Luminar AI
Luminar AI aims to take the tedium out of photo editing with its all-new Ai-driven approach to image enhancement
Does Skylum’s Luminar AI take the hassle out of editing? Find out
Luminar AI is designed to take the drudge out of photo editing, handling all the previously technical and time-consuming tasks of selecting and masking and manual sliders with its own automated machine-learning AI. It’s not trying to tempt photographers away from software they love. Instead, it’s aiming at what Skylum thinks is a much wider market of photographers and content creators who simply want beautiful images without the fuss.
Skylum has taken a bold step. It is ending development of Luminar 4 and taking its core technologies in a new direction. That may disappoint a lot of Luminar fans hoping for a more sophisticated and advanced Lightroom or Photoshop alternative. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen now.
Key features
Luminar AI is an all-in-one non-destructive photo cataloguing and editing program. You can use it to browse, filter and organize your photos, and any changes you make with templates or filters can be reversed or modified at any time.
It’s designed to be simple, so that when you select a photo for editing, it will analyse your subject matter and suggest ‘templates’ (or ‘looks’ in Luminar 4) that give a variety of different editing styles.
When you choose a template, Luminar AI applies the filters and settings needed to create that look, and many of these also use AI to identify and isolate different subjects and parts of the scene for selective enhancement. All this happens behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything.
If you want to go further and apply your own adjustments, that is easy too, via the Edit workspace. If you’ve chosen a template already, this will highlight the tools and filters used to create the effect so that you can go to them directly.
Alternatively, you can start from scratch by going straight to the Edit panel and building your enhancements and effects from scratch. You can, of course, save your own templates. All these adjustments are non-destructive, as already mentioned. What this means is that when you want to share an image you have to use the Export panel to save a processed JPEG or TIFF image – there are preset export settings here for email, messages, Smugmug, 500px or simply saving a file to disk.
Ease of use
Luminar AI is easy to use. The interface is simple and the Catalog>templates>edit> Export workflow could hardly be more straightforward. The simplicity means a few things are missing, though. The Luminar AI
Catalog, for example, can display both folders on your computer and custom albums you create yourself. It can also show recently added and recently edited photos, and organize photos by date. But it doesn’t offer ratings or colour labels, or even any search tools. Skylum simply offers ‘flag’ ratings – Favorite, Rejected, Unmarked – in a bold and deliberate decision to strip away all unnecessary complication.
Another thing you won’t find is layers. These were a welcome and useful bonus in Luminar 4, but they too have been removed. This means that if you want to mask effects, you can no longer do it with adjustment layers. You can mask almost all the filters individually, and there is a new Local Masking workspace, but it feels at least as complicated as adjustment layers and a little less useful. The bigger difference is that you can no longer combine and blend different images.
Quality of results
Many of the filters and tools in Luminar AI mimic those in other programs. It’s a
perfectly effective everyday photo enhancement tool. Some of the effects are perhaps less than convincing – Sunrays, for example, is a little obvious in its results.
But let’s get straight to the highlights. Accent AI is effective at applying a simple, overall image enhancement using a variety of AI adjustments, the Sky and Augmented Sky tools are incredibly effective at transforming skies in any outdoor scene, not just landscape shots, and the new Atmosphere AI filter is pretty good too.
And then we have to talk about the Portrait tools. There are many programs that offer portrait enhancements, often turning human beings into porcelain dolls or reshaping regular people into idealized body forms, which can be a bit much at times. However, Luminar AI’S portrait tools really are superb. For a start, they identify facial features like eyes and mouths, so there is no need for any masking or shape outlining. Secondly, they are both subtle and progressive. You can smooth skin, whiten teeth and enhance eyes without distorting the person.
Luminar AI does exactly what it sets out to do, by allowing novice photo editors to inject some magic into their images without the need for a lot of know-how or timeconsuming manual editing. It is very easy to create ‘idealized’ reality, which we suspect will be popular with content creators but perhaps controversial too.
It’s easy to list a bunch of things Luminar AI doesn’t do, or does superficially, but this isn’t an expensive program. It costs about the same as Photoshop Elements 2021, but feels a decade ahead in innovation, and is a lot less expensive than the full Photoshop or Lightroom. At this price it’s worth buying to just use as a plug-in for these programs.
N-photo verdict
Luminar AI’S results are often spectacular, particularly for sky replacement and portrait enhancement, though while the AI template suggestions are great, you only get a handful of suggestions and, without previews, you need to click to see what they look like. Some of these can also be a little heavy-handed, but this is just the beginning for Luminar AI. There are some odd omissions, such as the lack of ratings and search tools for your albums. However, the attractive price tag, ease of use and some of image enhancements themselves makes Skylum Luminar AI tough not to recommend.
4.0 Overall