How to Add and Organize Custom Skies In Luminar Neo

Being able to do a sky replacement with Luminar Neo is a game-changer. 

But if you take some sky images of your own and add them to Luminar Neo one by one, eventually you’ll end up with a big mess. When you have all your skies in the Custom Skies folder it makes it hard to find the one you want when you have to scroll through 20 or more, right? 

But what if there was an easy way to organize your skies? Well, guess what, there is, and in this video, I’ll show you how to do that step-by-step.

How to Replace Skies in a Photo with Luminar Neo

Step 1: Download and unzip any skies you want to add to Luminar Neo.

Step 2: Go to Luminar Neo and activate the Sky AI tool.

Step 3: Choose “Show Custom Skies” from the second pull-down menu in the Sky AI tool.

Step 4: Add your new skies to that folder (drag and drop or copy and paste them).

Step 5: Organize all your skies into subfolders inside the Custom Skies main folder.

Step 6: Enjoy using your newly organized skies!

Tips for Sky Replacement in Your Images

• Taking the image, try to crop out as much of the foreground and horizon as possible. 

• Remove distracting elements from the horizon or foreground using Luminar Neo’s Erase tool or GenErase feature to ensure a clean and natural sky replacement.

• Keep the image light but do not clip the highlights (hint: show the clipping warnings by pressing the keyboard shortcut “j”).

• Adjust the shadow slider (+) so that any clouds in the image aren’t too dark. You can always add contrast later in the new image but it’s harder to remove it. 

• Export as a full-size, high-res, uncompressed JPG and put it into the Custom Skies folder (or better yet one of the new subfolders you just made is appropriate for this sky).

I hope this helps you get your custom skies in order and makes the Sky AI tool easier to use. Being able to put them into categories is the key and should speed up your workflow. 

Enjoy and have fun editing your images with Luminar Neo!

If you found this tutorial helpful, check out my entire course on Luminar Neo where you will get more in-depth lessons and the RAW files used in the videos so you can follow along.