In this video, photographer Anthony Morganti compares three popular image editing software that currently includes the sky replacement feature and sees which one does the best job.
Luminar AI
Luminar was the first to introduce the sky replacement feature and it seems that the company had done a great job overall. You get a lot of control and the actual replacement is fairly quick and typically very accurate including identifying man-made objects and placing the sky behind them.
The only drawback of the current version of the software is reflections. While the software can create reflections, your ability to control them is lacking resulting in what in some situations can be an unrealistic look.
Since Luminar Neo is going to be released soon it will be interesting to see if there will be any improvements coming in that version.
On1 Photo Raw 2022
The sky replacement feature on the ON1 software is fairly new however it does a great job in replacing skies and even has control over reflections which Luminar currently lacks. The action is fairly quick and you have a lot of control overall.
Where things start to fall apart however is when you introduce man-made objects into the picture. While this doesn’t happen in every case, in some images ON1 will simply paint the sky on a structure and there is no simple way of masking this out which is a big problem.
Photoshop CC 2022
Photoshop added the sky replacement feature several months ago and while it does a fairly decent job, it seems to have some major drawbacks.
First, the algorithms currently lack any sort of reflection option which can be a deal-breaker for many users. Next, we have the speed, the software seems to be somewhat slower to respond compared to the two other software. Finally, there doesn’t seem to be a way to change your selection once this is made.
The people at Adobe have some work on their hands improving this feature (although for simple sky replacements it still does a decent job).
Sky ReplacementSo who is the best?
Overall Luminar AI seems to do the best job unless you are running into issues with reflections. It is clear that this technology is still in relatively early stages and in a few iterations, none of these issues should be bothering you anymore.
You can check out more useful Lightroom guides and tips on our LensVid Lightroom section as well as more videos by Anthony Morganti here on Lensvid.
Iddo Genuth 
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