Do more with your photos

Use this powerful AI-based image enhancement and editing app

Luminar Neo £67 FROM skylum.com FEATURES AI-powered retouching, powerful object removal, apply ‘looks’, sky replacement.

Apple’s Photos has some decent basic editing tools and the advantage that it is baked into macOS and iOS. Luminar Neo, on the other hand, features an incredible range of editing tools to help you improve your pictures, while remaining easy to use. You can create catalogues and then work on one image at a time.

There are standard tools of course for editing exposure, contrast and colour but the really interesting stuff happens when you start to leverage Luminar’s brilliant AI capabilities.

It can analyse an image and detect elements like skies, and let you replace them with a couple of clicks, turning a cloudy setting into a summer one. Or, look at a whole image and then enhance it by pulling up the levels and contrast as appropriate to the scene. You can apply ‘looks’ to an image, and even refocus scenes, adding bokeh to portraits and altering the lighting after the photo has been taken.

Subject detection is really powerful and lets you do things like easily cut out a person either to remove them from a scene, or put them on a new background. Face AI lets you retouch portraits easily and even change facial expressions. There’s layer support, and one-click image clean-up too.

There’s not much you can’t do in Luminar, from simple enhancement to advanced retouching and object removal. It’s light years ahead of Photos and although it doesn’t act as a library in the way Photos does, you can drag edited images into Photos to use them with iCloud.

Subject detection is really powerful and lets you do things like easily cut out objects