Luminar NEO panorama extension first view on the beta version

Luminar Neo has been introduced with some enhancements so far, and now there is a preview of the upcoming panorama function.

Introduction

Skylum has released some extensions to Luminar Neo, especially in the last year, which extend the program for upscaling, HDR, focus stacking and so on.

Now Skylum has distributed a beta version of Luminar NEO, which now also includes a panorama version. According to Skylum’s announcement, the final version will be released on July 20. Until then the extension can be pre-ordered at a reduced price of 39,– € instead of 49,– €.

But first let’s have a look at the features in the video.

Panorama Extension

Of course, the extension has to be installed first and then you can already start dragging corresponding photos to the extension.

There extension behaves like all the others, I can make further settings via a menu and of course also start the process to assemble a panorama.

The other settings are chromatic aberration correction and lens correction. A correction of ghosting caused by moving objects is available as a menu item, but could not be activated in the beta.

I don’t know if this is due to the beta version or to the fact that in my panoramas there are very few moving objects like people, cars or even moving objects.

When the panorama has been assembled, you are offered to crop the image directly accordingly:

The finished image as usual with the extensions saved in a separate collection in the format 16-bit Tiff. After that the image can be edited normally in Luminar NEO.

Now this was a quite simple panorama, but there are also

Problem areas

Surely due to the beta status there are also problems, either the preview is displayed much too small.

You can zoom into the preview with the mouse wheel (discovered by accident), but you can’t find a button to resize the panorama preview to the size of the window. And as you can see in the preview, there is a part hanging on the right edge.

Spherical panoramas

The panorama function seems to be intended for spherical panoramas as well, i.e. those that show the whole room with 360×180°.

But there are still problems just like with the

Fisheye panoramas

I used to take a lot of spherical panoramas with a 10.5mm fisheye on the Caonon. Only 4 shots were needed from the monopod to image the complete sphere. Here the Luminar NEO extension already has problems in principle.

In specialized programs like PTGui and Pano2VR, this works very well. At least such a function seems to be implemented.

Panorama from Video

Here is another function, which should make it possible to create a panorama from a video.Can be useful in some places, however, here also something does not seem to work, the after the start I have canceled function after just under 30 minutes.

Conclusion

The Panorama extension to Luminar Neo is a logical step and it gives hope. However, it is currently still very much beta and it remains to be seen whether the bugs and errors could be eliminated until the official release.

ciao tuxoche