LUMINAR AI

Taking the tedium out of photo editing

- Rod Lawton

www.skylum.com £59/$79

Luminar AI is designed to take the drudgery out of photo editing, handling the previously technical and time-consuming tasks of selecting and masking, and manually adjusting sliders, with its own automated machine learning AI.

It’s not trying to replace Lightroom or Photoshop, or tempt you away from the editing software that you know and love. Instead, it’s aimed at what Skylum believes is a much wider market of photographers and content creators, those who simply want beautiful images without the fuss.

Luminar AI is not an upgrade to Luminar 4, but instead is being pitched as a whole new product. Luminar fans may recognise a lot of Luminar 4 in the new program, but we’re saying nothing.

Skylum has taken a bold step here, ending development of Luminar 4 and taking its core technologies in a new direction. That may disappoint a lot of Luminar fans who hoped it would become an ever more sophisticated and advanced alternative to Lightroom or Photoshop – that doesn’t look like that’s going to happen now.

Key features

Luminar AI is an all-in-one nondestructive photo cataloguing and editing program. You can use it to browse, filter and organise your photos, and any changes you make with templates or filters can be reversed or modified at any time. It’s designed to be simple; when you select a photo for editing, the software’s AI will analyse your subject matter and suggest templates (or Looks in Luminar terminology) that present a variety of different editing styles.