Software Opinions on Luminar 4?

Biro

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Name
Steve
I've seen a free download of Luminar 4 offered as a bonus with a number of purchases at B&H. This is one photo-processing suite that I know nothing about. Any opinions? These days, I tend to use the Photos app on my Mac - or Capture One if I really need to edit heavily or use raw.
 
I have Luminar 3 and use it fairly often for fine tuning my post work. But as a product, was fairly disappointed that it initially was promoted to be a Lightroom replacement. Yet the emphasis in Luminar 4 turned out to be more AI tools. I don’t see it as a viable image management tool. It does have good integration with Apple Photos (my image management platform). I have not really considered upgrading to 4, but bundled with a purchase I would go for it.
 
And as far as I understand there's no update to it as the company replaces the "4" product with a "Luminar AI" product (as they previously replaced "2018" with "3" or something along those lines)

I had high hopes initially, since it's apparently made by programmers who originally worked on the Nik plugins...

But they pivoted from "Photoshop/Lightroom replacement" to "apply our filters and see if you like them" (up to AI sky replacements and "add a space shuttle to your shot")...

Not for me...
(It's also fairly sluggish on my I5 with 16GB Ram and GPU)
 
The following is not about Luminar 4, but a small rant about the company. Sorry if slightly OT :)

I actually forgot how dodgy their business model is until I looked into this again just now...

They basically release unfinished software with big promises and roadmaps... But then they don't follow up on these promises and then abandon that product for a "new" revolutionary software...

I found a review/advertisement for Luminar AI, and even in that it sounds dodgy :-D

-------------- Quotes: -------------
A few things to note (about Luminar AI)

-Layers functionality will be rolling into a new tool, which is as of yet, sight unseen.

-You can NOT migrate your Luminar 3/4 catalog over to Luminar AI.

-You CAN transfer all of your saved and purchased Looks over to Luminar AI!

It is NOT an update to Luminar 4
It is NOT Luminar 5
It is NOT a Photolemur update

Who it is not for?
If you are waiting for the original roadmap to be fulfilled – Luminar AI is likely not for you.
-----------------------

Rant over :)
 
I like it for the haze removal feature. They have finally fixed the bug in which the program randomly wouldn't open on Windows computers. I often process photos with LR and then give them a final tweak with Luminar. So it's useful for me. Versions before 4 I found to be fairly buggy.
 
I loved the MacPhun tools (as it was years ago), so when Luminar came out I took the bait, hook, line and sinker and bought that. Then they became Skylum and changed things so I can no longer use older apps. And then there was 2018. And L3. And Aurora HDR (2 versions). They have had quite enough of my money. All this “not a subscription” is just so much BS. Because if you wanted to update, you get to “upgrade” at something only slightly less than retail. In the end, I decided that the Creative Kit tools were all I ever needed (and I had already bought them) if all I wanted was a few filtering things. I havent even been using the Luminars at all. Wasted money and time. And don’t talk to be about that abomination known as digital asset manager. Its a nightmare.

I still use the Creative kit.
 
I still use it but only when I want to do sky replacement or object removal. It's quiet good with both of those, if you can bear the 15 second wait for the image to load and be ready for editing. For free, that's not bad. But I wouldn't pay more than that.
 
I got a free copy of L2 with the purchase of a Fuji XF 50-200. It was something of a challenge to get installed and licensed on my Windows box. Starting it up, I was completely underwhelmed as usage was entirely unintuitive to this brain damaged idiot.

At that juncture, I decided I wasn't interested in spending any time learning another piece of software, so I removed it from my computer.
 
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