Skylum Luminar is one of the best softwares for photographers and photography. This Software is an award-winning editing suite for both PC and Mac. Luminar is considered as a complete, professional photo workflow solution, but its best features are its slick interface, autocorrect tools, and impressive effects filters.
The Windows version of Luminar is not the fastest performance for organizing and organizing transactions and lacks some expected library tools such as search, facial recognition and geotagging.
But the unique adjustment tools and filters – and the fact that you can install it as a Photoshop or Lightroom plug-in – make photographers a worthy addition to any software’s toolkit.
Pricing and Getting Started with the Skylum Luminar
Skylum Luminar can be obtained directly from the Skylum site for $ 69. It is not available in the Windows app store but is available in the Mac App Store. Although desktop apps available in app stores are more being preferred because they make it easy to update and install on multiple computers. There is a 30-day trial version from the main site menu.
You can optionally install Skylum Luminar as a Photoshop or Lightroom Classic plug-in (Lightroom CC plug-in support is not available). It overlaps with a few tools found in Adobe’s photo software, but Lightroom Classic is the gold standard in workflow software, so installing Skylum Luminar as a plugin makes sense.
If Skylum Luminar can finally sync Lightroom’s organizational features, you can avoid Adobe’s $ 9.99 monthly subscription model and just use Skylum Luminar.
The first time you run Skylum Luminar after installation, it takes you through a very short wizard where you tell which folder your photos are stored in; You can optionally add multiple folders. From then on, it scans these folders in the Library view as they will be presented.
Skylum Luminar Interface
Skylum Luminar has a clean, clear-looking, dark gray interface with modern flat icons. You can choose which settings will appear in the right control panel. There are no mode switchers for tasks like Organize and Enhance, such as Lightroom CC and Phase One Capture One.
Instead, the right panel can toggle between the Library, Layout, and Info screen. This program is also great when it comes to syncing your photos to the cloud.
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Skylum Luminar Photo Editor Review
After installing the program, based on some reviews, sometimes images are not displayed in full resolution on their screen and sometimes they turn black. Generally, edit sliders are gray and unresponsive. And maybe you can’t use the Page Down key to quickly scroll through large image collections or open a photo with the Enter key.
You cannot resize the program window from the upper corner either. Changing editing Workspaces loses the edits you made before, but that’s not very nice, but it’s possible to pull back with many Ctrl-Zs.
Import and Organize
- Skylum Luminar allows multiple catalogs as in Lightroom Classic. You can add a single photo to another folder at any time with options from the Library menu. What you cannot do is transfer image files from your camera card to another storage location, as is the case with Lightroom and PhotoDirector. It might take about 30 seconds on the computer to add 180 raw photos to my catalog.
- The right sidebar’s Library mode groups photos by Date, Favorites, and a few options. The program allows you to create your own albums and drag pictures from other views to them.
- A major organizational problem for the Windows version of Skylum Luminar at this point is that there is no built-in search. Compare this to DxO PhotoLab and Lightroom Classic, which let you search by image attributes such as focal length and lens, and any text in the filename.
- You can use color-coding to categorize photos, select and reject buttons and rate stars. However, you cannot assign keyword tags to photos, which can make it easier to find photos in a large collection.
- Skylum Luminar also doesn’t let you filter by color codes, making them not very useful. And forget about advanced options like filtering using face recognition etc.
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Enhance and Adjust
- For raw camera file conversion, Skylum Luminar only has one of its developer profiles, the Skylum Luminar Default, but you can choose Adobe Standard (less vivid than the new Adobe Color) and whatever profile it gets from your camera; Options for Canon EOS 6D were Faithful, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait and Standard.
- Switching the right panel to Edit mode brings up a very customizable group of settings. By default, you’ll see the Quick & Perfect control group or filters as the program calls all adjustments. Includes Fast and Awesome Accent AI Filter, AI Sky Enhancer, Saturation / Vibration and Clarity. For any of these settings (but not for basic tonal adjustments), you can use a brush or mask, the second of which can be a gradient, radial, or gloss. There is also a Dodge & Burn locale brush to lighten or tone specific areas.
- Accent AI Filter is one of the best auto developers. The Boost slider can bring in darker shadows and lower highlights at the same time. AI Sky Enhancer finds the sky in your photo and adds drama. But it didn’t work on all of my test files, it even worked on some AI. Sometimes it included distant mountains in its settings. You should try setting both to the maximum, then turn it over, although you get an HDR image with flip since they don’t distort the image excessively but improve it clearly.
- In the default Fast and Awesome workspace, the basic exposure and contrast tools are unavailable and not embedded in a Tint filter group unless you add them with the Add Filters button. You can add or remove any group of individual settings to create and save your own custom Workspaces.
Performance with Luminar
Luminar is not, at this point, an extremely robust Windows application as it was in the development of the product. At several points during testing, it stopped responding and the photos were shown in all black.
It’s a little slow to get started and sometimes you have to wait a bit to do something simple like flip a picture or switch to another photo. The Mac version didn’t have these issues.
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Sharing, Output and Help
The options for sending your edited image to the world on Skylum Luminar are pretty simple, but these are way more than what you get in Lightroom CC. Skylum Luminar can print. You can also share it via email, but it cannot be shared via social networks or chat apps.
Perhaps when Skylum Luminar distributes the program as a UWP application, it will be able to share it with any application on your computer, as Windows Photos can do. You can also edit your work as JPG, PNG, TIFF, PSD or PDF – much more than Lightroom CC’s JPG or unprocessed with editing options.
Although Adobe has its own issues in this area, the help and support options for Skylum Luminar are not the best. The User’s Guide link in the Help menu takes you to a slightly lightweight indexed web page. There’s no searching for this help and it is hard to find information on the flagship Sky Enhancer feature.
