Top 9 AI Tools Every Creator Should Be Using

AI is changing everything about photography. And even if you're more into video like myself, odds are you still use photography in your daily workflow. Whether that's making YouTube thumbnails or even just making like a cover for a reel on Instagram, these new AI tools are making it easier than ever to create better content. I mean, just have a look at this amazing new feature that Photoshop has where you can do things like this. Now, I honestly had way too much fun messing around with that feature in Photoshop, but in most cases, it actually is super useful. But that's just one of the many ways that AI is changing photography forever. And in this video, I'm gonna show you nine of the craziest and most useful ones that I've found and show you exactly how to use them. In my case, one of these tools actually saved my ass last week when I was in Iceland, but I'll get to that a little bit later. First off, I just wanna show you how powerful these tools actually can be. If your image isn't sharp enough from missing focus or motion blur, you can do this with one click of a button. Here's a drone shot that I took at night that honestly is just way too noisy to be useful. And with AI, you can go from this to this in one click. You can also use AI to analyze your entire image and pick every single individual part out and mask it. In this one photo, it detects humans, sky, flora, water, mountains, natural ground. And if this did have anything that was man-made, it would detect it. There's even a tool that can detect the depth of your image so you can just detect things that are close to the camera and just far away individually. I also found the most powerful eraser that I've ever seen. You can instantly remove power lines. Sensor dust, gone in one click of a button. Sky replacements with reflections, super easy. You can even turn a panorama video that you took into a single image. There's even one tool that literally pretty much does everything for you and it only takes like a couple seconds to edit each photo using it. And lastly but not least, the tool that saved my ass last week, which is Upscale. I was in Iceland shooting the volcanic eruption and I accidentally was flying around taking JPEGs on my drone, but with Upscale, I can take those JPEGs, put them through, and instantly have a super high resolution photo. A lot of the photos that I'll be messing with today are from that trip to Iceland and I'm working on a full film of that adventure. So if you wanna make sure that you don't miss that video, make sure you subscribe. Also, if you guys could do me a massive favor and hit the like button, I will put a photo of a really adorable puffer fish at the end of this video. So anyways, I showed you all these tools. Now let's get into how. All of these features are part of Luminar Neo, which is also the sponsor of today's video. And you guys know I don't take any sponsors on unless I actually personally use and recommend the product and Luminar is no exception. And the rest of this video, I'm just gonna walk you through all the different things and just show you how easy they are. If you're someone like myself that mainly uses Lightroom or mainly uses Photoshop, the best part is it integrates perfectly with both of those so you can just work back and forth between the two. All right, let's freaking hop into things. Or in my case, roll. Okay, so the first thing that I am going to do is just a little noise removal. This is a super simple tool, but for shots like this one that I'm about to show you, this shot right here, if you look around the edges, like the lava is exposed really well, but since it's so dark outside, it's pretty noisy. So I'm gonna come in here and similar to Lightroom and Photoshop, all your controls are on the right side. It looks a lot more complicated than it actually is, I promise. This literally took me like 15, 20 minutes to get kind of pretty much perfectly down. And so you can kind of see all your controls over here. There's a ton of them. There's a bunch of really cool ones that you can mess around with. Like I said, I'm only gonna go over my favorites, but this Develop tab is kind of like your normal Lightroom. If you're used to using Lightroom, this is kind of where all those things are. They have blacks, whites, color curves. You can do a nice S-curve, all that good stuff right in there. And the cool thing about Luminar Neo is it actually works in layers. So you can basically just make masks of every different part of the image and just affect that mask. But noise reduction, I'm gonna go ahead and do all of that. So I'm gonna just come down to one of these top tabs called Noiseless AI. It gives you some recommendations and this says to use low, so I'm gonna go with that. So you just hit low and boom, just like that. You can definitely see it when you go close up. There is a pretty significant amount of noise and that pretty much got rid of all of that. So that's the first super simple tool that we're gonna cover. Next up, I'm gonna pick a photo that Nicole, my girlfriend, actually took of me flying the drone back and kind of catching it. This one was super cool, but the only problem with it was it was really out of focus just because it was moving, like I'm pretty in focus and all good. But they have an