And as with any automatic image editing tool, there'll surely be some dodgy bits in the final images that don't make sense.

To a dedicated image compositor who's spent years building up the skills to do this stuff manually, it's going to look like cheating. Likewise, if you shoot a series of images in one place and want them all to have the same final look applied to them, you can sync edits across a range of shots together. Previewing a template's effect on your image takes less than a second, all the details can be tweaked once you've found an overall vibe you like, and you can save your own templates for later use.

There's even a composition helper, which rolls many rules of composition, including the rule of thirds, Fibonacci spirals, leading lines and the combined wisdoms of the algorithm training teams into a system that suggests crops for you that'll make the image most effective. The software analyzes your image, works out where the sky is, places a new one from the image you've chosen, handles reflective bodies of water, and then re-lights and re-colors your original image to suit the sky you've chosen, be it a starry night sky or a dramatic sunset. It reduces the entire sky replacement operation, for example, to a few sliders and a gallery of different sky options, to which you're free to add your own images. Skylum's upcoming LuminarAI software makes it ridiculously easy to throw a huge wow factor into your images. Best of luck if there's a reflective water surface at the ground level! More recently, you'd use Photoshop mask out the original sky manually, move a separate sky image layer in, then fiddle about with adjustment layers to make the sky and ground colors feel right together.

Later, darkroom techniques enabled some extremely crude developing techniques to effect some changes. In the past, photographers had to either be at the right spot at the right time, or sit around and wait until the sky and lighting conditions were just right, an outcome that was far from guaranteed.

Sky replacement is a perfect example the right kind of sky can add all sorts of drama and emotion to an image. And a new generation of tools powered by artificial intelligence is going to make Photoshop look like a caveman's tool. How much of a given image is real these days, and how much is manipulated? And how much does it matter? The tools of image editing have improved massively over the last 10 years, as anyone who likes to zhush themselves up for Instagram can attest.

Luminar ai photo editing