Luminar 4 wants to make editing photos more fun and less boring

Skylum has come a long way since the Macphun days. Since breaking out of their Mac-only shell and expanding out into Windows, their software has come on leaps and bounds for both platforms in terms of both capabilities as well as performance. We caught up with Skylum CEO, Alex Tsepko, at PhotoPlus 2019 in New York last month to have a chat about the new features coming to Luminar 4.

A lot of features for the upcoming release have been announced over the last few months covering a wide range of photography needs. Centred primarily around AI, new features include a Sky Replacement tool, a Structure tool to enhance details, a Skin Enhancer to clean up skin tones while still offering a natural appearance and many more.

The new features expand Luminar’s capabilities quite considerably over previous versions, and they’ve managed to make the whole thing run faster, too. Increasing performance has been a big driving force for Skylum over the last few versions as images get larger and user demands are more intensive.

AI Skin Enhancer & Portrait EnhancerSkylum’s goal with Luminar is to simplify the editing process as much as possible in order to make the process accessible to as many photographers as they can. A lot of hobbyist photographers will skip the post-processing stage purely because of a lack of understanding, or it takes so long that it becomes boring. Luminar, they hope, will be the tool for those photographers to be able to get the most out of their images that they can with the least amount of fuss and maybe make it a little more fun.

Luminar 4 is set to be released on 18 November 2019, but it’s already out for preorders on Luminar’s website. Pre-orders include a bonus one-year plan to SmugMug (worth $180) and costs $79//€79/£72 for a new purchase and $69/€69/£64 for an upgrade. When released on November 18, the price will jump to $89/€89/£81 new and $69/€69/£64 for an upgrade.

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DIYP’s coverage of PhotoPlus Expo 2019 is sponsored by Luminar, Cosyspeed, PhotoPlus, and Spiffy Gear – check ’em out.

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