Luminar 4: An Honest Review
Here is my honest opinion on Luminar 4. A lot of Youtubers have been sponsored by Luminar recently and it's hard to tell their genuine experience of the program. In fact, I made my purchase of Luminar 4 after watching these videos as they gave me confidence in the program. I feel like I’ve been let down a bit, so I want to give my honest opinions on my experiences with the software. You can watch the video here, or scroll down to where I have noted my opinions below.
Firstly my laptop is 6 years old but I did check that it fulfilled Skylum’s recommended requirements for running it. I had to update my OS in order to download Luminar 4 as it won’t run on any Mac below Sierra. So after backing up my hard drive and upgrading my system (6 hours later) I managed to set up Luminar.
Other than running a little slow occasionally, it worked perfectly fine the first time I opened it. But the second time it wouldn’t open. It just kept going to the catalog screen and crashing, and then continuing in that loop. Luckily I managed to fix this by going through the Skylum forum, though whilst there it became apparent that there are hundreds and hundreds of people complaining of the same issue. This was worrying!
Finally I managed to open Luminar and begin editing. I was generally impressed with it, especially the AI components which would save hours of editing time in Photoshop. Some of the features on it really were awesome, and I had a lot of fun playing around with it. But as soon as I started trying to edit my professional photos with it, I started to run into issues. One thing I did notice was that the image didn’t fully render when it was full size, I had to zoom in for all the detail to appear. This then lead to an issue further down the line when I exported my images to JPEGs and discovered that there were huge issues with the masking. These issues were not apparent when the image was loaded into Luminar. You can see what I mean here.
The tree line is masked very strangely and there are weird marks on her face. The obvious solution would be to reload it into Luminar and fix the mask, but as it takes on average around 10 minutes to export a photo, it felt like too much effort, so I fixed it in Photoshop instead. The fact that I had to return to Photoshop after using Luminar has shattered my confidence in it as a professional.
All the Youtubers I’ve seen advertising Luminar have been professional photographers, so naturally I assumed this could be a program that could replace Photoshop for me when editing- at least that’s the impression I was given watching these videos. After trying it out, I know I would very rarely use it for my professional photography, and more to enhance my every day photos instead. So it’s not completely useless, just not what I intended it for, which is disappointing.
To summarise, I am very impressed with the software, particularly the AI components, however there are more than a few stability issues which put me off using it unless I really needed it. As said in the video, my laptop is old, but I checked and it does meet the apparent 'recommended requirements' as stated by Skylum. I would definitely use it for general everyday photos and to have a bit of fun, but I can’t risk trusting it with an of my professional work. I am remaining positive about using it, but in my opinion there are too many stability issues for a new program, and as a result I think it was released much too early (possibly without being tested maybe?).
Do let me know your thoughts, it’s always interesting to see if everyone else is having the same issues, or if the problems I’ve had are rare, or due to my older hardware! Here are a few of my different edits I made in Luminar 4 (after I fixed them all in Photoshop).
All images in this blog post copyright of Aby-Joanne Photography
