skylum Luminar 2018
£64/$69
a fresh and exciting approach to photo editing
While Luminar started out as a Mac-only product, Windows users can now use its new and innovative approach to image editing too. Instead of offering a conventional interface with a fixed set of tools, it’s built around a set of individual filters which can be combined to create custom workspaces for different types of editing, such as portraits, landscapes, black and white, and more.
The idea is that your workspace isn’t cluttered up with a dozen tools you don’t need, just the few that you specifically need or want to use. You might save even more time with Luminar’s collection of preset effects, each of which uses specific filters and settings that you can adjust yourself, if needed, to fine-tune the effect.
On top of this, Luminar offers a system of layers and masks to blend effects, adjustments and even other images in multi-layer montages – that’s how the image above was constructed.
Performance
Luminar can open Raw files directly and its Raw processing has recently been improved, and now has perspective correction tools. The results are not quite in the same league as Adobe Camera Raw, Capture One Pro or DXO Photolab, but they’re not half bad. Luminar’s layers are surprisingly effective too, and in combination with its filters and masking tools give this software some real depth and power.
What it is missing, however, is some sort of image browsing or cataloguing tools, but Luminar says a DAM (digital asset management) system is on the horizon, and this should hopefully extend Luminar’s capabilities and its appeal significantly to more consumers.