Luminar lets you add atmospheric haze and lets you defocus the sky. Both let you import skies from your own library, and both let you flip the skies horizontally. On the majority of sky replacement tests I did, both Luminar and Photoshop looked about the same. With Photoshop, the effect was subtle or not visible at all. I got a far more realistic outcome using the Luminar Relight Scene slider than I did with the Photoshop color adjustment slider. I found Luminar had a much better option there. Both software programs have sliders to spread the new sky color on the landscape, making it a better integration between the original image and the new sky. Normally, I'd call it a day and declare Photoshop the winner, but it's not that simple. Luminar only allows you to move the sky vertically.

Photoshop lets you move the sky image vertically and horizontally. In the Adobe controls, note the options to reposition the sky image at the left of the panel, and the scale control that's missing from Luminar. Here's a look at the sky controls for Luminar, followed by the Photoshop controls. If I went too far with the edge controls, the sky image itself was altered, which is not a good outcome. This was much smoother, although again, I had to play with the edge controls in Photoshop to improve things. I tried the same challenge with the new sky replacement feature of Photoshop 2021: You can see the areas where it is less than perfect: Luminar has some issues here, and while one can use the Close Gaps control to help, it still has problems filling in between the leaves and the branches. Here's the original image of the location:Īnd here is a closeup of the trees that can be problematic for auto-masking software: It would be very difficult to do a sky replacement by manually masking in a new sky with all this vegetation, so automation offers hope for an image like this. That's just what I wanted to find out, so I took an image that has routinely tripped up Luminar because it had trees with many small branches and leaves. While sky replacement is still a contentious issue, it can mean a lot to many real estate photographers, wedding photographers who do outside events, and some landscape photographers who find it useful at times. The controversy will always be with us, and that's a healthy thing, but how does the Adobe offering stand up to Luminar's popular sky controls? Now, four years later, Adobe is offering this feature, seemingly playing catch-up with Skylum. It got, as I remember, much applause and interest. Adobe first showed off sky replacement at the Adobe Max 2016 conclave.

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