I've been experimenting with the Free version of Luminar 4

[Photogimp]

Thanks for the thread. Good education. Especially helpful was the side-by-sides from Greyfox. It highlights the need to have appropriate shadowing in the subject area for the sky being inserted. The result was very good but I got the "feeling" that something was off. Be careful when fooling with Mother Nature.

[hectorsm]

Luminar did an excellent job there, not easy to do better or even as good in ACDSee, but possible nonetheless:

Excellent results. Hopefully ACDSee will make that process a little easier in a future update. Although, I can think of other features that should be higher priority that need improvements before this one.

Hector

[hectorsm]

Hector,

ACDSee have a quite small allowance for images uploaded to the forum, they don't actually want users to upload high res images.
In most cases relatively low res screen shots are adequate for forum subjects. Where it is necessary to pass on high res images, use a file transfer service like Dropbox or the free WeTransfer service, and post a link in the forum to the download.

In regards to Luminar 4, if you do use it be aware that it's support of metadata is not good, particularly IPTC and XMP, so if it is used freestanding you might find the saved version no longer has some of the metadata. You can avoid that by using it as a plug in from ACDSee's edit mode as I do, but there were some issues reported getting that to work.

Thanks for the advice. I thought about posting a link from my Flickr account. That should work also, except for raw files.

Good to know we can use L4 as a plugin to ACDSee.

Hector

[gfxtom]

Hi Regor250!

Thank you very much for these great instructions. I'll try that in a moment.
All the best and stay healthy!

[Regor250]

Hi Regor250

it's true, Luminar (I have Luminar AI as a plugin) does it best, better than Photoshop.
Still, I'm surprised at how well the ACDSee can do. How did you do this? I would be very happy to receive an answer. Thanks in advance.

Sorry for the google translation

Basically created a new layer with the sky, applied the Darken blend mode, and added a mask to protect the non-sky areas. Applying some transparency also brought back some of the finer details. The tricky part is to get a good mask. For the image above I created a high contrast B&W version of the image, saved it and converted it to pure B&W in view mode then added it back as a layer, and copy pasted it as a mask, then deleted the layer. When the mask leaves unwanted transition edges I fine tune (Select>Refine) it by copying it as a selection, adjusting the selection edges by a few pixels, and then recreate the mask from the adjusted selection. I sometimes also simply painted white on the mask where the details were coarser, and the darken blend mode took care of blending the edges transitions. If you want to bring back some of the areas of the sky because of the transparency, create a blank layer underneath the sky, and paint white where you want to hide the original sky coming through. The method of selection really matters not, whatever works best for the given image. For example, in the example below (I was trying to replicate the overlay bug), I simply used a combination of Luminance/Color range selection and manual magic selection with some Refine applied and I'd say it worked pretty good on that dead fir tree, which is the most challenging detail here (and I'm working from an Gigapixel enlarged low resolution version of the original at that. Using Gigapixel AI to enlarge your original 4x or even 6x is a good way to add pixels to small details to get a better mask too):

[gfxtom]

Hi Regor250

it's true, Luminar (I have Luminar AI as a plugin) does it best, better than Photoshop.
Still, I'm surprised at how well the ACDSee can do. How did you do this? I would be very happy to receive an answer. Thanks in advance.

Sorry for the google translation

[Regor250]

One thing that happened when editing this image, I lost the ability to see selection overlay. I could still make a selection, but the overlay wasn't visible. There's an obvious bug, but I am not sure of the sequence of edit I need to do to replicate it. I'll have to work on that. Sometimes saving and closing the image restored the selection overly for a brief moment. I could still save selections (that I couldn't see) to the selection basket, and opening the overly option window showed the presence of the selection, but it wasn't visible in the edit preview window.

[Regor250]

Luminar did an excellent job there, not easy to do better or even as good in ACDSee, but possible nonetheless:

[Greyfox]

Sorry for the small images. I kept getting some kind of error when I tried uploading the full size. The images in my previous post should be a little bit better but still not at full res. I'm still trying to learn how to post the images.

Hector,

ACDSee have a quite small allowance for images uploaded to the forum, they don't actually want users to upload high res images.
In most cases relatively low res screen shots are adequate for forum subjects. Where it is necessary to pass on high res images, use a file transfer service like Dropbox or the free WeTransfer service, and post a link in the forum to the download.

In regards to Luminar 4, if you do use it be aware that it's support of metadata is not good, particularly IPTC and XMP, so if it is used freestanding you might find the saved version no longer has some of the metadata. You can avoid that by using it as a plug in from ACDSee's edit mode as I do, but there were some issues reported getting that to work.

