Luminar Neo - My Replacement for Lightroom
Early last year I wrote an article about having just switched my photo editing software. You can read that here. It has now been ten months since I switched to Luminar Neo and I thought I would give you my thoughts this far in and show you a couple of examples.
First, how I got here. As you read in my previous article, I was a longtime Adobe user. I think I was paying them for a decade. However, they upped my price just one too many times and I knew that there had to be another option. I finally settled on trying Luminar Neo and again just to be transparent, I got my original license for free from them. Still, one of the great things about Luminar is that you buy a perpetual license for generally about the cost of four months of Lightroom. One of the immediate downsides to Luminar Neo is that they do try and upsell you a fair bit even if you have the perpetual license. Mostly to try and convince you to buy some of their presets. That said, I do now pay for the Luminar Mobile app for when I need something a little more powerful than Google Photos on my phone.
So what is it like to use Luminar Neo? Well when you open it you will be in your photo catalog and there are two other tabs that you can move between, Presets and Edit. In the Catalog you can manage all of your photos, though it only stores them locally on device and not in the cloud, You can also do some of the more complex AI editing here like Generative Erase and Generative Expand. I don’t use these tools because I don’t like to manipulate my photos like that and you do need to have a fairly fast processor for it to happen relatively fast, which I don’t have. There are also some standard tools here like focus stacking and a panorama tool.
The Preset tab is exactly what you would expect it to be. It has a collection of presets that you can use on your photos. The standard license comes with actually quite a few, but there is an even more extensive catalog of ones that you can buy. I don’t use presets very often unless I am trying to get a specific look in a hurry, but they are there if you need them.
The final tab is where I spend most of my time and there an extensive list of editing options here. One of the first menu options you see on the right hand side is Develop which has all of your basic editing tools. If you are a more adventurous editor there is almost an endless list of tools that align with some of the really specialized ones you see in Lightroom like studio lighting and toning, but also some I don’t recognise like mood enhancement. I think you could do some pretty creative things in here if you wanted to. I occasionally will use some minor dodge and burn type lighting fixes, but again mostly just stick to your basic exposure enhancements (another reason that I didn’t need to be paying for Lightroom).
I thought I would show you some straight out of camera raw images and some of the edits that I was able to do pretty quickly to show the variety available. The photos were all taken this year. I did up a black and white one for each and for a couple I used the lighting tools to enhance certain spots.
Tofino Beach - The first image on the left is what the RAW image looked like. The second uses the studio light to enhance just them. The third one is where I would likely go with the image and the last one uses one of the presets.
Island View Beach - Again the one on the left is the original. The middle two are presets and the final one is a basic black and white edit.
Japanese Garden - This picture is from the Horticultural Centre of the Pacific. Like the previous two, original is on the left. The second one I used the dodge and burn tool to raise the light on the rock. The third one is a basic colour edit and the last one is a basic black and white conversion.
And I want to emphasize that these were all quick edits that you can learn easily. As far as I am concerned, Luminar Neo does pretty much anything that Lightroom can do and maybe a few unique options that some will find very helpful. Skylum, the company that makes Luminar Neo has a great YouTube channel where you can watch a ton of how-to videos. There are also a thousand other creators out there that use it and that produce videos on it as well, though I find a lot of them are talking about their review more than they’re use cases.
If you are interested in checking out Luminar Neo, click the button at the end of the article and you can get it on sale. If you are reading this on November 28th, you can get an even bigger discount with their Black Friday sale. That is an affiliate link so please use it as it help support my blog!
I would love to know if you have tried Luminar Neo and what you think or if you have found another great alternative to Lightroom, please leave a comment below! Also if you have a question about Luminar Neo, don’t hesitate to get in contact with me at: SidewalkingVictoria@gmail.com