Luminar Neo is a photo-editing application that makes effective use of artificial intelligence (AI). It can replace the sky in a photo, adjust the atmosphere and enhance portraits. Every edit remains reversible because it is stored separately in the library, allowing you to revisit and refine each adjustment.
You might point out that Luminar AI already did this. That is true, but Neo offers more functionality, including layers and tool masks.
Luminar Neo in Catalog view
Luminar Neo has three views: Catalog, Presets, and Edit.
In the Catalog view you add photos that you want to edit, all edits are saved in the library. By the way, you can use different libraries.
The Presets view with the suggested presets for the selected photo at the top right
When you open a photo in Presets, three suggested preset collections appear in the upper-right corner. A preset applies adjustments quickly. To see which tools and settings a preset uses, open Edit and click Edits; you can refine the preset’s settings there as well.
In Edit, the right-hand column contains two tabs: Tools, which lists the available tools, and Edits, which lists the tools already applied and their settings. You can adjust those settings here.
The edited photo is only visible in Luminar Neo, so if the result is to your liking, the photo can be exported. The original always remains available.
The Masking tab with the AI mask and subjects you can mask
The Tools tab lets you adjust a photo in detail. Although not every tool uses AI, many include a separate Masking tab with an AI mask option. Neo analyzes the photo and lets you mask detected elements such as sky, plants or architecture, depending on what is present.
With a mask you have the option to edit only the masked part of the recording.
The collection of presets Easy landscapes with the Snow preset
Do you want to quickly apply certain edits to other photos? Suppose you've scanned a stack of old color photos, but they have a horrible color cast - not unusual for old prints – then you naturally want to remove that orange, blue or green haze from the images.
First make the necessary edits to a scanned photo, then save all of these adjustments under your own name as a preset. You can find these under My presets. So you can create a preset for Kodak or Agfa, for example, to quickly fix your scans.
A notification for a new update with an overview of the improvements
At the time this tutorial was written, Luminar Neo 1.4.0 had just added the Clone tool. The tool, familiar from earlier Luminar versions, lets you define a source area and copy it to a target area. It is useful when the Erase tool cannot achieve the desired result. Burn & Dodge had been added in an earlier update.
When my book went to press, Skylum announced the Luminar Neo Pro subscription, which included Luminar Neo and all extensions released during the subscription term. Announced extensions included AI Background Removal and Noiseless AI. Once the subscription ended, access to Luminar Neo and those extensions would also end.
At that time, Luminar Neo also remained available as a one-time purchase, allowing owners to keep using the application without additional charges. Extensions were expected to become available separately as well, so users could buy only the ones they wanted.
Read more about the book This is how Luminar Neo & AI, Second Edition, works for Mac and PC by Henny Temmink. (Ed.) Language: Dutch. This article refers to the Dutch-language edition.
