[Leica] Luminar 4

[Jayanand Govindaraj]

I have been fiddling along with Luminar 4 the past few days, seeing it as a
valid replacement for the Nik Suite, thanks to DXO making no improvements
in the latter since they took over, and just making it more expensive and
cumbersome. Luminar is also developed by the same group who developed Nik,
and started this for the MAC initially, but for Windows as well since,
after selling Nik out to Google.

They have a wonderful sky replacement tool, called AI Sky Enhancer, which
almost perfectly figures out where the sky ends and land/water begins in a
photograph, and adds a sky of our choice. There are canned skies, but we
can add our own to the library as well, with a menu of adjustments that can
be done, including colour temperature and defocus, for a natural feel.

For example, I captured this unusual shot of a Black-browed Albatross and
Giant Petrel flying in tandem on the Southern Atlantic Ocean last month,
but had a horrible plain background:

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/jayanand/SGF/South+Georgia/South+Georgia-20191026-11812.jpg.html

After tweaking it a bit in AI Sky Enhancer, I ended up with this:

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/jayanand/SGF/South+Georgia/South+Georgia-20191026-11812sky.jpg.html

All in all, all the tools in Luminar 4 work very well, especially the AI
ones (there are many more), and it is well worth giving it a trial run!

Cheers
Jayanand