Automatic photo editing and enhancement using artificial intelligence (AI), that’s what Skylum promises with Luminar AI. Can the company deliver on that promise? We let the product loose on a lot of photos to find out and in the meantime we tell you what you can do with this software.
The old-fashioned manual work that has been used to polish photos for about 30 years is getting more and more competition from systems that can do it all themselves. Luminar AI is one of the forerunners in this area, which can be used as a standalone program or as a plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom (or compatible products).
If you use the program as a plug-in, the tool will of course be immediately released on the photo that you are currently editing. If you start Luminar as a separate program, you can open an individual image, but it is more convenient to first create a library, which in Luminar is called Catalog. For this Luminar scans your folder(s) with photos and even with a large collection that goes smoothly. Luminar also recognizes many raw formats.
The results are impressive. The thumbnails can be displayed in four sizes and can be filtered on the basis of various criteria. If you have images that somehow belong together, you can also merge them into virtual albums.
Edits you make are not committed until you export an image. Until then, everything you’ve done with a photo is visible in the thumbnails and you can also filter by recently edited material. Finally, you can of course also search for photos by name and by searching folders.
Working with templates
Luminar has a streamlined way of working that doesn’t use the icons you know from most photo editors. Instead, you move from tab to tab. The first tab you’ll come across when you’ve selected an image from the catalog is Templates. That’s where the AI ​​first appears.
Templates are similar to Actions in photoshop; collections with edits that you automatically apply to a photo one after the other. More than twenty collections are supplied as standard. Based on the content of your photo, the AI ​​makes a suggestion for which template you can use, for example especially for portraits or for cityscapes.
Although the AI ​​interpretation of a photo is often correct, that is certainly not always the case. But you can always manually search for a template.
Within each collection you can choose from a handful of templates. The idea behind this is that you can quickly give multiple photos the same look by applying such a template with one click and possibly changing its strength. If you don’t find enough inspiration in the supplied templates, you can add to your collection in the Skylum Marketplace, but compared to Luminar itself, those separate extras are relatively expensive. Fortunately, you can also easily create your own templates.
Explore interface
The third tab we come across is To process and this area is in fact the real heart of Luminar. Here you will find a large number of tools with which you can quickly boost an everyday photo into an eye-catcher – partly based on AI.
The tools are divided into four categories: Essential, Creative, Portrait and Professional. A category such as Portrait speaks for itself here, but less so for the tools in the other sections. The names of the various parts are self-explanatory to a certain extent, so you quickly know which function you are looking for.
In the Essential section, we also immediately encounter the first AI-based tool: Improve. With only two sliders (accent and air improvement) you can make a photo immediately splash off the screen here. The AI ​​here itself recognizes what can be improved and what the sky is and immediately brings more depth to the image.
Here you will find many more tools to quickly improve a photo. For example, the AI ​​can Composition create an aesthetically pleasing crop in any desired aspect ratio and you can To clear quite simply make unwanted visual elements, such as an unsightly traffic sign, disappear. Selecting such an object could be smarter; you have to color the part completely, while indicating the outline should be enough.
the tool Structure is also based on AI and cleverly magnifies small contrast differences in an image, making it sharper. The other parts in this section don’t use AI, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t smart. This is how the slider is Smart Contrast of the part light a lot more useful than the usual contrast function.
Also with Details we find sliders that outperform well-known functions such as sharpen and unsharp mask in traditional photo editors, as they give you more control. Finally, the part Landscape still worth mentioning. Here you can quickly reduce haze, enhance foliage and give your photo a touch as if it were taken during the ‘golden hour’ so loved by photographers.
Replace air
The death knell for many photos is a dull air, and in a traditional photo editor, you have to put in a lot of effort to separate it from the rest of the image so that you can replace it. Luminar can do that trick all by itself.
The first feature in the section Creative because it is called Sky and here you can easily choose a different cloud pattern or a starry sky. Not only does Luminar automatically replace the dull sky, but you can also cleverly re-expose the scene and you will also find the new pattern in reflections. Even in difficult scenes, for example with many bare tree branches, the replacement succeeds very well.
