As we lead up to the release of Luminar 4, Skylum is teasing us with new features to chum the waters. The latest is AI Structure, which is potentially quite useful.

Structure is a detail-enhancing tool found in most image editing applications. Depending on its particular algorithm, it typically increases midtone contrast with a bit of clever sharpening. It's particularly useful for architecture and landscape work.

The challenge is, when applied globally, is that there may be elements in the composition, such as people, where you don't want the structure applied. Who wants to increase the skin texture of their mom?!

Our best option then is to apply structure with a brush so we can use the enhancement locally instead of globally, only increasing the contrast and detail to the areas of the image that can benefit from it. This works well, but it is time consuming.

What Skylum proposes with AI Structure in Luminar 4, is to use machine learning to identify the areas in the image that would benefit from structure enhancement, and leave the other areas alone.

I think the best example of this is the "Human Aware" before/after illustration on the Luminar 4 page, where the woman is untouched during the application of structure, but we see real enhancement in the wood background.

The key to all of this working is accurate masking with no halos. The better the algorithm, the more useful the tool. In this case AI Structure looks darn good.

We will continue to see changes to our image editing tools thanks to machine learning. This latest innovation in Luminar 4 promises to be a good one.

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