Luminar Neo
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Loading... - Fyodor Yelchin
- 28 Apr 2023
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For a while now, editing photos has been about more than just Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. A number of other companies have popped up in recent years like mushrooms after the rain. One that you may have heard about is the company Skylum, with their Luminar Neo software. Does the inclusion of AI in its algorithms mean a revolution in photo editing?
The User Interface
The user interface in Luminar Neo is clear and quick to navigate. There are three tabs at the top, two of which are familiar from other programs. From left to right, they are: Catalog, Presets, and Edit. Although, it’s quite possible that dust will settle on the middle tab – but I’ll get to that later.
There aren’t many options to tweak the environment in Luminar Neo (found by expanding the button at the top left of the screen). About the only major thing I recommend changing is the histogram display in the View tab. In Preferences, you can basically only set the max size for caching/backup and GPU use. At least you’ll soon be done and can get on with the important stuff, which is photo editing.
Catalog
There are two ways to look at the features and functions of the Luminar catalog. For some, it may be too simple and lacking in sophisticated features. For others, it is much more intuitive than other cataloging software. Personally, I am somewhere in between.
What I like about the catalog is that you can get familiar with it quickly – all but instantly. From the Add Photos or Folders menu, you just click through to the source of your photos. No complex import setup like you might be used to in Lightroom. The selected photo, or all the photos from the corresponding folder, are loaded within moments.
To make sure you don’t get lost in the number of photos, you can filter them by date taken, date imported, whether or not you’ve already edited them, and a few other simple parameters. If you don’t need advanced features like keyword search, coordinates, camera or lens used, you’ll be happy. But more advanced users may find these organizational options on the slim side.
Akin to Lightroom catalogs, you can use Luminar’s “Albums” to gather together your photos without moving the corresponding source files around on your disk. In the right-hand column next to the photo thumbnails is a slide-out panel showing the metadata, along with the ability to “Favorite” a photo. Read More…
