Lately, we have seen the release of several pieces of software which automates procedures that would have otherwise taken much longer to achieve. Replacing a sky has been possible for some time in several apps but Luminar and Adobe have made it faster than ever with recent releases. You can now replace a sky in a click or two, the software does all the masking and heavy lifting for you. This has been received with mixed feelings, the landscape photographers don’t like it, they like to chase their subjects using only what the scene offered to them at the time of capture. For them swapping a sky would be unacceptable. More artistically minded photographers seem to like it. I guess it depends on what philosophy you subscribe to.

Topaz has also released new versions of Sharpen, Gigapixel and Denoise that all use Artificial Intelligence to achieve their goal. Again, some people shied away in favour of established plugins found in Photoshop but after more reviews, many have endorsed the Topaz software as being superior to Photoshop. I have used the Sharpen app myself and found it to be an extremely good product.

I think that often we forget there are other apps out there other than the ones we use. We need to keep an open mind, we love our favourite editing software but you never know, there might be a better one around the corner, we shouldn’t be afraid to take a look. If something isn’t our thing then at least we know.