AirMagic Review: Is This AI-Powered Drone Photo Editor Worth It?

As drone photography continues to grow in popularity, many software companies are releasing tools aimed specifically at aerial photography. One of the newest options is AirMagic, an AI-powered photo editor from Skylum designed to automatically analyze and enhance drone photos with minimal input from the user.

I‘ve spent some time testing out AirMagic for this in-depth review to help you decide if it‘s a good fit for your drone photo editing needs. I‘ll cover its key features, analyze how well it works, discuss its pros and cons, and compare it to popular alternatives.

What Is AirMagic?

AirMagic is a streamlined, fully-automated photo editor built solely for enhancing and correcting drone photography. By leveraging artificial intelligence, AirMagic analyzes your photo and applies adjustments to fix haze, improve contrast and color, boost the sky, sharpen details, remove lens distortion, and more.

The key thing that sets AirMagic apart is its simplicity and full automation. It has an extremely basic, minimal interface with essentially no options or controls beyond a single slider to adjust the strength of the AI effects. There are no layers, masks, adjustment tools, or any of the complexity you‘ll find in most photo editing software.

This makes it incredibly easy to use for anyone regardless of experience level. Just open a photo (or multiple photos for batch processing), let AirMagic work its magic, and export the enhanced version in a matter of seconds. It removes the barrier of having to learn complicated editing techniques.

Key Features

Here‘s a rundown of AirMagic‘s main features:

Automatic AI Adjustments
The core of AirMagic is its intelligent analysis and enhancement of drone photos. It detects the contents of a photo (sky, haze, land, etc.) and applies a range of automatic adjustments:

• Sky Enhancer increases color and detail in the sky
• Haze Removal reduces fog, mist and haze
• Smart Contrast & Color improves overall tone and vibrancy
• Lens Correction fixes distortion and aberration
• Details Enhancer sharpens small details and edges

All of this is done with no input from the user beyond opening the photo. A single "Boost" slider controls the overall intensity of the effects but the user has no granular control over the individual adjustments.

Lens Correction
AirMagic has built-in lens correction profiles for a wide range of popular consumer drones from DJI, Parrot, Yuneec, Autel and more. This automatically detects and fixes lens distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration and other issues to produce a cleaner, straighter photo.

Styles
In addition to the standard AI adjustments, AirMagic includes 5 Styles (essentially presets) that apply creative color and toning effects with a single click. Additional Style packs will likely be available as paid add-ons.

Batch Processing
AirMagic supports batch exporting, allowing you to edit an entire memory card full of drone photos quickly by applying the AI adjustments to every image at once. This is a big time saver over editing photos individually.

Plugin Support
While AirMagic works fine on its own, it can also be used as a plugin inside Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop for a faster workflow if you use those tools.

RAW and JPG Support
AirMagic can handle both JPG and RAW files from your drone, including DNG, CR2, NEF and more. Editing RAW provides the most flexibility and quality.

Performance

To evaluate AirMagic‘s performance, I tested it on dozens of drone photos from a range of different drones and environments, from landscapes to cityscapes. I also compared the results to unedited originals and to manual edits done in Lightroom and Luminar.

Overall, I found AirMagic‘s automatic adjustments to be quite impressive, especially considering how little user input they require. With a single click, it was able to liven up most drone photos noticeably, producing images with richer color, better contrast, bluer skies, and less haze.

Here are a few example before and after comparisons. Move the slider to see the AirMagic version:

[Comparison Slider 1 – Before/After] [Comparison Slider 2 – Before/After] [Comparison Slider 3 – Before/After]

As you can see, in most cases AirMagic did a solid job of improving the look of the photos while still maintaining a natural appearance. The lens corrections also worked well to remove the distorted "fisheye" look and straighten out lines and horizons.

Compared to manual edits done in Lightroom and Luminar, AirMagic‘s automated adjustments held up surprisingly well, getting close to or matching what I could do by hand. Of course, manual editing provides much more precise control and stylistic options, but for a quick improvement, AirMagic is very effective.

The AI isn‘t perfect though. In a few cases, I preferred the unedited original photo over AirMagic‘s version. It can occasionally oversaturate colors or create an artificial look if you crank up the Boost too high. But overall, I was pleasantly surprised by its capabilities considering the fully automatic approach.

