The full release version is out now and includes presets and layers, but an upcoming update will add Mask AI (which will do what Photoshop's Quick Select tool does) as well as Portrait Background Removal AI, which will presumably do what it says on the tin.

It’s worth stressing that although much of Luminar Neo’s appeal is in tinker-free editing, you can fine-tune the effects the automated tools give you using the masking brush.Ī point worth making is that our review is, currently, based on an early access version of Luminar Neo. On images with more clearly defined subjected – either in terms of their brightness or the sharpness falloff between them and their background – the tool worked much better, selectively brightening the subject, or the background. On images with large depth of field – that is, more sharpness throughout the image – it seemed Luminar was struggling somewhat to accurate gauge the depth of the shot.

We went in with high hopes for Relight with Luminar Neo acquitting itself well elsewhere, there seemed a chance this might to an end the days of laboriously masking out a subject and endlessly dodging and burning them to get the desired result.īut we got a mixed set of results. Relight is a tool that analyses the depth in an image, detecting the foreground near the camera and the background further away, and then allows you to make exposure corrections based on that information. Photographers of all experience levels will know the challenge of correctly exposing a subject when they’re against a very dark or bright surface and will similarly know the challenges associated with correcting missed exposures in software. The inclusion of the AI-powered Relight is another tool with heaps of potential. One image with a pair of enormous dust spots failed completely, with Neo unable to detect or remove them. Where we had nothing but untrammeled success for removing powerlines, removing dust proved a little more hit and miss. Under the same set of erasing tools you also get automatic dust spot removal. Not only did Luminar Neo accurately detect powerlines – including one case where the cables faded into an area of over-exposure – but it made an exceedingly decent fist of removing them as well, deleting the lines and leaving no trace of the efforts made to conceal them. We tried this on four or five images, with powerlines that featured either prominently or diminutively in the composition, and came away impressed. For example, there’s the specific but frequently helpful option to remove powerlines, the blight of landscape photographers everywhere. Take, for example, the AI crop tool, which attempts to detect your subject and then line it up in the frame in a pleasing way or Luminar’s famed 'sky replacement', which will swap out your gunmetal-grey winter clouds for something with a bit more pizazz.īoth of those are present in Luminar AI, though – Luminar Neo brings with it a whole new set of tricks and toys. What makes Luminar Neo interesting is its AI tools, which claim to relieve you, the retoucher, of much of the technical strain of image editing, and even some of the creative choices you’ll have to make. Industry standards such as curves, white balance and so on are all in here, allowing you to do the simple stuff, like punching up colors and contrast, correcting color balance, cropping images to get your compositions right and so on.Īll of which, of course, you can do in just about any image editor. Whether you buy the AI hype or not, Luminar Neo has a strong set of image editing tools.

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