Skylum Luminar Neo Review (2024)

The impetus to create Skylum Luminar Neo was the desire for a photo app that would make extensive use of AI to improve and enhance your digital images. It has a simple interface that's a pleasure to work in, and it retains the company's previous Luminar application’s sky replacement and extensive set of filters and editing tools. It also gets layer support with a library of textures and overlays. Unique AI adjustment tools and filters—and the fact you can install it as a plug-in for the more complete Photoshop and Lightroom apps—make it a worthy addition to any photographer's software toolkit. While we recommend Skylumn Luminar Neo without hesitation, it isn't a complete photo editing tool or photo workflow solution. For the complete package, you should look into Editors' Choice winners Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom Classic.

What's New in Skylum Luminar Neo?

Skylum delivers a steady flow of what it calls extensions—optional features and effect modules you can install or not as you choose. They come with the subscription pricing option, or you can buy them each separately ($49) or all together in a pack ($299). I like Skylum's strategy of not forcing you to install lots of features you may not want.

The latest extensions focus on generative AI tools, many with Gen in their names, like GenExpand, GenSwap, and GenErase. These tools generate background content based on what's already in the photo. Also new are panorama stitching, neon and glow drawing tools, and a tilt-shift effect. Other AI tools that have been added somewhat recently include Upscale AI, Supersharp AI, Background Removal AI, and Noiseless AI. The company continues to improve the program's user interface and performance, as well.

How Much Does Skylum Luminar Neo Cost?

Luminar Neo is available directly from Skylum's site either as a subscription ($11.95 per month or $99 per year) or as a lifetime license for $249. Skylum also has a free online photo editor, but it doesn't have the same powerful features that Luminar Neo has.

For comparison, Capture One costs $299, CyberLink PhotoDirector costs $99, and DxO PhotoLab costs $229. Lightroom requires a subscription of $9.99 per month, which you have to pay for as long as you want to keep using the software.

Luminar Neo is available as a Windows Store app and a Mac app in the App Store. I prefer when desktop apps are available in the app stores since they make updating and installing on multiple computers easier and are vetted for security and functionality. You get a 30-day money-back guarantee, as well as a 30-day free trial. I tested the subscription version for this review since it includes all the latest features. Another way to get the app is to download a small installer stub program from the company's website.

Setting Up Skylum Luminar Neo

Luminar Neo requires Windows 10 (version 1909 or later), Windows 11, or macOS 11 or later. At setup (or later), there's an option to install Luminar Neo as a plug-in for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic, but you can't install plug-ins in Luminar Neo itself (for example, for Topaz noise reduction). The program takes up about 3GB of hard drive space, similar to Lightroom’s size. When the installation is done, you sign into a Skylum account and then you’re presented with a QR code to install the companion mobile app for wirelessly transferring images.

Skylum Luminar Neo's Catalog mode shows a grid of your images with a left-side panel for dates, folders, and albums, along with photo shot details. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

On the first run, you see a very simple interface with a big Add Photos button. There’s no explicit import process in Luminar. You choose a folder and bingo, all the images it contains are added to your Luminar catalog. This setup may seem odd, but it gets you to your pictures fast. You can start viewing and editing instantly. My card with 858 files was “imported” in a few seconds. Moving forward and backward through images in the catalog was also snappier than in most applications.

I would prefer that the Add Photos button could find attached camera media as many apps do, but it doesn't. Instead, it’s simply a File Explorer, but it’s not that hard to find your camera media folder and start working on the pictures. I had to allow the program to access my Pictures folder in Windows, since I had folder protection enabled in Windows Defender settings.

A Clear, Simple Interface

The program’s compact and dark interface lets you concentrate on your picture. It’s far less busy than those found in other pro photo software, such as ON1 PhotoRAW or Capture One. It almost feels like a mobile app. It’s not, however, very customizable, and "getting started" type help is on the light side, though given its simplicity and clarity, that's not a big issue.

The single photo view in Catalog mode shows a filmstrip below; right-clicking lets you can pick, reject, and view the original unedited photo. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

The app has only three modes: Catalog for viewing all your images, Presets, and Edit. In Catalog view, you zoom by spinning the mouse wheel (much simpler than in Lightroom), and you’re not restricted to major stop points like 33% and 50%. An i icon opens an info panel showing shot settings and camera model. And a search magnifying glass makes quick work of finding photos based on filename, although you can’t refine the search based on metadata such as f-stop or lens model, as you can in Lightroom and DxO Photolab. You can't search for tools, which, given the number of them, would be helpful. Photoshop has an ever-present search icon at the top of its interface, which is super helpful.

Below the image, you can favorite it with a heart icon or reject it with the X for some quick culling, but there’s no keyword tagging or color coding. You also get a filmstrip ribbon along the bottom for a view of the collection.

