Luminar NEO fall upgrade

This week, after a long time, there is news from Skylum again. The Luminar NEO Autumn Update will be released on October 10th. I had the opportunity to take a look at the beta.

Introduction

The Luminar NEO Autumn Upgrade comes with some attractive offers to get Luminar NEO cheaper either as a subscription or as a lifetime license. And if you order with the code TUXOCHE there are further discounts. But the interesting question is what Skylum is delivering as an upgrade and what new functions may have been added.

I had the beta version available, but please note that things may still change compared to the final release.

Managing images

Skylum has now taken on the management of images as a first step. There is now a search for various meta data of the images, which can be called up with CRTL-F.

If you search for terms here, e.g. car or tree or house, Skylum will also find images that don’t actually match the search.

Here you can choose from all the cameras that appear in the catalog. If you want to search by date (either the date taken or the date edited), you can unfortunately only select fixed areas, not a specific time period:

Even when searching for focal lengths or ISO values, the selection option is not determined from the metadata of the photos in the catalog. The same applies to aperture values ​​or shutter speeds

It is a good solution that you can combine several filters, but only as a logical AND connection.

Masking based on colors

New or improved is the masking based on colors, so that these areas can later be edited differently than the rest of the image.

This is a helpful function for editing photos and you can also use the slider to define the area or the accuracy that should be covered by the mask.

Improved performance of the generative functions

Here I tried out the GenErase function and marked an annoying object in the image.

This works quite well and I also have the impression that it has become faster. Depending on the motif, however, inaccuracies remain. You have to be aware of this and it applies more or less to all AI functions from other manufacturers as well.

The result is quite good, but on closer inspection you notice that the area is replaced by a kind of wave pattern that may look a bit strange or unnatural. But it also depends very much on the motif and also on the background whether the software really hits the mark here.

Conclusion

The autumn upgrade was successful, even if there is still a lot of room for improvement, especially with the search functions. The generative functions have been improved, but it remains the case that you may have to make one or two more attempts until the result is more suitable.

And until Thursday there are also discounts when buying a license. You can try it out and there is no risk, because there is also a 30-day money-back guarantee.

ciao tuxoche