Skylum announces Luminar Neo: New tools and more AI promises to make photo editing easier
posted Thursday, September 9, 2021 at 8:00 AM EDT
Skylum has announced a new creative image editor, Luminar Neo. The software builds upon the foundation of Luminar AI and adds new features and improved performance.
'As the latest member of the Luminar family, we designed Luminar Neo to allow artists to take on more challenging image creation work and achieve results which often seem unattainable.' said Dima Sytnik, Co-founder & CPO of Skylum.
Luminar Neo continues to pursue the same goal as previous iterations of Luminar, to reduce the time photographers spend doing repetitive, tedious tasks when editing photos. The less time you spend editing, the more time you can spend shooting photos. Alternatively, spending less time on menial editing tasks lets you focus more on creative processes on the computer. To that end, Luminar Neo includes numerous new features.
Luminar Neo includes new relighting options. The software uses AI to analyze each image, recognize the depth in a scene and identify the subject to give the user precise control over exposure and tone.
The software also recognizes and removes artifacts caused by a dirty camera sensor or lens, meaning you must spend less time doing spot healing. There are also new tools to remove distracting elements from an image quickly. You can even totally replace the background of an image if you want. If you have a portrait photo and want a new background, you can do that in Luminar Neo.
Alongside Luminar Neo, Skylum is launching a new companion mobile app. You can use the app to add photos captured on a mobile device to your Luminar Catalog. After you're done editing the image in Luminar Neo, you can send it back to your mobile device for easier social sharing.
Taking input from photographers, artists and colorists, Luminar Neo includes new AI-driven compositing. AI-based masking isolates elements in individual images. You can add multiple images as new layers and apply any tool and mask to each layer individually and non-destructively. Luminar Neo includes different blending modes, which are guided by AI to produce clean composite images.
The software promises improved ease of use, too. Users can save photos and presets for easy reuse. All editing steps remain editable throughout your workflow, meaning you can go back and change individual editing steps at any time.
To improve performance, Luminar Neo includes an all-new editing engine. The software now better handles multiple tools on a single image and allows for complex layering of multiple RAW photos. The new editing engine maintains the same AI editing tools as are found in Luminar AI.
'The goal of Luminar has always been to help everyone create images they truly love. With Luminar Neo, we empower even more artists and photographers to achieve their full creative vision,' said Ivan Kutanin, CEO of Skylum. 'With new tools and a flexible editing workflow, they'll find powerful new ways to create while being inspired to explore new ways to do so. We can't wait to see what our creative community comes up with.'
Luminar Neo will be available this winter. The software is available to preorder now. To learn more and view special preorder pricing offers, visit Skylum.