[hectorsm]

Not sure if hectorsm has Luminar 4, but here is a quick L4 effort.
I could only get a low res 300 x 449 image from the forum post, so did an initial enlargement in Topaz Gigapixel AI, then ran L4 as a plug in from ACDSee.

Sorry for the small images. I kept getting some kind of error when I tried uploading the full size. The images in my previous post should be a little bit better but still not at full res. I'm still trying to learn how to post the images.

Hector

[hectorsm]

The blend mode method is the quick way of swapping skies, but the color blend is applied to all colors that are lighter than the new sky image's corresponding pixels, hence the blue tinge in the foliage. Sometimes you just can't avoid masking part of the image and every image is different, but nothing here than you can't do with ACDSee. Curious, how did Luminar handled that image?

I've downloaded and installed Luminar to see how well it handles the sky replacement. I've also decided to start with the original undeveloped raw version instead of the previous processed version. Here is a comparison of the three.



I'm getting better results with Luminar with just a few click. It does a better job blending the two images and with no color cast. Still, I have no plans on using Luminar as my main raw processor. I like how ACDSee features better. I will probably use Luminar in cases like this.

Hector

[Greyfox]

..Curious, how did Luminar handled that image?

Not sure if hectorsm has Luminar 4, but here is a quick L4 effort.
I could only get a low res 300 x 449 image from the forum post, so did an initial enlargement in Topaz Gigapixel AI, then ran L4 as a plug in from ACDSee.

[Regor250]

The blend mode method is the quick way of swapping skies, but the color blend is applied to all colors that are lighter than the new sky image's corresponding pixels, hence the blue tinge in the foliage. Sometimes you just can't avoid masking part of the image and every image is different, but nothing here than you can't do with ACDSee. Curious, how did Luminar handled that image?

[hectorsm]

As Alec mentioned in the video, you can download sky images from free on line sources like Unsplash.

I have ones I have downloaded, sky packs I purchased some time ago (but rarely used because they tend to be too dramatic). Mostly though I use ones I have taken myself.

I try to take the images from places where there is a horizon, but with minimum protrusions of objects into the horizon (so taken from a hill or high point, or from a beach). I post crop the bottom of the images at or close to the horizon (so the bottom edge is effectively the horizon point). Knowing where the horizon was helps when positioning the sky on the image.

If you take your own sky images, you can choose ones where the light is from the left, from the right, or evenly spread. Morning shots with the sun rising, evening towards sunset, lots of clouds, relatively clear sky's etc. I would avoid using "spectacular sky shots" at least in the beginning, because there will be few images where they will look real. Remember that the main subject in photos where sky changes are considered would rarely be the sky itself.

Other than shots taken for a specific purpose, like real estate sales photos, or where for artistic reasons one wants to change the tone of an image, most sky changes are probably only considered for images where the sky, or parts of it are blown, but the rest of the image is worth keeping. For realistic results with that type of image, the replacement sky would be expected to be relatively bright and clear.

Just for fun, here's my attempt. It's okay but not perfect. The tree branches in the sky area have a blue tint on them, and the details on top of the mountain appear to have been lost. My skill with the edit mode tools is very limited so it's very possible the results can be improved. I can probably fix the tree branch color with a Nik color control point, but the top edge of the mountain it's more difficult.



This is not something I'll do often, but it's good to know it can be done within ACDSee without having to go to an external editor.

I'm not sure how to post the images here that will allow resizing. Sorry about that.

Hector

[Greyfox]

Where do you get your sky's? I might try it, just to learn.

As Alec mentioned in the video, you can download sky images from free on line sources like Unsplash.

I have ones I have downloaded, sky packs I purchased some time ago (but rarely used because they tend to be too dramatic). Mostly though I use ones I have taken myself.

I try to take the images from places where there is a horizon, but with minimum protrusions of objects into the horizon (so taken from a hill or high point, or from a beach). I post crop the bottom of the images at or close to the horizon (so the bottom edge is effectively the horizon point). Knowing where the horizon was helps when positioning the sky on the image.

If you take your own sky images, you can choose ones where the light is from the left, from the right, or evenly spread. Morning shots with the sun rising, evening towards sunset, lots of clouds, relatively clear sky's etc. I would avoid using "spectacular sky shots" at least in the beginning, because there will be few images where they will look real. Remember that the main subject in photos where sky changes are considered would rarely be the sky itself.

Other than shots taken for a specific purpose, like real estate sales photos, or where for artistic reasons one wants to change the tone of an image, most sky changes are probably only considered for images where the sky, or parts of it are blown, but the rest of the image is worth keeping. For realistic results with that type of image, the replacement sky would be expected to be relatively bright and clear.