Luminar 4

£81 FROM Skylum, skylum.com/luminar NEEDS macOS 10.12

The AI is particularly impressive when put to work on portraits

Skylum specialises in photoediting applications and Luminar 4 is its flagship suite, running as a standalone app or as a plug-in for Photos, Photoshop or Lightroom. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline the process of identifying areas of images for enhancement, and offers a powerful set of tools without requiring a person to have advanced knowledge of graphical concepts.

With all major image formats supported, including RAW, you load either a single file or a folder of files. There’s support for layering and adjustment layers like in Photoshop, and AI-powered ‘essential’ adjustments like white balance, colour, exposure and detail, among others. Many of these have a Mask option that lets you draw in free-form, radial or gradient masks under which adjustments will be applied. Various automatic options like

Landscape Enhancer are available that attempt to enrich and clarify your shots, with controls you can tweak.

More AI tricks

The Creative tab reveals further options like AI sky replacement, which is remarkably effective at identifying and replacing skies with preset alternatives. More presets can be purchased, along with other ‘looks’ – pre-created templates for enhancing whole images. The AI is also particularly impressive when put to work on portraits, with the app identifying skin, eyes, mouths and more with ease and letting you change their shape, appearance and smoothness. The skin-smoothing algorithm is excellent, removing imperfections without appearing artificial. It’s also adept at removing objects from flattened images – set a brush size and draw around something that’s reasonably well defined and it can be removed effectively.

Luminar 4 is a sort of mixture of the best features of other leading photo-editing apps. It has easily accessible editing and masking tools and great presets like Lightroom, but adds layer functionality and AI. It’s also much more user friendly and catalogue-oriented for photographers than Photoshop. The AI really works and there’s a great depth of features, all presented in a slick and easy interface. For all but the most demanding photographers, it’s an excellent way to enhance and edit your photos in a professional way. HOLLIN JONES

Use presets or AI to quickly enhance and enrich images, then make tweaks.

Auto-detect the sky then replace it with a couple of clicks. Choose from preset skies or add more via an IAP.