For many reasons, Skylum Luminar has quickly grown to become one of the the most popular editing tools for professional photographers around the world. For one, you pay a one-time flat fee for the program rather than a monthly subscription like Adobe. And, Luminar offers a ton of built-in tools and accessories!
Luminar is a one-stop shop for photo editing that can be used by itself or as a plugin in with Lightroom, Photoshop and even Apple Photos.
Skylum Luminar Interface
Believe it or not, Skylum Luminar uses the same keyboard shortcuts that Adobe’s Lightroom does. This is especially helpful if you’re already familiar with Lightroom’s interface. If that’s true of you, you’ll find switching to Luminar an easy transition given the consistent keyboard shortcuts between the two software.
And, like Lightroom, you can use Luminar as both a photo editor and a photo organizer. Once again, this means that you can upload your images to your Luminar Library so that all of your photo editing workflow is centralized in one place!
Like Lightroom, you can then sort, tag and categorize your images within the Luminar Library to make them easier to find. Many also find the Luminar Library to be simpler and more intuitive even than Lightroom’s library.
Where Luminar excels over Lightroom is its preset workspace options. Luminar provides preset workspaces each specifically designed with an editing task in mind. For example, Luminar’s preset workspaces include:
- Professional
- Quick & Awesome
- Essentials
- Aerial Photography
- Black and White
- Landscape
- Portrait
- Street
In addition to those presets, you can create your own workspace by saving the tools you use most often to a blank workspace.
If this feature sounds familiar, it’s because Photoshop also provides preset workspaces. But, you’ll note that Luminar’s preset workspace options are much more extensive and cover a greater number of photography-specific needs. Anything to streamline your photo editing!
Skylum’s Luminar also offers more editing tools than Lightroom, but fewer than Photoshop. For example, Layers support is missing, which is crucial in Photoshop. Having more editing tools is both an advantage and a disadvantage — they make the program more challenging to navigate, but they also allow you to do more with your photos.
Here’s what we love about Luminar’s editing tools:
Skylum Luminar Key Features
Luminar has gained popularity for its AI slider, which applies automatic quick fixes to your photos including brightening, clarifying, toning and other basic adjustments.
It also comes with a host of built-in tools to make your photo editing easier and faster. These Skylum Luminar features include:
- AI Editor
- Exclusive filters like Sunrays filter (which lets you add realistic looking sun rays to your images) and Orton filter (made famous by the Lord of the Rings and blurs parts of the image while focusing in on others)
- Adjustment Layers
- Image Layers
- Dedicated presets for DJI drone photos
Skylum Luminar Extras
What we love most about Skylum Luminar is its expandable gallery of Luminar Looks. These Looks are sets of editing solutions, much like Lightroom’s presets. But, Luminar Looks are even easier to use, and there’s more of them!
Skylum’s extensive Luminar Looks collection makes achieving specific, stylized photos even easier than ever. And, while Skylum comes pre-packaged with its own set of high-quality Looks, you can also find them for free all over the internet. Some of them are made by freelance photographers, but others are made by popular, professional photographers to help you achieve the looks you’ve loved in their work.
Once you apply a Luminar Look to your image, you can tweak the edit’s intensity and fine-tune it to fit your photo. You can also build and save your own Luminar Looks, which saves you editing time in the long-run.
Cost
If you’re liking the sounds of Skylum Luminar, you can purchase it online for a one-time fee. This purchase gives you access to Skylum Luminar for life! Plus there is a 30 day money back guaranty.