Luminar Neo tutorial: fix a blown-out sky

This Luminar Neo tutorial works through an overexposed sky in a Las Vegas cityscape. The speaker recommends shooting RAW for greater recovery latitude than JPEG and uses the J key clipping overlay to track bright areas during editing. He cautions that recovery will not work for every photo.

The initial workflow lowers exposure, then adjusts highlights, shadows and the white point. In the example, pushing highlights and whites down too far gives the sky a muddy or discolored appearance. Super Contrast provides further control over highlight and midtone contrast.

The tutorial compares a linear gradient with a Mask AI sky selection. A gradient fades the adjustment but can also darken buildings that extend into the sky. The sky selection applies the adjustment throughout its mask; the speaker shows how strong exposure changes can expose imperfect edges. He also notes that Develop RAW cannot be masked, so these selective edits use a subsequent Develop adjustment.

Other options include lowering blue luminance where the sky contains blue and processing a single exposure through HDR Merge. The latter produces a TIFF in the demonstration and still needs tonal adjustments. If recovery fails, the speaker uses SkyAI to replace the sky, including its reflection in the water.