editors, bringing a lot of Photoshop and Lightroom-esque features along with some one-of-a-kind capabilities like one-click sky replacement and AI-based features for landscape and portrait photographers.
How often is it that you miss that great selfie expression, kid photo, or sports play because you didn't have your camera running at the right time? It happens to me a lot, but a new app for iOS and very soon coming to Android called SnipBack has some good ideas to fix this issue, and it makes me think that our pro gear could learn a few lessons here.
The LensPen has been around a long time, and you've seen it under a variety of brand names that act as OEMs for the original product. I had never used one, but often read about it. I was sent the original model (the NLP-1) for testing.
Today, Skylum released the latest update for Luminar, version 4.3, focusing on enhancing the overall experience for creatives through several welcome refinements and performance improvements.
Last year, I took a look at Astro Panel, a Photoshop plugin designed to enhance Milky Way and other astronomical images. At the time, I was happy with what it did, but the author had a security scheme that forced you to log into the app every couple of weeks, which I thought was burdensome and downright silly.
I'm mainly an Arizona based golden time landscape photographer, and I also mix in Milky Way and telescope based astronomical photography of galaxies and nebulas. On June 5th, a lightning storm struck the Catalina Mountains near Tucson, and almost literally, all hell broke loose.
The rollout begins today, so you'll see the updates soon if you haven't already. Adobe is calling this a major set of updates, and I'll highlight the ones that apply to photographers.
Mac users with a need to migrate image catalogs to another hosting app have found that process difficult to impossible. Help is here, in the form of a new app called Avalanche Unlimited from CYME Software. The app can deal with migration from Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Luminar 4, Capture One, and Apple Photos. The latter two are coming soon as a free update.
It was about a year ago I reviewed the NIK Collection 2, a rebirth of popular Adobe plugins that laid fallow while its new owner, Google, tried to figure out what to do with them until DXO bought the software in 2017 and continually upgraded the collection. They have now added a feature that is really going to excite photographers.
Like most of you, I'm cooped up at home other than occasional forage for groceries. As a landscape photographer in Arizona, there's plenty of landscape, but I'm doing my best to abide by the stay at home rules. So basically, the landscapes are in one place, I'm looking at 4 walls.
Like many photographers, I was intrigued by the announcement of the Peak Design Travel Tripod. It was a Kickstarter offering, like many things Peak Design sells. It appeared to be a fresh look at what a travel tripod should be, so I plunked down my money. I opted for the carbon fiber model, as travel tripods are all about weight, and carbon fiber is lighter.
RAW Power 3.0 gives Mac-based photographers a solid way to handle raw file editing that nicely syncs up with a version that runs on iOS.
Over the years, 3D has come and sort of gone, then come back again. We've seen it in the movies and in photography. After digital imaging got popular, I had a 3D Fuji camera, which was fun, but you either had to make expensive lenticular prints or watch on a 3D TV. Not a fulfilling experience.
Photolab 3.1 from DXO has been out a couple of months now, and early looks from photographers have been positive. It's a complete raw editor and has many features photographers will expect to see and adds some very worthwhile enhancements that will highly interest editors at every skill level.
I've been looking at photo apps for the iPhone since the phone was first released in 2007. From the start, it was pretty clear Apple wasn't getting the most out of their own camera with the built-in app, and third parties rushed in. If you wanted to take serious photos, many of the apps were wanting, offering stickers and other features most pros would disdain. But not this app.
Experienced night sky shooters know that some of the most challenging targets are meteors. While meteor showers, which happen several times a year, will make capturing the elusive meteors easier because there are more of them, you can still point a camera to the sky with a 30 minute exposure and get nothing. Then, suddenly, a meteor can appear where you weren't pointing.
