Luminar 2018
Mac specialist gives Adobe a run for its money
$69 From Skylum, skylum.com/luminar Needs OS X 10.10.5 or later
Skylum, formerly known as Macphun, likes to take a different approach to photo editing from other products on the market. Its Luminar app is often compared to Lightroom, but it doesn’t have the asset management abilities of Adobe’s software (Skylum is working on this, however), although they do share a dark gray interface.
Luminar is a non-destructive editor, which means your original image file isn’t changed by the edits you make, instead they’re only applied when you export your edited photo as a new file. Effects are added as filters, which can be faded out, piled on top of one another, or applied selectively to part of an image. There are cropping and rotation tools, along with Lightroom-like sliders to alter exposure, contrast, saturation and the like.
New features in this 2018 release include lens correction tools, to even out the distortions introduced by camera lenses, particularly wide-angle ones, plus increased speed in the raw file handling and noise reduction systems. The updates make the app more attractive to photographers with interchangeable lens cameras, since it can correct for every quirk of their systems and fly through the processing of large raw files. Raw processing depends as much on your Mac’s CPU as the software you’re using, of course, but every speed improvement helps.
Luminar separates its one-click edits into presets and filters. The presets live in a bar along the bottom of the interface, while filters have their own section in, and pop out from, the editing sliders on the right. New filters in the 2018 edition include the very clever Sunrays, which sends beams of light from a user-defined center, and Dodge and Burn, that lets you paint areas of darker or lighter tones directly onto your image.
Luminar’s way of working can take a while to get a handle on, especially if you’re used to Adobe products or the software that comes free with many cameras, but it’s a well thought through process married to an interface that’s maturing nicely. It still has its quirks, such as the buttons spread thinly across the top and filters that are applied at 0% so you wonder what they do, but with Luminar 2018 Skylum proves it’s a real force in the software world. With no subscription and a price lower than that of Photoshop Elements, aspiring photographers should turn their lenses on Luminar.
the bottom line. A full-featured image editor, with more functionality being worked on, for a reasonable price, Luminar is only a few updates away from troubling Adobe at the top of the image-editing tree. Ian Evenden