extension that you can literally just click one button and it'll make it super sharp. That applies to pretty much everything. So you can kind of see over here, it basically refines the blur. So whether that's movement, missed focus, or just a shaky camera. So you go to super sharp, just come into motion blur because I just want the drone, I look fine. And then I'm just gonna hit low and it comes up with this pretty dope little animation here. And then boom, just like that, you can kind of see the before and after. Just because this has propellers, it did a little bit of a weird thing around the propellers, but it's not too bad. But just that is pretty freaking crazy. Like the end of this cord here, you can focus on that. It went from that to that. So that's just a really cool tool to kind of like repair mistakes if you did make them while you're shooting. So another amazing thing about Luminar Neo is like I said, it works in masks. So I'm gonna come to this photo right here. Basically what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna first come to really any of the different tools and inside you can just hit this masking tab. So I'm gonna hit mask and I'm gonna use their AI mask. And it's basically going to find all the different objects within this one photo. Boom. So you can see right here, it already has human, sky, flora, water, mountains, and natural ground. So you got human. So you got the sky right there. Flora. So you can see all like the greenery. Water. It actually does an insane job of masking the water. And you can actually go in in each individual mask and kind of refine the edge if it did make any mistakes. But it has the mountains and then the natural ground. One of the cool things is it also detects man-made subjects too. So it kind of separates it. It's got natural ground and then man-made ground as well. And now that it's done that, for literally any adjustment that I wanna make, like all across this right-hand panel, now it has all those objects so I can affect each one individually. So for this one, if we go back to adjustments, I'll just come in here and pick, let's just say the mountains. So I select those and then come back to adjustments. And now I'm just adjusting that. Obviously, there'd be a lot of refining and I wouldn't be doing it as drastic, but it's pretty crazy how smart this software actually is. Next, I wanna show you another feature that's really cool and it's called Relight. And it's basically how you select depth in your photos. So right here, obviously, here's me standing in front of the volcano. I'm gonna come down to Relight AI. And basically, it's gonna detect all of the places that are near the camera and that are far away. So if I wanna bring the stuff that's near up, I just go ahead and do that or I can bring it down. And obviously, you're not gonna go 100%. You're just gonna do it slightly. So I'm gonna bring that up a little bit, but then you can go the brightness far and bring all of that down. And like I said before, you can kind of just adjust all of these masks. They're not perfect, but you can just grab the brush and make it so they are perfect. And just with that one tool, you can kind of see the difference. Next up, I wanna show you one of my personal favorite things that I use out of this and that is the eraser. And this is by far the most powerful eraser I've ever seen in any editing software. First up, let's go with this photo right here. So sometimes Lightroom and Photoshop can kind of mess up the erase tool. For some reason, I don't know what Lightroom did to update the erase tool recently, but it's way harder to use than it was. So I'm gonna come in here. I'm gonna go to erase and you can select your size right here. And I'm just gonna go like this to him and hit erase. And with AI, it basically just like finds the best replacement for that. Another insane thing this eraser can do is actually remove all power lines. So I went back in my archives and found a photo from Cuba when I went there back in 2018, which was by far probably the most power lines I've ever seen in any photo. So if you come in here, click erase and hit remove power lines and just let the AI do its work, boom, pretty much every power line is gone. And if it did miss anything, this one actually did it super, super well. I have no idea how it works, but you can kind of go in and refine the edges and take any like loose spots out. Another thing about the eraser is something that is super helpful for me because I'm horrible at cleaning my sensor and that is removing sensor dust. So I'm gonna come up here to a photo that had a bunch of dust because this was like three weeks into a motorcycle trip I was taking and there was just sensor dust everywhere. So come into erase, hit remove dust spots and just like that, every single dust spot is removed, which is so mind blowing to me that it can just do that automatically. They also have the most intuitive sky replacement software I've ever used. So we're gonna click this photo that already has a pretty cool sky, but I think it could be cooler. I took this up in Glacier National Park, I think in 2019 or something, but basically gonna go into sky and again, I'm gonna hit masking and just have the AI run its mask thing. This animation is super, super cool to mess around with. But boom, so in this photo, you