Luminar Neo Adds a One-Click Portrait Background Removal Tool

Skylum has announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool in Luminar Neo that it says will help eliminate the time-consuming process of masking and background removal in portraits.

With the new Portrait Background Removal too, an image’s background — the area behind a photo’s subject, including complicated hair selections — can be made transparent with a single click.

The company says the Portrait Background Removal Tool in Luminar Neo will help users take the pressure off the details and let them focus on creativity by using one slider to select a human and remove the background behind it. Skylum believes this new tool is perfectly suited for creators who do not have the time to deal with the detailed and tedious editing involved with background removal and masking. Once updated to version 1.1, the tool can be found in the Luminar Neo Layer Masking options.

Skylum says the new tool provides several options to creatives including the ability to remove a busy background from an image without layering, gather clean assets for compositing (Exported as a PNG with transparent background) making it easy to create layouts and graphics for journalists and graphic designers, clean up busy or unappealing backgrounds at event photography sites (including the option to edit several images in a single click with custom saved presets), and make precise selections with minimal effort.

The company does clarify that there will be some scenarios where the mask will still need to be cleaned up, but the AI will take 90% of the heavy lifting away from end-users and just relies on them to use the Refine Brush to clean up any rough edges.

“Manual masking and separating people from the background is a lot of boring work to me,” Ivan Kutanin, CEO of Skylum says. “My creative spark can be extinguished by this routine. With Luminar’s new Portrait Background Removal tool, nothing will slow down the creativity. You can freely explore any and all of your wildest ideas.”

The Luminar Neo Update 1.1 is available now from the Skylum website and through various app stores including Microsoft and macOS stores, while Luminar Share is available in the iOS and Google Play stores.