Skylum has revealed another Extension that will soon be added to the Luminar Neo editing platform for Pro plan subscribers and owners of the 2022 Extensions Pack. Five Extensions have already been revealed, and today, another has been announced for next month: Supersharp AI, a tool for sharpening details in an image.
According to Skylum, Supersharp AI tackles motion blur and misfocused shots and helps transform a photo from blurry to sharp. The neural network in Supersharp AI calculates a photo’s depth, perspective, and context. With this information, it can deblur and correct the focus with compression algorithms. With the Supersharp AI Extension, it’s easy to eliminate motion blur caused by a shaky camera or moving subject or eliminate lens blur caused by missed focus.
This tool helps photographers correct mistakes when they miss the mark with manual focus and assists in those cases when the shutter speed is too slow and fails to catch the desired details. As a result of Supersharp AI’s work, photographers will get a natural-looking image full of details.
Skylum has plenty of competition, including the excellent Topaz Sharpen AI and their new Photo AI that sharpens, reduces noise, and does upscaling. There is also similar sharpening tech from ON1.
The Supersharp AI Extension will be released in November. It can be accessed as part of a monthly or yearly Luminar Neo Pro subscription, or it can be purchased as part of the 2022 Extensions Pack. Pro monthly and yearly subscriptions are available now and include access to Luminar Neo and all currently available Extensions as well as all Extensions released during the subscription period.
Frankly, Skylum pricing is all over the place, with frequent special deals, so it's best to check their website.
Luminar Neo itself is available from the Microsoft Store and the MacOS App Store.
I'll review Supershapr AI when it's released, with comparisons to other sharpening tools available.
I wanted to love Luminar Neo and have found it to be incredibly slow for batch processing, even on my brand new M1 iMac. Even rendering previews takes a long time (is slower than Luminar AI in fact) and I think they should work on improving performance before introducing a bunch of extensions you have to pay extra for. Overall, I like the interface pretty well and think it has good potential but I've stopped using it for now.
I have had a similar inconsistent performance of Luminar NEO on my MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip. The update to 1.4.0 added a crazy slow cloning tool that eventually crashed first the program and finally the computer. Inexplicably after a few reboots now it runs perfectly fine…
On the other hand the new extension currently add 5 out of the 6 features I use other programs for, pano stitching the only missing one. If they add that I would like to buy the 2022 pack.
I figure that a vast library can affect the performance of the program upon start. My solution is to use multiple libraries. I currently edit of a library that has only images from 2021 and 2022. I do have a master library with everything. I use this one for search and selection but edit in the smaller libraries. This may help you speed you NEO a bit.
Thanks, Juan. The slow performance happens for me even in brand new libraries with only a few images. I believe I saw somewhere that there should be a performance update in November. If not, I'll probably continue to use Luminar AI as needed since it's faster for me.
I have Luninar Nero and the portrait one. Super slow and AI is disappointing so far. The blur background part is sketchy at best. I will keep it but no pleased at all. The Marketing folks over shot the runway on what it does. Their pricing layout plans, sketchy and confusing. I get it, software company want to subscription model. I hope it fails personally. Its a free market economy, so most likely get nickel and dime out of the software market.
Seems less and less about photography and more about image manipulation.