can see sky, floor, water, mountains, man-made ground because it detects the dock. And I'm gonna go back and basically just pick a pinkish looking sky. If you pick the wrong sky, it can definitely like not look good at all and look super whack. So you have to pick a sky that's close enough to the color that the sky already is. So just shuffling through here, find a good one. This one's kind of cool. Honestly, that one is pretty sweet. And the cool thing about Luminar is it actually intuitively adjusts the ground reflections. So just to kind of show you what it did like the before and after, you can see that it not only adjusted the sky, but it also adjusted the entire ground around it. And now I don't typically do sky replacements because in my opinion, it's kind of like a little bit like cheating, but for YouTube thumbnails, real covers, stuff like that, sky replacements are super, super helpful. Next, let's get into panorama stitching, which is something that has actually been around for a decent bit over in Lightroom Classic, but Luminar added a couple game changing things. So like any normal panorama stitching, you can select all the photos you'd like to put in the panorama and bring them down here. Hit start and Luminar will put those all together. And you can kind of play with like the field of view here. This is a lot more intuitive than the one in Lightroom in my opinion. So you can kind of play with like where exactly you want to have all the curves and stuff. Sometimes the horizon gets messed up in panorama stitching. So you can have a ton of flexibility here. Hit continue. And then you basically just crop wherever you want it. Boom, crop. And now you have that cool panorama photo. So something really crazy that Luminar actually can do is take a video. So you can just take a video with your phone like this, throw it in Luminar, and it'll actually turn that into a panorama photo. And then another really cool thing is it can actually take a video and freeze frames from different spots. So if you've seen those photos of like cliff jumpers or dirt bikers that, where there's like every stage of the journey, you can actually do that in Luminar too. They even have a slider that pretty much does everything for you. If you're kind of in a hurry and you just want a quick edit of something, they have this tab called enhance. And it basically just like intuitively works on the photo and does a pretty decent job of making the photo better. So right here, you can see it's kind of adding a little bit of clarity to this, bringing the highlights down. And on top of that, you can use sky enhancer. Again, intuitively kind of detects what kind of sky it is and makes it a little bit better. So in this case, it brings the highlights down and that's completely automatic. So you can go in and literally spend two seconds on a photo and that's all good. So here's on another photo, we can bring this up. And basically what that is doing is kind of bringing up the background of this one. It doesn't have a sky, so obviously there's no sky enhancer. I don't use that feature a ton because I prefer to edit my own photos, but it is there. Lastly, I want to show you how to upscale images because that's another thing that, like I said, completely saved my ass when I was doing that drone flight. So these photos actually are all JPEGs. Honestly, I don't really like to print out JPEGs just because the resolution is too low. But if I wanted to upscale this, I can drag this photo into upscale, which is an extension you can add and you can pick how much you want to upscale it. You can go pretty crazy with this. So let's just go four times. Okay, so this photo is officially upscaled and honestly, because it already was like a pretty high resolution photo, it took a really long time and now it is 21,000 pixels by 15,000 pixels. So it is an insanely high resolution image now. You can zoom in to this mountain and you can see like the lines are so, so sharp. I'm gonna do this one more time on the helicopter photo just so we can get like a very clear before and after. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and bring this one into upscale as well. All right, so I'm gonna hit 4X and then just let it wreak complete havoc on my computer for a couple minutes. All right, so that has officially done its magic and yeah, I mean, my computer is struggling, but let's go ahead and zoom in to the helicopter. Wow, that is pretty freaking insane. So those are all the features that I really wanted to cover on this video. If you guys wanna see me cover any more features of this, definitely let me know down in the comments. If you guys are interested in using any of these tools, there's a link down below. If you use the code McGee, you get an additional 10% off of Luminar Neo. I recommend going with the yearly plan. And guys, sponsors are the reason that I'm able to create videos like this. So it would mean the world to me if you just tried it out and just saw if it can help your workflow. Thank you again to Luminar for sponsoring this video and huge freaking shout out to everyone who hit the like button earlier. The photo of the cute puffer fish is incoming. And for everyone who didn't hit the like button and thinks they're gonna get a free photo of a puffer fish, you better click off this video soon. Peace.