Luminar 4 + AI Review

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. 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.From 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. It offers a faster editing process compared to Lightroom, making it seem much more appealing. 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. Heck, Jim Nix was even sponsoring Luminar 4 in recent videos to show off how to make his photography really pop!What everyone failed to mention, however, was the mediocre programming and processing capabilities of Luminar 4, in my opinion. 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.I’d downloaded the pair of software applications to try out and gauge if it met my needs. In the three says I’ve worked with it, I was left with the following impressions: - The main claims made about Luminar 4 and Luminar AI were that it was made to create faster post processing possible. 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 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. While these features sound great, I found that each felt out of place in the trial photographs I’d tested these tools with. The sky replacements felt out of place in the images, sometimes creating more issues trying to blend the replacement sky into the original image. The solar rays were too high luminosity too early on the slider, making adjustments (and their advanced adjustments) poorly scale. - RAW file formats, while supported, too a lot of memory to run. 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. This often led to multiple crashes just prepping an image for layered adjustments! - One of my largest concerns was that edits were being made on the original files instead of the program creating a copy of the image it was editing. Instead, I’d found that while trying to avoid any edits to the original image before exporting, the image libraries and the image you work on were being preallocated to memory while the software was running. This was an issue when I was dealing with access to a portion of my image library— well over the capacity of my computer’s RAM. Supposedly, the image thumbnails are supposed to use a compression method to avoid any issues; however, I found that this was not necessarily the case and that the abundance of images in the library was overwhelming the software. - Since you’re limited to one version of your image, the only way to preview multiple versions was to create duplicates of the same image for as many revisions to the style or tone of the image as I would need. This was a feature that I sorely wished they would have added in (multiple virtual images with various styles); however, due to the memory issues, I doubt it would have made their customers happy. - Lastly, working on large volumes of photos requires a strong and stable foundation of building profiles or masks that can be applied to a whole range of similar photos. I felt that Luminar lacks the stability to really handle a typical day out. Due to consistently crashing, I was not able to get through a single album of photos in the time I’d set aside to do so, making it all the more frustrating trying to work with a product that didn’t want to work with me.Overall, I felt like the hype for AI driven technologies was what led to Skylum’s rise in popularity. The issue is that they were trying to reinvent the wheel and do too many things to really make a comparable or competitive product in today’s market.Open-source applications felt more stable and had more features that make them competitive software applications. My main post process tool, RawTherapee, had a comprehensive list of available tools and features with a moderate learning curve. While it misses out on adjustment layers and masking, the software itself is ideal for large volumes of batch processing and individual edits. GIMP similarly feels like it has more community support and documentation than what Skylum has produced. Google Snapseed— used for mobile RAW processing and spot post-processing— feels easier to use. And while despite being limited to working on individual photos, I feel like it’s an excellent example of how to simplify post processing to streamline for faster methods.All in all, I can’t say I’m impressed with Skylum’s current products. I hope to see their software grow and develop to fulfill their goals, I just don’t think they’re there yet. via /r/photography https://ift.tt/3moS5dL