Skylum Luminar AI - An In Depth Look At The New Features

Ukrainian software company Skylum recently launched its Luminar AI software, the latest in its Luminar photo editing series of software first revealed back in later 2016. The new version as the name implies brings even more advanced artificial intelligence and smart automatic features to the table designed for portrait, landscape, and other types of photographers and meant to perform complex operations faster and easier.

First, as the company explains it, Luminar AI is not a replacement for Luminar 4 (currently the latest version besides the newly released AI) as they both represent very different approaches to image editing. While the Luminar 4 is based around tools (very similar to Photoshop for example) and is more traditional in this respect (some might argue also more professional or at least designed for more refined and longer workflows), the new Luminar AI is all about “solutions – getting the job done as quickly and easily as possible with as few clicks as possible (better suited for beginners and photographers who need to process lots of images in a short amount of time).

Skylum Luminar AI features

Some of the features Luminar AI brings to the table for editing portraits for example are quite impressive. You can automatically work on eyes, skin imperfections, lips, and much much more. The new AI-engine is improved compared to what already existed in Luminar 4 and the software engineers of Skylum classified more than 7,000 kinds of objects for the software to detect and mask in order to dynamically and individually apply changes with a slide of a slider.

Official Skylum video showing how you can change different aspects of portraits automatically with AI-based sliders

Luminar AI works with a non-destructive local adjustments tool which is designed to be easier to use than conventional layers and can apply changes to color, detail as well as sharpness locally. There are now also better eraser and clone & stamp options which also work non-destructively as well as many options for built-in templates that are easy to apply.

Luminar AI can also help landscape photographers with better Sky Replacement tools (than Luminar 4 which started this “trend” a year ago) as well more realistic fog, mist and haze options. You can see some examples for all these tools and features in some of the video demos below.

Marvin Grey on Luminar AI

Photographer Anthony Turnham editing an outdoor fashion shoot with Luminar AI

Pye Jirsa on creating mystical landscapes with Luminar AI

Jim Nix first look at the Luminar AI software (he has a series of very useful tutorials on the software on his YouTube)

Luminar AI Pricing

Luminar AI is currently available both as standalone software or as a plugin for Apple Photos, Adobe Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop. As for pricing the Luminar AI is currently sold for $79 (single computer) or $99 (for two computers).

You can find more coverage of Skylum products on our special subsection on lensvid.com.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.