I’d found that while using my RAW library, my 16GB RAM was 40% idle and 90%+ while handling things such as multiple adjustment layers or running a luminosity mask. RAW file formats, while supported, too a lot of memory to run. The solar rays were too high luminosity too early on the slider, making adjustments (and their advanced adjustments) poorly scale. The sky replacements felt out of place in the images, sometimes creating more issues trying to blend the replacement sky into the original image. While these features sound great, I found that each felt out of place in the trial photographs I’d tested these tools with. The automated features such as the solar rays and sky replacement were a nice touch that I thought would be useful in the long run, especially dealing with mundane tasks like ray tracing, atmospheric effects, and so on. This was offset by how often the application would crash, making all of the work put into it much MORE time consuming than using an alternative application! The main claims made about Luminar 4 and Luminar AI were that it was made to create faster post processing possible. In the three says I’ve worked with it, I was left with the following impressions: I’d downloaded the pair of software applications to try out and gauge if it met my needs. Not only is it not a stable platform to work with, it’s endeavors to introduce simplicity and ease of use created shortcuts that cut corners and ultimately led to an inferior product. What everyone failed to mention, however, was the mediocre programming and processing capabilities of Luminar 4, in my opinion. Heck, Jim Nix was even sponsoring Luminar 4 in recent videos to show off how to make his photography really pop! The AI capabilities that were touted in the reviews seemed to make it sound extremely impressive, especially being able to add solar rays or replace skies more easily. It offers a faster editing process compared to Lightroom, making it seem much more appealing. I’d recently run across an article that compared Lightroom to a newer software from Skylum called Luminar 4 and Luminar AI, which was being designed to use neural networking strategies to develop images.įrom what I had read, not only was Luminar comparable to LR’s range of tools, the interface and learning curves were much better to get into. So I’ve been researching complimentary and competitive software to Adobe’s Lightroom ever since they’d shifted their model from perpetual licensing to subscriptions.

Luminar ai review