Luminar Neo

Luminar Neo is Skylum’s latest effort to bring photo editing and adjusting to the masses. It uses AI technology to make complex edits simple…amazingly simple.

Catalog

When you first launch the software you will see the Catalog page. This easy to use DAM (Digital Asset Manager) allows you to quickly sort, organize, and find the images you want to edit.

Editing

Once you have your image selected you move to the editing panel. It is broken down into four sections: Essentials, Creative, Portrait and Professional.

As one would expect, each of these sections has loads of options – and each option has adjustments you can make to your images. With Neo you can make all of the typical edits to things like exposure, sharpness, and such. Curves and noise reduction are also available in the Develop section. As you make adjustments the option to add masks becomes available, so you can target your adjustments.

Speed

We edited one of the sample images that was included in the Media demo version of Neo. It was a busy image of a beach, with not the best lighting – nice image to try and fix.

Luminar Neo Before — Beach sample – Before

We made a quick pass through the Creative options, adjusting sliders and making selections more to try and test the speed and accuracy versus the overall look. It was blazing fast. Relighting the scene, swapping the sky, adding sunrays, mood, toning, all a breeze. Jumped back up to the erase option and quickly removed objects from the scene. All edits took under 5 minutes to complete.

Luminar Neo After — Beach sample – After

Obviously, we could still go back and spend time fixing and adjusting, but…wow, was it fast to get to this point.

Luminar Neo – final thoughts

We are looking forward to the final release of Luminar Neo in the coming weeks. It handles your RAW images as well as JPGs with speed and ease. As a standalone product, or plugin, you will be able to take a bland image and make it exceptional. Skylum has come a long way from the early days with this latest AI offering. If you are looking for an easy to use piece of software with loads of options, give Neo a try.

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