Luminar Flex 1.1 released
After the release of Luminar 3.1.2 Skylum now published a new version of Luminar Flex.
Introduction
Luminar Flex is in one sence not a standalone program like Luminar 3 but it is according to Skylum devloped upon the wish of a lot of customers who use Luminar 3 as a plugin only for Lightroom and Photoshop CC. Besides this Photos for Mac OS is supported.
Luminar Flex mainly is suitable for those users which don’t use/need the poorly implmented library functions in Luminar 3 or for Lightroom 6 users who need an application offering layers.
Luminar Flex costs 70,– € which is the same price as Luminar 3. Since the plugin functions in Luminar 3 are planned to be removed in some later update there is the question if you get a Luminar Flex license when buying Luminar 3.
I did a little video on the new functions:
Improvements
According to Skylum the main improvment is the implementation of the Accent AI 2.0 filter which is part of Luminar 3 for quite some time (actually it was introduced with the last version of Luminar 2018) And that really is an improvement, because you get very decent results just with 2 rulers, Accent AI and the Sky Enhancer.
After the introduction of this filter a comment in the blog corrected me that the Accent AI 2.0 filter will not touch skin tones in an image, while all other areas like background and so are affected by the filter.
According to an email from Skylum thze improvements include the adaptability of the workspaces where i can choose from the different filters available and define a workspace of my own.
A little bit annoying is the new default which displays the full filter catalog when opening Luminar Flex.
As a further improvment Skylum adresses performance gains and more stability. I can’t state performance improvements but so far i didn’t have any reason to blame Luminar Flex for its performance.
Bug
Luminar Flex still has a pretty bad bug, which i mentioned in the first version. With Luminar Flex you can either choose from the “Edit in” or from the “Export” Menu. If you choose the “Edit in” Menu to handle over an image to Luminar Flex it could happen that after the Reimport into Lightroom all Exif or other metadata are missing, in particular camera, exposure and so on.
Sometime just the “GPS Data” is missing after the reimport into Lightroom and the other exif data are kept. This error is not to 100% reproducable. But on the other hand the error with the missing GPS Data sometimes occured even when i called Luminx Flex from the export menu.
Conclusion
Luminar Flex is on the right way to include the Accent AI 2.0 filter in this release. Opening the filter catalog by default is not a good idea but maybe Skylum listens and ads an option to the preferences.
If you want to order Luminar 3 and get a rebate use the code TUXOHCEW and this Link .
ciao tuxoche
