Skylum are currently (as at 11/11/20) offering Luminar AI for pre-orders, as an affiliate I have been lucky enough to get a BETA copy of the software which provides me with a unique opportunity to try out some of the interesting new features and see how they perform on images I have selected rather than specific marketing information. In this post I wanted to show an example of Iris AI which is part of Face AI, I do need to note that this interface is not locked down, and as it is a BETA there may be changes to the interface at final release.

Because I don't typically take portrait photos, I used a portrait image of a man taken by Ludvig Wiese (https://unsplash.com/photos/d-MfHM-jHwc) to show the examples before and after the image had been edited. In the case of this image I applied a minor Accent AI tweak, with the majority of changes being made to the portrait through the Face AI tab (settings below).

It should be noted that the interface shown (above) is not locked down and may change. In this case I applied a little bit of eye whitening, increased the iris visibility, increased the face light and slimmed the face. The main change through and the highlight of this article is the Eyes: Blue dropdown. I have changed this from Original which was the image below;

Picture 1: Original Image with normal eyes, image captured by Ludvig Wiese.

When I used Accent AI, I didn't bother with any masking or anything like that but rather went with the AI tools to quickly edit the image, changing the image took the best part of < 1 minute and with that I created two artistic versions of the above picture with different eye colours. That i think is the benefit of this sort of tool, before you would need to worry about masking out the eyes, setting up multiple layers, and making numerous edits however, using Accent AI it allows people to easily focus on how artistically an image can look without worrying about the process required to undertake those changes. It becomes results driven rather than process driven.

Picture 2: Image with applied edits as discussed earlier but with green eyes applied.

Picture 3: Image with applied edits as discussed earlier but with blue eyes applied.

As you can see with the above samples, there are very few settings which are required to effectively change the colour of an eye in a portrait image. Many people may say this is not needed which may be true for some, but for those who have to change eye colors the process of masking the eyes in the image, to then apply the respective changes can be a hassle and take away from time which could be spent shooting photos, or editing other images. Whilst I don't shoot portraits often, so this tool may be of more limited use to me, I do like the ability to have the option to change eye colours, slim the face and undertake what can be considered more advanced retouching without having to learn a new skill, and spend time getting it done.

For those who are interested, pre-order links are below;