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Pre-Order Luminar 4 with AI Skin Enhancer and Sky Replacement

Well, Luminar 4 is now ready for pre-order and it looks like they're really going for Adobe's throat! It already had a ton of features and tools that are sorely lacking in Lightroom. This one has a bunch of new tools that are pretty wicked-smart and fast!

One is the AI Sky Replacement. Below is a picture I took of those famous Baobab trees I visited last week in Madagascar. I went all the way to Madagascar and the sky was so boring... what a bummer! Anyway, this AI Sky replacement is pretty rad because there are a ton of different ones to choose from (or use your own), and it's a simple one-click operation. Besides blue skies, it's also easy to choose from a ton of sunsets and other dramatic skies. You can make a few other adjustments too as you can see in the screenshot.



The second cool feature is the AI Portrait stuff. It's pretty amazing how simple it is to change someone's face - either a little or a lot. Some people like their faces to get a bit of fluff and others don't. Who am I to judge? In the example below, this was actually a picture of the Unabomber that I turned into my previous assistant Tane. You can see all the sliders on the right. It's really quite incredible.. and if you're a portrait kinda person, don't miss it!



The third sweet tool is the AI Structure enhancer. The cool thing about it is that it doesn't make any adjustments to humans in the scene. AI Structure can really make textures and other elements "pop" without making the humans in the scene look overly sharp, gritty, or illustrative. As you can see in the screenshot below (another one I took a few weeks ago in Zimbabwe), it's just two simple sliders!

Join me for a Photo Adventure in Beautiful New Zealand

I just arrived back home in New Zealand after spending 3 weeks in Africa for an amazing photography workshop... wish you had been here! We take little planes like this from camp to camp. We don't have any more Africa trips available, but if you want to come to New Zealand for the workshop next year, come check it out here.

Here's a video I recently made that shows the epic beauty of New Zealand. I hope you can come join me at the next workshop in April 2020, you'll LOVE it!!

Trey’s 360 podcast – Craig Mod, Behind the Podcast

While walking the Camino in Spain last year I recorded this chat with Craig Mod as he was recording our chat for himself. You’ll find us discussing all sorts but there is a bunch of useful info in here for those of you who might be thinking about how you can approach one of these long hikes as a complete novice.

Find out more about Craig and his awesome writing at his site: https://craigmod.com

StuckInCustoms.com is a personal blog where Trey puts up a new unique photo every day and writes about the art, the technology, and the story of the adventures. Actually, this is Trey writing about this in third person. Both Trey and I appreciate your support very much! If you think your family or friends might like this Newsletter (subscribe for free), please forward this to them. It'll make a fun email chain!

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Some recent photos from my Africa Photo Workshop

We visited an amazing local festival in a remote area of Zimbabwe near the Chilo Gorge and had a lot of time to hang out with these children. Here's a photo of a group of kids that came out for the event. All the local tribes get together for a huge celebration a few times a year. It's a new local effort to get various tribes together from all over the region - no matter whatever the national boundaries happen to be. I like this sort of thing because just like racism is an "idea" - so is nationalism (our country is better than yours, etc). If you want to know more, read about it in Yuval Noah Harari's latest book.

Here are the baby lion cubs I mentioned before. Sadly their brother and sister were just killed by hyenas.

Lemur Party! I spent a few days hopping around the forests of Madagascar with lemurs. I actually didn't know there were like over 10 kinds of lemurs. There might have been more - I wasn't really listening. This one is either called the white lemur or the polar bear lemur or something like that... To me, it's one of the prettiest and most cuddly!

Here's another one of these cool kids I found on the beach... I probably took photos of at least 100 of them so far here in Madagascar. The people here have a bit of a different "look" than many other African countries. There's almost a bit of "Asian" somewhere in the gene pool. My guide said there are some theories that there was very early mixing with the Malaysians.

One of my favorite things about Africa is I get to ask the guide all kinds of dumb questions about animals. I'm honestly amazed about how dumb I am about basic stuff. Like, for example, did you know giraffes have the same number of vertebrae in their spines as other mammals? Yeah, they're just longer. Who knew? Definitely not me. I also asked a super-dumb question about birds yesterday that made my friend Deanie and the guide crack up. I said, "So, like, do male birds have like a penis and balls and stuff and do they like blast up sperm into a ladybird vadge? Or do they fertilize eggs outside the body? I don't know... I'm just asking because I've never seen a bird with balls and stuff." Anyway, after the guide stopped laughing at my idiotic question, he said they use a cloaca. I asked him what that was and he said it was like a bird penis. So that explains that. I also asked him if there was such an animal as a liger (half-lion half-tiger) because I remembered it from Napoleon Dynamite. He said yes, ligers exist, but he's never seen one. Then I asked him if he actually knew they existed since he's never seen one. He was like, trust me, dude. So that explained that.

Yesterday we spent most of the day tracking a male lion and finally found him… as you can see, he was acting rather majestic! I really love spending time with all the animals here… It was a pretty crazy day (I’m not sure if you watch my Instagram stories or not). We had an elephant walk into our camp, saw some baby lions, found a dead giraffe, walked for a while with our guide (who had a gun - just in case) until he got freaked out by a few elephants (when the guide gets concerned, we get concerned), saw a hippo pop out the lake whilst dining, had a leopard walk by our tent, and all kinds of other stuff.

Here's my friend Rene jumping from rock to rock along cliffs in Zimbabwe. This is near the burial grounds of Cecil Rhodes in Zimbabwe. Rene was not very interested in that, so he decided to climb rocks and jump from one to the next. He loves climbing stuff... I'm always worried he won't land one of his crazy jumps! But he always sticks the landing and has someone from ground level toss him a beer. That's just how he is.