On the left sidebar is an option to see All Photos, organized by date, with convenient filters to show recently added or edited images. Below that are computer folders and custom Albums. There are no standard program menus, like File, Image, and View, along the top. To see the standard menus, you click the Luminar logo.

In Edit mode you can switch between Tools, Edits, and Presets. Clicking an eyeball icon shows the original view of your photo, but I wish there were a split-screen before-and-after view. I do appreciate that double-clicking on sliders returns them to their defaults, and you can easily see any previous edits and undo them in the Edits tab.

Compare the initial raw camera file import from a Canon 80D in Luminar Neo (left), Adobe Lightroom (center), Capture One (right). (Credit: PCMag)

For initial raw import, the Develop tool in Edit mode, gives you profile choices of Luminar Default, Adobe Standard, camera defaults, or custom profile from DCP or DNG files. I had no trouble loading raw images from newer camera models such as the Canon EOS R6, the Fujifilm X-T4, and the Nikon Z 6. The default rendering of shots from my Canon EOS 80D resulted in a fine image quality, on par with Lightroom and Capture One, as you can see above. Capture One remains the best at initial import, though, to my eyes, with more detail and less overexposure. Different camera models yield different results, and you can adjust the initial import in any of these apps for a better image.

Luminar Neo has several Develop profiles for imported photos. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Standard Adjustments

After you choose the Develop profile, a goodly group of adjustments remain in the Develop panel on the right side, including Exposure, Smart Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Blacks & Whites, Curves, Color, Sharpness, Noise Reduction, and Optics. That last group includes a manual barrel and pincushion slider, along with a checkbox for Defringe. For some raw file types, the menu has Auto Distortion correction and Auto Fix Chromatic Aberrations checkboxes, too. The CA correction worked in a test shot, as did the geometric distortion correction, but the latter took several seconds before its results appeared on my test PC.

A Skylum rep told me the app includes a database of lens and camera profiles for these behind-the-scenes optics corrections. For gear not in the database, it uses general algorithms.

Of note is the Professional section at the bottom of the right-hand control panel, which gives you separate contrast sliders for Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows. You also get Curves with RGB selectors and White balance settings with an eyedropper tool.

You don’t get Auto settings for the standard lighting and color sliders. The Enhance tool serves in place of that, and a slider lets you increase or decrease its strength. It yielded pleasant improvements in my test shots, in a sort of HDR way often boosting contrast and saturation.

The Crop tool has an AI option that finds the subject and suggests a crop. It does a decent job cutting out excessive same-texture areas that take away from the subject. The crop section also has Horizon Alignment, but I didn’t have any luck with it. It failed to level the horizon in my test shots.

Luminar Neo can suggest how a photo should be cropped. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Noise Reduction (in the Develop edit group as well as in a separate Denoise section) doesn’t come with an automatic option, but its luminance and color noise sliders work well, even maintaining decent detail. It’s not at the level of detail recovery you find in DxO PureRaw, however.

For even more anti-noise power, you can install the Noiseless AI extension (included with a subscription). The results was on par with DxO DeepPrime XD's. Here, it's the center image, with Topaz DeNoise on the left and DxO DeepPrime XD on the right.

Compare the denoising done by three programs: Topaz (left), Skylum Luminar Neo (center), and DxO (right). (Credit: PCMag)

The Skylum tool lets you choose between Low, Middle, and High adjustment levels and also lets you tweak the results with sliders for Luminosity, Color, Details, and Sharpness. I was impressed with how well it worked.

Luminar Neo includes a plentiful selection of Color tools, with not only saturation and vibrance but also HSL and hue shift options with sliders for eight colors.

Luminar Neo has plentiful color editing tools. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Skylum has been adding generative AI tools to Luminar Neo. As mentioned, they include GenErase, GenSwap, and GenExpand. Note that among these only GenSwap creates objects based on your text input, the way Adobe Firefly and some Photoshop plug-ins do.

GenErase

This tool is like Photoshop's AI-powered Remove tool. GenErase (like the other Gen-tools) is visible in Catalog mode in the buttons on the right. With it, you paint over an unwanted object in your photo with a resizable brush, and then click Erase. In my testing, the result was much better than that I got using the Adobe Remove tool.

You paint over object to remove it with Luminar Neo's GenErase. (Credit: Sklyum/PCMag)

Here's the final image after using GenErase:

A photo of a highway where a car has been removed with GenErase. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

The result is superior to what you get using Photoshop's Remove tool (shown below), which leaves a blotchy patch in the road and guardrail.

Photoshop's Remove tool doesn't do as good a job of removing an object in this case. (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)

GenSwap

GenSwap most closely resembles what we consider to be generative AI since it creates objects and scenery out of thin air. It's similar to Photoshop's Generative Fill tool, but in Luminar Neo's case, you select an object to replace with the generated content. I asked it to swap the car in the shot above with a horse and buggy:

Luminar Neo's GenSwap feature uses AI to replace an object with something else. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Little did I expect that it would create a horse combined with a buggy. I got a better (but still not perfect) result after changing the prompt to "horse with buggy," as shown below.

