Skylum revealed Luminar Neo today, which builds upon the unique AI-editing technologies for which the company is well known. According to the company, Luminar Neo further re-imagines the image editing experience, which enables creators to be more expressive with fewer boundaries and rediscover the joy in their creative work.
“As the latest member of the Luminar family, we designed Luminar Neo to allow artists to take on more challenging image creation work and achieve results which often seem unattainable,” said Dima Sytnik, Co-Founder and CPO of Skylum.
What Does Luminar Neo Do?
Expected features in this new editor include:
- Transform photos with new relighting options. Luminar Neo analyzes each image to recognize the depth of a scene and its subject which allows precise control over exposure and tone.
- Remove blemishes and distracting elements. Luminar Neo automatically recognizes and removes artifacts caused by a dirty camera sensor or lens. New tools make removing unwanted background elements easier than ever before.
- Powerful background replacement. Take full control of the background for portrait photos by quickly replacing it with an all-new image or background.
- Round-trip mobile image management. Our new companion mobile app makes it simple to add pictures captured on a mobile device to your Luminar Catalog. Once edited in Luminar Neo, results can be sent back to the mobile device for easy social sharing or viewing on the go.
The software is expected to ship this winter and will be available as a package deal with Luminar AI.
My Thoughts
It looks like another interesting effort from Skylum. It appears to be aimed at portrait photographers more than, say, landscape photographers, but it's hard to tell until I have the software in hand. Still, LuminarAI has some excellent tools for portrait work, like skin smoothing, lighting controls, and bokeh. That makes me think there's going to be some overlap with LuminarAI, and I'm wondering why they don't incorporate these new tools into the existing product. I hope it's not a ploy to soak photographers twice, once with LuminarAI and then again with Luminar Neo. Luminar says the two products have different workflows, and photographers are free to choose which is the better fit.
In a more detailed response, Skylum says:
LuminarAI is the easiest-to-use image editor fully powered by AI for those who prefer a time-saving, template-driven workflow for quick results. The app can swiftly guide you to the best outcomes while still preserving editing flexibility. It's a compact and easy-to-navigate application that already packs everything one needs for great results.
Luminar Neo is for those who want more editing options and more creative control. The app provides the ability to build detailed and expressive images with advanced layer-based workflow and flexible tools that can be applied in any order. It also boasts a high-speed core engine with background rendering and accelerated exports for more complex tasks. (while also retaining the features of Luminar AI).
In my own landscape work, I find LuminarAI a powerful and time-saving tool. They've got very creative people on the software end, but companies have to be careful to be not seen exploiting their users or there will be a backlash. We don't have any real details on the specifics of this release. Skylum says Neo is not a replacement for AI and that LuminarAI will continue to be sold and supported.
I look forward to getting an early release of Luminar Neo and will share my thoughts at that time.
Here's a link to sign up and purchasing info. The company says in the coming weeks, they'll share more information on Neo.
I just started photograhy a year ago and am very much an amature. I went for Luminar 4 because it seemed to be a less steep learning curve and to be honest cheaper, then I found myself thinking I needed to upgrade to Ai, now......... Adobe here I come!
Amateur or not, if Luminar 4, which does have some cool AI features, works for you that's great. Plus, when you start renting the Adobe products, it will run as a plug-in to PS and LR.
Kevin
I know and appreciate Luminar 4 and AI has benifits and can/will be used as plug-ins for PS/LR. I just feel the limited time I have for something I am very much enjoying learning (the whole process) would have been better channeled into PS/LR in the 1st place rather than trying to 'keep up' with new versions of Luminar. I guess its just progress 😂
In 2019, they sold me this “revolutionary” POS (I promise I mean piece of software, lmao) called Luminar 4 as a lifetime license. It is all the YouTubers talked about, and they were clearly getting some behind the scenes cuz the software was slow and buggy even after many “updates”. Less than a year after that, they announced their “new revolutionary” POS called Luminar AI as a paid upgrade. The users from Luminar 4 got nothing and were left behind with their buggy and slow software. Now, they announced this Luminar Neo, which is also paid, and the previous users get nothing again. Sorry, but I don’t fall for that crap anymore. If I was looking for a yearly paid software, I would stick to Adobe, which is an industry standard for a serious reason called quality. My advice to anyone considering to get this: they will take your money every year in their so called “lifetime” and abandon you faster than a blink. Don’t, just don’t.
Delvidd it is a LIFETIME license... to that version. It never expires you can keep using it.
I also have a lifetime license to my Sony A7S, A7R2, and A7III
I own them. No one can take them away. But if I want the new version with extra features I pay for it.
Why do you think lifetime updates with new featurs should come for free?
If this means that AI will not receive any future upgrades then I'm done with skylum. I bought luminar 4 right before they announced AI and felt like I was lied to because they could have let us know it was already dead. Complained enough to get AI for a decent price and now this. Make that subscription to Adobe not seem so bad. Not to mention none of the luminar products have lived up to expectations. I have free apps on Android that do a better job at automatically removing blemishes. I constantly have to manually do what the AI is supposed to do.
Luminar AI has an update next month... and is getting new stuff
Hope it's better than the AI upgrade which would not work for me. So sceptical on this.
Hi Tom Cummings Not sure what you mean would not work for you. If you mean your machine didn't meet specs and it couldn't launch, the requirements for system are about the same for Luminar Neo.
But you can always contact support and theu can help torubleshoot activation issues. Please let me know what you need.
It's pretty shady of them to not not allow catalog migration from one version to another. I say "allow" because if they really wanted to, they could have made it part of the new software. Literally all software provides an upgrade/migrate path even when it's a whole new engine. C'mon, man.
Don't come back with the lame and childish solution, "So batch export your processed images and import the folders... Or leave both apps installed.".
Because of the way the engines are built, the images would look different, in some cases dramatically. So Skylum decides to not build that in.
If you need catalog migrations though, these guys do it. cyme.io
if you want to submit feedback on migrations, support@skylum.com tabulates and makes sure the product team knows whats on folks minds.