Skylum Luminar AI

£69/$79 Remarkable AI editing tools

Luminar AI is not the latest incarnation of Skylum’s ever-changing photo editor. The company has been pushing and pre-selling its next Luminar Neo product for months, though it’s now not scheduled for release until February 2022. Luminar AI will continue, and right now it’s the only version you can buy and use.

With Luminar AI, Skylum pushes the AI angle, with the excellent Sky Replacement and equally excellent AI Portrait enhancement tools, which can find and enhance facial features quickly and naturally without turning people into caricatures. The AI Composition tool is less impressive, AI Structure doesn’t seem to add much, and the promise of automatically selected Looks doesn’t come off.

Other disappointments are that layers are no longer supported and the catalogue tools still don’t include proper search tools or virtual copies – an obvious feature, you’d think, in a program designed for experimentation with different image looks.

Parts of Luminar AI are excellent, others less so, where the ‘magic’ of AI is somewhat overplayed.