It’s probably not a great surprise, as from the moment Luminar Neo was launched, the fact that the older Luminar AI stayed on sale seemed pretty odd.
Luminar AI was not the best incarnation of Skylum’s ever-changing photo editor. It had some new AI tricks, but lost a lot of the more advanced features previously found in Luminar 4, like layers, for example.
Layers has made a return to Luminar Neo and Skylum says a free update is imminent which will add a Clone & Stamp tool to Luminar Neo – that’s another feature that was already in Luminar 4, all those versions ago.
Luminar has always been an exciting and fast-moving newcomer to the photo-editing market, but some of the moves have been so fast and so erratic it’s hard to have a lot of confidence in where it’s going next. Each incarnation features the same core message as previous versions, but with new features added and some old ones removed amid a blizzard of marketing messages.
Luminar Neo is not bad, in my opinion, but Skylum has done a couple of things I’m not keen on. First, it’s speeded up its rendering by showing only those adjustment effects ‘below’ the current one in the tools stack – this seems a real backward step in a world where other editors preview the cumulative effect all the tools in real-time as you make adjustments.
The second thing I’m not keen on is the way Skylum has pivoted towards paid Extensions as a way of extending Luminar’s capabilities. The basic software is cheap enough, but the ‘extras’ could quickly push the price up well beyond that of its nearest rivals.
I’m not putting much Luminar how-to content on the site at the moment because Skylum’s repeated relaunches have left a lot of the older content outdated, and I’ve no great confidence that any new tutorials I create will still be relevant next week, let alone in the next version.
Buy Luminar Neo
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