Everything You Need to Know About Luminar Neo

AI photography is becoming more popular, and Luminar Neo is one tool that you can use. But what is it?

Luminar Neo is Skylum's second-generation app that sports a 100 percent AI-based photo editing suite. It's designed with professionals in mind who want a creative editing app to enhance their images. In this article, we'll walk you through the program's menus to help get you started.

What Is Luminar Neo?

Skylum bills Luminar Neo as an AI-driven creative image editor. Following in the footsteps of Luminar AI, Luminar Neo is a 100 percent AI-based photo editor that works as a plugin for major photo editors as well as a standalone program.

Where Can You Get Luminar Neo?

You can buy Luminar Neo on Skylum's website for $79. If you already own other Skylum products, you're eligible for a discount. They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you're not happy with the software.

Who’s Luminar Neo Best-Suited For?

Luminar Neo is best-suited for photo editing enthusiasts who need an additional program to perform quick finishing edits and to make use of an abundance of easy-to-use creative controls. It's important to note that Luminar Neo isn't a replacement for professional photo editing programs like Lightroom and Photoshop and similar programs on the market.

If you're not interested in spending a lot of time with the post-production phase, though, Luminar Neo is an excellent option.

The Luminar Neo Layout

Luminar AI users will be familiar with the Luminar Neo layout. There are three essential viewing modes accessible at the top of the screen.

In the upper left, the Luminar Neo logo serves as a dropdown menu for essential and administrative functions. These are broken down into the usual File, Image, View, Account, Window, and Help sub-menus.

Catalog is the next main viewing mode, located at the very top of the screen. From here, users will be able to access all the folders and images on their computers.

The last viewing mode is Edit, also located at the top of the screen, where all the image editing is performed. In this viewing mode, there are four sections: Layers (far left), Tools, Edits, and Presets. We'll discuss each of these below.

Adding New Layer and Overlay Features

The Layers panel is somewhat like Photoshop's layer system. Multiple layers can be applied on top of a base layer to build up effects. By default, the current layer is shown in the square underneath the + icon.

To add a new layer, click on the + icon. From here, users will be able to add a new image from their computer to create an overlay or composite. There are also a number of lighting presets available, including Flares, Light Streaks, Stardust Bokeh, and Sparklers.

If you'd rather stick with Photoshop, you can fix bad lighting on that platform without much difficulty.

The Essentials Menu

The Essentials toolkit is accessed from Edit view, and it serves as the starting point for the Luminar Neo workflow. Many of these tools will be familiar to users of editing software.

From top to bottom, the Develop menu offers a limited, Lightroom-like set of sliders for basic editing, like exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, and so on.

The standout tools are Enhance AI, Structure AI, and the Details sliders, all of which intelligently make your images pop.

But the potentially most powerful tool that Luminar Neo includes is the Erase Tool. Users can adjust brush sizes to erase objects from the image, much in the same way Photoshop does with Content-Aware Fill. Additionally, there are automated buttons to remove power lines and dust spots.

The Creative Menu

The Creative menu is packed with transformative AI tools to completely change the overall appearance of your image. The top three are arguably the most useful, Relight AI, Sky AI, and Atmosphere AI. On applicable images, you can relight foreground and background elements, replace skies, and add fog or haze using this trio of sliders.

Additionally, you can add the sun and sunshine to an image using Sunrays. The Dramatic slider adds a punch while Mood provides a long list of LUTs to color-map your images.

The remaining sliders—Toning, Matte, Mystical, Glow, and Film Grain—provide film treatment effects for images that require a retro look.

The Portrait Menu

The Portrait menu can be extremely useful for batch editing and group photos. This set of tools usually requires a face in the photo to apply the effects sliders.

• Portrait Bokeh AI can blur boring or busy backgrounds so that emphasis is on the subjects.
• Face AI comes in handy to brighten and slim faces. There's also a host of tools to edit the eyes and mouth, including teeth whitening.
• Skin AI smooths out the skin with one slider and offers Shine Removal and Skin Defects Removal AI as an over-simplified skin-retouching suite.
• Body AI allows you to enlarge or reduce body size, including the abdomen.
• High Key makes it possible to create a high key effect by adjusting up to seven sliders.

The Professional Menu

The Professional menu in Luminar Pro only offers two tools at the moment: Supercontrast and Color Harmony.

With Supercontrast, the Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows are controlled by sliders to increase or decrease the amounts. Each also comes with a balance slider to fine-tune the effect.

Color Harmony is sectioned off into four tools, Brilliance and Warmth, Color Contrast, Split Color Warmth, and Color Balance. The latter resembles the color balance tool found in Photoshop. Each of these tools has two or more sliders to dial in the right settings.

How the Edits Tab Works

The Edits tab could just have easily been named the history tab. Here, you will find all the edits that have been used for each image. Because these edits function like layers in Photoshop, they can be adjusted or deleted at any time.

The great thing about Edits is that users can duplicate the same effect multiple times. This is for images that require the sliders to go beyond their set limits.

For example, if you want to apply more than one LUT, all you have to do is go back to the main Edit tab and apply a new LUT. This edit would then be found in the Edits menu on the right side of the screen, in the same layer stack as the previous LUT.

Presets

Presets are broken down into three sections: For This Photo, Purchased, and the included presets for Luminar Neo.

For every image that you edit in Luminar Neo, For This Photo will recommend three presets that the artificial intelligence believes will work best. You can try them out and select one of them or choose your own.

In Purchased, you'll find any presets that you've purchased from the Skylum store. Just click on the + if you want to browse for new presets.

Below Purchased are the included presets, which are broken down into categories. The categories are Essentials, Landscape, Mother Nature, Portrait, Macro, Cinematic, Lifestyle, and Aerial. Click on any of these to see a list of presets.

Catalog

The Catalog menu displays any of the image files that have been edited in Luminar Neo. You can also Add Photos via the button. There's a folder view on the left side of the panel and a list of the Recently Edited images at the top.

At the bottom left, you can also view the select image's EXIF information, like camera settings and what kind of camera and lens combination was used.

Dropdown Menu

It's subtle, but there's a dropdown menu on the screen that can be accessed by clicking on the Luminar Neo logo at the very top-left.

From here, you can choose options under File, Image, View, Account, Window, and Help.

Luminar Neo: The Second Generation All-AI Editor

Skylum's Luminar Neo is the company's next all-AI-based photo editor. With new streamlined coding for quicker computations, Luminar Neo runs faster and offers more advanced features than its Luminar AI predecessor.

If you're interested in trying AI photo editing, Luminar Neo is an excellent starting point. Give it a try and see what you can create!

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