Luminar software has been an industry leader when it comes to artificial intelligence photo editing for many years, and now they’re taking it even further with Luminar Neo.
If you’re used to Luminar AI, the Luminar Neo will feel familiar, but under the hood, it’s all new. Now, instead of saving all photo edits in your computer’s RAM, Luminar Neo saves each individual edit separately in a “history-style” panel, where each edit roughly acts as a its own class. The problem with this design change is that complex editing can sometimes become confusing, but the decision was made to enhance both speed and reliability. Luminar has never been very fast and Neo is definitely the fastest Luminar software I have used.
I talked to the developers at Luminar and they told me that software like Lightroom is fast because Adobe purposefully limits its functionality to being able to edit hundreds or thousands of images at once. AI editing done in Luminar is much more processor intensive than your average global edits; therefore, changes need to be made to make the editing process faster.
Two of the new AI erasure features in Neo are automatic dust and power line removal. As with any 100% “automatic” feature, it’s not always perfect, but these work a lot better than I could have imagined.
Neo also has a “Relight” feature that finds objects and then creates a depth map of the background and allows you to edit parts of each separately. Of course, you could spend 20 minutes with the Pen Tool in Photoshop to cut everything manually, but Neo does an amazing job, instantly and automatically.
The other new update is the companion app, Luminar Share, which works alongside Neo on mobile devices. This app allows you to send images wirelessly from your phone to your computer, and once you’ve edited your photo, it automatically sends the complete file back to your mobile device for sharing.
Watch the video above to see Luminar Neo in action. Depending on your shooting and editing style, Neo can save you hours of editing. At the very least, it’s worth checking out the free trial.
