Photo enhance: sky, ground and batch

Open the photo

From a project, open the Photos gallery and click a photo, then choose Edit. The editor loads the full-resolution original - your edits never overwrite it, they save as a separate enhanced version you can revert at any time.

• Adjust, Sky enhance, Erase object and Import edited file are the four tabs across the top.
• Reset returns every slider to zero without touching the saved original.

Detect the sky and wait for it

Open the Sky enhance tab and press Detect sky. A machine-learning model runs on your own device and builds a mask of exactly which pixels are sky - ground, buildings, poles and trees are protected. It takes a few seconds on the first photo while the model loads, then it is fast.

• The panel tells you the state: not run yet, detecting, or detected.
• If the photo genuinely has no sky, the sky controls stay off - that is expected.

The very first detection of a session downloads the model. Let that first one finish before you start clicking through photos.

Check the mask before you trust it

Turn on the mask overlay so you can see what was called sky. Look at the hard cases: bare branches, roof ridgelines, antennas, distant hills and anything bright and white like a metal roof or a light stucco wall.

Never adjust the sky without looking at the mask first. Every sky problem downstream - halos, glowing roof edges, dark tree fringes - is a mask problem, not a slider problem.

Expand sky downward

This nudges the whole mask boundary down in pixels, with 0 / 8 / 16 / 32 quick presets and single-pixel plus and minus buttons. Use a small expansion when you see a bright rim of untouched original sky hugging the rooftops or treeline.

Work in 1-2 pixel steps near a roofline. Big jumps eat the top of the building.

Mask edge

Mask edge feathers or tightens the transition. Push it negative to pull the mask in off a soft edge, positive to soften a hard cutout. Trees want a softer edge; a clean straight roofline wants a tight one.

Fix the rest by hand

Turn on Manual mask edit and pick Brush for organic shapes or Line / polygon for straight runs. Add sky paints sky into the mask, Remove takes it back out. This is how you rescue a chimney the model swallowed or knock out a bright wall it mistook for sky.

• Brush size is adjustable - go small on branches, large on open field.
• Zoom in before brushing; the mask is edited at full resolution.

Run Auto Enhance

In the Adjust tab press Auto Enhance. Boundray reads the actual histogram of the image and sets exposure, shadows, highlights, contrast, white balance and clarity from what it measures - not from a canned preset. When a sky mask exists it enhances the ground and the sky separately and tells you so.

• Ground gets lifted shadows and added local contrast.
• Sky gets held back so it does not blow out.

Brighten the ground, darken the sky

That split is the whole trick. Drone frames are backlit almost every time: the ground sits two or three stops under the sky. Almost every good result ends up with the ground pushed up (Exposure, Shadows, Brightness) and the sky pulled down (Sky boost lowered, Highlights down).

A useful starting point on a bright day: Shadows +25 to +40, Highlights -30 to -50, Contrast +10, Clarity +15. Then fine-tune by eye.

Interior + Windows for inside shots

For interiors press Interior + Windows instead. It detects the blown-out window openings, tones them separately from the room, and gives you a sensitivity slider plus Draw windows manually and Tone from mask if the automatic detection misses a pane.

Finish with the sliders

Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Temperature, Tint, Saturation, Vibrance, Dehaze, Clarity and Sky boost are all live. Dehaze is the one to reach for on a humid or smoky day; Vibrance is safer than Saturation on green grass and blue skies.

Grab the slider circle to drag. The tracks are click-locked on purpose so you cannot jump a value by accident on a touchscreen.

Pick a sky

Choose one from the sky library, or use a Real Sky pulled from your own photos. Match the time of day and the sun direction of the shot - a warm low sun over a flat noon-lit house reads fake instantly.

Place it

Sky horizon offset slides the sky plate up or down so the interesting clouds land where you want them. Sky scale zooms it. Sky opacity blends the new sky against the original, which is the fastest way to keep some of the real haze near the horizon.

Make it believable

Sky brightness matches the plate to the exposure of your ground. Natural blend re-introduces the original tone and grain so the sky is not suspiciously clean. Then look at the horizon: it should get slightly lighter and hazier toward the ground, never end in a crisp line.

Squint at the finished frame. If your eye goes straight to the sky, it is too bright, too saturated or too contrasty - back all three off.

Adjust the sky manually

If a slider alone will not do it, drop back to the mask controls and fix the boundary, then come back. Halos and dark fringes are always solved at the mask, not in the sky sliders.

Sky replacement is still being tuned. Edges around bare trees and complex rooflines can halo and results vary shot to shot - review every photo before you deliver it.

Lasso the object

Open the Erase object tab and drag around whatever you want gone - a trash can, a parked car, a stray cone. The Grow slider pads the selection outward; a few extra pixels usually gives the fill more room to blend.

Erase and check

Press Erase selection. The masked area is sent up and filled in with generated surroundings, then merged back into your full-resolution photo. Undo steps back one erase at a time, so you can iterate.

Know what it costs

Object erase and cloud Autoenhance both consume credits from your balance - everything else in this tutorial (sky detection, masking, auto-enhance, sky enhance, batch) runs locally on your own device for free. If credits run out, cloud renders come back as a watermarked preview instead of a full-resolution file.

Erase before you do heavy tone work. Erasing after means the filled patch is generated against already-pushed pixels and it is harder to match.

Select and open Batch enhance

In the gallery, multi-select the photos you want and open Batch enhance. Local modes run on this device using your GPU, so keep the tab open and in the foreground - on a phone, keep the screen awake.

Pick a mode

Auto analyses each photo on its own. Split (Ground + Sky) runs the sky mask on every frame and enhances ground and sky separately - that is the mode that matches the brighten-the-ground, darken-the-sky workflow. Preset applies your saved offsets. HDR merges bracketed sets. Revert deletes the enhanced versions and puts the originals back.

Split is slower per photo because it segments every frame. Start it and go do something else.

Spot-check and export

Flip through the results before you deliver. Anything that missed gets opened individually and fixed by hand. Exported photos keep their GPS EXIF, so a re-fed set still georeferences correctly in photogrammetry software.