Last week review 30-2019

Last week review 30-2019 we experience a more than tropical heat and until now there is no rain  🙁

This week or should i say better the last 2 weeks Skylum was in the discussion. Once with the new release Luminar Flex 1.1 and this week with the announcement to release Luminar 4 in fall. With the release of Luminar 4 in fall (whatever this means) i think the option to use Luminar as a plugin for Lightroom CC is probably dropped, so you have to decide either plugin version with Luminar Flex or image processing with Luminar 4.

After the announcement of a Windows version but mainly after the annoucement to implement a library function in Luminar the software was seen as a competitor to Lightroom. But i think a lot of people were disppointed after the release of Luminar 3, which was placed on the market after a heavy delay.  Then we had a roadmap on the Skylum website which stated the lib functions to be implmented until mid 2019.

This roadmap was altered with the last update and now the roadmap has vanished. Does this mean that Skylum doesn’t want to work on the so much advertised library functions any more? Now the company implements a sky replacement tool and wants to see your money for it.

Don’t misunderstand me its ok for me that a software gets money and of course they have to make profit, but it also would be nice for Skylum to correct all/most of the bugs in Luminar 3.

• The library function is not usable til yte because you can’t even search for part of the Exif metadata like camera or lens used for example.
• Apllying keywords to the images is not implemented so far
• Fast scrolling thur the images leads into black rectangles
• A backup function like in the Mac OS version is still missing in the Windows version
• All rulers in the devlopment modul controlling the histogram this is updated after the release of this ruler
• Export to JPEG is quite slow
• Partially not stable and this might affect the catalog

For Luminar Flex i found out that sometimes either parts of metadata are missing after the reimport to Lightroom or they are missing completely in the tiff file. And important Luminar Flex is behind the regular Luminar version.

Other users could report on other errors so i doubt that many customers will use the pre-order option. And Luminar so far isn’t an alternative for Lightroom even if you use last non-subcription version which is 6.14.

And the price for the new version are a little bit weird too

The regular licsense will cost 89 ,– € and a price for a upgrade is not mentioned, just the price for the pre-order option which is 49,– € which is only 10,– € off. And i assume that Skylum will release a new major version every year to the price difference to the original ist so much any more.

So we have to wait and see if Luminar 4 will offer other new fucntions besides the sky replacement. It would be preferable because the trust in the company is going down.

But anyway this was an interesting week  and I hope you like the blog posts and i’m looking forward to your questions and comments.

ciao tuxoche