Skylum has announced a free update for Luminar 2018 which adds a new AI Sky Enhancer. Operated by just a single slider, the new feature, as the name suggests, uses AI to selectively add depth, definition and drama to enhance the sky in your photos.

The goal of the AI Sky Enhancer is to help bring back some of that contrast and drama we saw with our eyes without having to spend too much time creating masks and layers to selectively bring areas up or down to try and bring it back. Skylum says that hundreds of thousands of photos covering varying degrees of tonal skies were used to train a deep neural network. This is what powers the AI Sky Enhancer and lets Luminar analyse, detect and adjust only the sky.

I’ve been having a play with the new AI Sky Enhancer myself with a few old snaps. So here’s a couple of before and afters. The afters all have the AI Sky Enhancer at 100%. On some images, the effect at 100% can be a little strong, so you probably won’t need to take it this far all the time.

Like I said, and as you can see above, taking the slider all the way to 100% can be a little strong on some images, so you won’t want to dial it up all the way all the time, or even often. But it definitely lets you pull a fair amount of detail back into those skies very quickly.

The new update comes ahead of the expected Luminar 3 with Libraries, which releases on December 18th. Luminar 3 comes as a free upgrade for existing Luminar 2018 users until late into 2019, and there’s no annual subscription fee. Luminar is also going to receive a new Digital Asset Manager at some point (hopefully) soon, and it will also be seeing Loupedeck+ support.

Luminar is available to new customers for just $59, with current users of other Skylum applications such as Aurora HDR, Photolemur and legacy products able to purchase Luminar for $49.