The batch processing also worked very well on Mac, making it fast and easy to polish up a whole set of aerial images. Unfortunately, on Windows, I encountered several crashes when batch processing that required force quitting and relaunching the app. Stability seems to be an issue on PC still.

Ease of Use

Without a doubt, ease of use is AirMagic‘s greatest strength. The basic, no-frills interface makes it dead simple to improve your drone shots even if you have zero photo editing experience. Just open a photo and let it work. The hardest part is deciding how high to set the Boost slider.

This simplicity cuts both ways though. While it‘s easy and fast, you also have very little control over the end result. If you don‘t like the look AirMagic comes up with, your only option is to lower the strength of the effect. You can‘t tweak individual adjustments, mask out areas, or really do any of the advanced editing you can in other photo editors. It‘s a one-trick pony.

So while AirMagic is unbeatable from an ease of use perspective, that comes at the cost of control and precision. It‘s great for quick improvements but less suited for careful, artistic photo editing. Beginners will likely love the simplicity but pros may find it too limiting.

Value

AirMagic costs $39, which puts it in an interesting mid-tier price range above free/cheap mobile editing apps but well below professional editors like Photoshop. The question is: does it provide enough value to justify that cost?

Honestly, for many drone hobbyists, I think there‘s a good case to be made for AirMagic. Its automation removes the learning curve normally required to get good results from photo editing. And by being designed solely for drone photography, it zeros in on the most common issues faced in aerial images like haze, lens distortion, and dull skies.

For the amount of time AirMagic could save in editing a large set of drone photos, the one-time $39 price seems quite reasonable to me. Buying dedicated haze removal, lens correction, and sky enhancement tools individually for another editor could easily run over $39.

However, more advanced photographers who already own and know how to use tools like Lightroom or Luminar may have a harder time justifying the cost, since it duplicates a lot of functionality they already have. The plugin integration is nice but the AI tools are fairly redundant with the capabilities of those programs.

It‘s also worth noting that, like many Skylum products, AirMagic frequently goes on sale. At the time of this writing, you could pick it up for around $31 with a coupon code. At that price, I think it offers very good bang for the buck if you do a lot of drone photography.

Alternatives

If you‘re not sold on AirMagic, there are a few main alternatives to consider depending on your needs and budget:

Luminar – Also from Skylum, Luminar is a full-featured photo editor that includes many similar AI-powered tools as AirMagic but with a lot more manual control as well. It‘s more complex but also more flexible.

Lightroom – Adobe‘s Lightroom is an industry standard for photo editing and management. It‘s very powerful and can do everything AirMagic can and more, but it also requires more experience and has a subscription pricing model.

Photoshop – The most advanced editor out there, Photoshop can handle any editing task you throw at it, including aerial photo enhancement. But it comes with a steep learning curve and price tag.

Mobile apps – There are numerous mobile apps available for editing drone photos, many of which include auto-correction features. These are usually simpler and cheaper but less powerful.

Ultimately, the best choice depends on your level of expertise, desire for control vs simplicity, and budget.

Conclusion

All in all, I think AirMagic delivers on its promise: a quick and easy way for drone photographers to improve their images without needing to be editing experts. The AI-powered adjustments are surprisingly effective at enhancing aerial photos, and the simple interface makes it accessible to anyone.

However, that simplicity is also AirMagic‘s main limitation. If you want complete control over the editing process and the ability to perform advanced techniques, it will likely leave you wanting more. There‘s also no denying that it‘s a bit of a one-trick pony – it does that trick very well but not much else.

Whether AirMagic is worth it for you largely depends on your needs and experience level. For drone photography beginners and hobbyists who want a fast and easy way to liven up their aerial shots, I think it‘s a great tool that can save a lot of time and hassle. The $39 price tag is reasonable for what it offers.

However, professional-level photographers and those already experienced with other editors like Lightroom may not find it as useful since it doesn‘t add much that can‘t already be done (with more control) in those programs.

For casual drone shooters though, AirMagic makes it dead simple to get eye-catching aerial images and avoid the most common issues like dull colors, low contrast, and lens distortion. Its AI is robust enough to improve most photos convincingly with no editing expertise required from the user.

If that sounds appealing and the stability issues on Windows get ironed out, I can easily recommend AirMagic as a valuable addition to any drone photographer‘s software toolkit. It may be a one-trick pony, but it‘s a very useful trick indeed.