It will be clear that replacing the sky does not always work, for example when the position of the sun deviates strongly or when there are already strong reflections of the existing sky. Of course, the included skies get boring once, but luckily you can add your own images or buy bundles of skies. Incidentally, just like Templates, they are quite pricey (39 euros for 20 to 25 pieces).
Besides replacing skies, you can also easily add objects, such as birds, fireworks, lightning and so on. You can also make these kinds of objects yourself (in another photo editor) and add them or buy them. Here too, you should pay close attention to credibility.
Other weather effects in this section include the ability to add fog, haze and sun rays. In the Creative section we also find tools to adjust the mood of a photo, for example by means of a soft focus filter or to change the color scheme via LUTs.
Portrait and professional
You rarely come across real portraits in glamor magazines and the popular models on Instagram and other social media also like to embellish reality a bit with Photoshop. Luminar can save a lot of time in that aesthetic tinkering, because the AI ​​in the category Portrait recognize facial features. To make lips redder and fuller or teeth whiter, you don’t have to select them manually first.
Beautifying or discoloring the eyes and making the skin smoother in Luminar is also a matter of a few clicks and playing with some sliders. Even slimming the body and creating a wasp waist is quickly arranged.
The last section we encounter is called Professional and that’s a bit of a mixed bag. Here you’ll find five tools that are quite technical in nature and that are more reminiscent of a traditional photo editor, although Luminar does give it its own twist.
Here you can tackle lens distortion and vignetting and find functions to adjust contrast and color balance in a more extensive way than in most other software. Here you will also find the option to make parts of a photo lighter or darker (Push through and To prevent). Finally, this section offers a version of the time-honored clone tool.
Prices Luminar AI
€79 for 1 license
€99 for 2 licenses
Luminar X subscription basic € 39,- pro € 59,-
Without layers
The focus of much photo editing lies in the use of layers and masks and these terms have not yet come up in our discussion. You will therefore search in vain for a traditional implementation of these tools in Luminar. That is not to say that they are completely absent.
You can apply a local mask to every photo you edit, so that any effects you apply to it are only applied locally. You can draw or generate such a mask as a linear or radial gradient. In addition, you can also load such masks in the form of a texture file.
Masks and textures cannot be used to selectively apply all Luminar toys. The only AI tool that cares about masks is Texture, and otherwise you’ll only find traditional settings here, such as contrast and saturation.
With regard to textures, you have even fewer options, but on the other hand, you can mix them with the primary image in all kinds of ways, although the list is somewhat shorter than in Photoshop, for example.
At this point, you can take a closer look at your entire workflow in the History and from here you can also take the necessary steps back. In this, Luminar does not differ from many other photo editors.
If you are satisfied with the edits that have been made, you can save it as a template to release all at once on a new image next time. Strangely enough you can’t give the template your own name at this point, for that you have to go back to the tab of the same name.
As mentioned before, Luminar does not save photos, but only keeps a list of edits. To actually save we have to go to the last tab in the workflow. Here you can send your image directly to SmugMug or 500px (a somewhat sparse list), email it or save it as a jpg, png, tiff, pdf or psd file.
It will regularly happen that you want to apply the same edits to several similar photos. That too is simple. In the Catalog you can copy them to multiple photos and then export all edited photos.
Conclusion
Because Luminar AI is so different, the program takes some getting used to. The sometimes somewhat arbitrary division of tools into categories certainly plays a role in this. You get used to things quickly and you will soon notice that you can give almost any photo a big boost with a few actions. The AI-based functions provide a huge time-saver. The latter in particular makes Luminar AI suitable for professionals, for whom time is money.
If you just want to beautify photos, Luminar should suffice. If you also want to create complex compositions with layers or, for example, be able to add text to photos, you still can’t do without a traditional photo editor.
Although Luminar AI is reasonably priced, you will notice that the included skies and objects get boring quickly. You can purchase additional bundles or a subscription for a fee. Fortunately, you can add your own material (possibly from royalty-free sources on the internet) so that this objection is easy to circumvent.
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