Sneak Peek: Skylum Shows Off Water Reflections in AI Sky Replacement Tool

Skylum, the makers of Luminar 4 and the soon-to-be released Luminar AI, are taking a page out of the Adobe playbook. In a sneak peek video released earlier today, the company showed off the next iteration of its AI-powered Sky Replacement tool, which will be able to generate fake reflections from you “new” sky automagically.

Since its debut in 2019, AI Sky Replacement has become one of the more popular machine learning-powered features in Luminar. But while it does a decent job of cutting out the sky, dropping in something new, and adjusting the lighting in your image to match, there is one thing it notably does not do: it doesn’t add sky reflections to water.

That is, until now.

In so-called Sky AI 2.0, the editing software will be able to automatically generate a reflection of your new sky on any highly reflective surface (mostly water) that happens to be in your original photo. It’s not a huge change, but the capacity to do this adds that little bit of extra “pop” that can really sell the edit and make it look “real.”

And if it’s not looking quite right, you’ll be able to adjust the strength of the reflection or even add ripples to the surface of the water.

You can see the tool in action in the video above, or check out some before and after images below:

Check out the upcoming feature in the video demo up top to see the tool in action for yourself.

The new-and-improved Sky AI 2.0 will be coming to Luminar AI via a free software update sometime in 2021, and will not be coming to Luminar 4. We’ve confirmed this with a Skylum spokesperson, so it seems that Luminar 4 will not be getting any additional AI-powered features as Skylum shifts all of that tech over to Luminar AI.