This Skylum Luminar Neo review will cover Skylum’s latest photo editing software which is available for Mac and Windows.
With its headline AI-powered tools and easy-to-use interface, Luminar Neo has been the year’s most eagerly anticipated release – but does it live up to its hype?
There’s still a lot of confusion surrounding the feature overlap of Skylum Luminar Neo with Luminar AI, released only a year earlier.
With the latest version (Update v1.5.0), Neo presents a solid set of features that helps it step ahead of its predecessor and now includes ‘Extensions’ to further expand its capabilities.
Aside from all its flashy AI features, will photographers genuinely find Skylum Luminar Neo a useful editing app, or is it destined to be a transient gimmick for the Instagram generation?
In this Luminar Neo Review, I answer all the most common questions to help you decide whether you should buy Luminar Neo in 2023.
Skylum Luminar AI Editing Tools
OK, so this is where all the fun starts.
If you’ve read any other Skylum Lumnar Neo review, you’ve no doubt already been bombarded by images of skies being replaced and faces slimmed – Skylum Luminar Review. It’s easy to become desensitized by just how incredibly simple and realistic complex photo manipulation has become. In a nutshell, Luminar Neo offers a suite of non-destructive RAW editing tools powered by artificial intelligence that lets you carry out complex editing tasks in just a couple of clicks.
As a professional photographer with over 10 years of experience editing photos, I have little need for certain AI tools offered by Luminar Neo.
I can achieve similar results to ‘Crop AI’ Skylum Luminar Review ‘Enhance AI’ and ‘Structure AI’ manually by using tools found in the standard adjustment panels.
Things like adding realistic bokeh to an image, removing the background, or relighting a scene (controlling foreground and background brightness), I can definitely handle, but it takes considerable time to do properly.
However, I draw the line at replacing an entire sky, changing the shape of a subject’s body, or performing delicate facial retouching. This is the realm of a professional retoucher with years of experience.
With Skylum Luminar Review, you can achieve all the above in a couple of clicks – sometimes, with just one click, like in the example of the Eiffel Tower below.
Out of all the AI-powered tools, Sky AI is still my favorite and most impressive. Whether your photo is a pure landscape or an urban scene with people and buildings,
Luminar Neo Review Neo does a jaw-dropping job of swapping out the sky and relighting the scene to suit.
What is Luminar AI?
Pros
- Great value for money
- Complex edits made simple
- AI tools produce great results
- Template-based editing is ideal for beginners
- Manual masking for advanced users
- Great plugin for Adobe/Mac Photos
- Fast (big improvement to Luminar 4)
- Fun to use
- Regular updates & new camera support
Cons
- Limited export options
- Limited metadata/DAM options
- Limited layer-based editing
- Can’t transfer Luminar 3 or 4 catalog
- Advanced features are harder to locate
- Confusing pricing
Luminar AI is a revolutionary new image editing software that uses artificial intelligence to help with time-consuming and complex editing tasks.
It’s a stand-alone Windows and Mac application, as well as a Plugin for Lightroom, Photoshop, and Photos for Mac OS, allowing users ingrained in an Adobe workflow to also take advantage.
Since April 2021, Lumina AI is optimized to run on Apple’s next-generation M1 computers, taking full advantage of the faster processing capabilities of the M1 chip.
Luminar AI is designed for every level of creativity – from complete beginner photographers to seasoned pros, although the latter will likely use it more as a plugin, in conjunction with other image editing software.
Despite being incredibly powerful, it’s simple enough to pick up quickly, even for those with zero image editing experience.