Here's a better result after a few more AI prompts. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

The Photoshop Generative Fill tool produced a similarly unconvincing result:

Photoshop's Generative Fill also tries to create objects based on your text prompts. (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)

I expect that these emerging tools will get better over time.

GenExpand

Similar to Photoshop's Generative Expand tool, GenExpand is useful when you have a narrow image that you want to create a wide-screen version. It lets you optionally describe what you want to expand with, and if you leave it blank, it creates content based on what's in the preexisting image. I used a somewhat difficult cityscape to try it out, and neither Photoshop nor Luminar Neo produced a convincing result. (Later attempts using the prompt "mountains" yielded better results.)

The result of using GenExpand on a cityscape; the building on the left looks wobbly and the vegetation on the right is out of scale. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Photoshop produced a somewhat better but still lacking version.

Photoshop's Generative Expand also uses AI to make a photo wider. (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)

One thing I prefer about the Photoshop tool is that it lets you select an aspect ratio, while Luminar Neo just has you expand by eye. Note also that all these Gen tools in Luminar Neo don't create their work instantly. You might wait up to a minute for them, even if you're using moderately powerful hardware.

Other Special Tools

You don’t buy Luminar Neo for standard correction tools like exposure and saturation. You buy it for its AI. Two unique AI-powered tools in particular stand out as unique: Relight AI and the Erase tool’s Remove Powerlines feature. New extensions add powerful new capabilities like Neon Glow, Magic Light, Portrait Lighting, background removal, AI sharpening, AI denoising, HDR merging, focus stacking, and AI upscaling.

Relight AI

Relight AI is an innovative tool in the Creative section, and it may be reason enough to buy Luminar Neo. It lets you change the brightness selectively for the near and far parts of the image, determined using 3D AI mapping. You can apply Dehalo, and near and far warmth, too. The tool is good for both portraits and landscapes.

My test shot of a West Mexican chachalaca shows that it’s good not just for portraits.

Luminar Neo's Relight AI tool (applied on the right side) brightens an image. Note that the branches farther back on the right remain dark after the adjustment. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

A related (and fun) tool is Magic Light AI, which lets you add radiant light sources and manipulate its beams. Just as fun and crazy is the Neon Glow tool, which lets you add a neon highlight anywhere you draw over detected objects.

Neon Glow is a cool effect that identifies people and objects in your photo and surrounds them with a bright outline. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Remove Powerlines

The Remove Powerlines tool, found in the Erase tool group’s Objects Removal section, is impressive in removing power lines from street scenes. On my test image, I also applied the program's Old Town filter for a markedly better shot.

Luminar Neo's Remove Powerlines feature, used here in combination with the Old Town effect filter, removes both the big vertical power line and smaller horizontal ones. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Another button in Erase group’s Objects Removal section is Remove Dust Spots. Like Remove Powerlines, it’s a one-button-press affair, although you can fine-tune results by clicking a brush over any parts you want to blend in. It’s similar to Photoshop’s content-aware spot healing tool.

You still get Skylum Luminar’s signature sky-editing tools, which do an excellent and effort-free job of determining what’s the sky and what isn’t and replacing the latter with a more beautiful one.

Luminar Neo's sky replacement tool is simple to use and effective. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Portrait Tools

In the Portrait section of tools, you get Studio Light AI, Portrait Bokeh, Face AI, Skin AI, and Body AI features. With Studio Light, you pick a light source point (or multiple sources) and adjust the brightness, smoothness, contrast, and more. Body AI lets you trim a few pounds off your subject and slim that waistline a bit. It did a good job identifying human forms in my testing. The Face AI tool gives you Light and Slim sliders, which also do a convincing job.

Background Removal AI

The Background Removal AI tool is a type of feature that's been appearing in a lot of photo software, and I question Skylum's need to charge extra for it, though you do get it if you're a subscriber. Go to the Masking section of Layer Properties in Edit mode to find it. You can choose Human, Flora, Architecture, Sky, Mountains, or Man Made Ground for selection. The choices vary based on the photo's contents.

Luminar Neo's Background Removal AI removes the background from a photo's subject. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

I wasn't particularly impressed with this selection tool compared with others in Adobe software, ACDSee Photo Studio, and Capture One. Notice that it considered part of the ceiling to be part of the human. In another shot, it didn't select a side wing of a building. There is a refinement brush to add to and remove from the selection, an essential help.

You can manually add to the subject selection when using Luminar Neo's Background Removal AI. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Supersharp AI

The Supersharp AI extension, included with a subscription or available separately, has a goal similar to Adobe's abandoned Camera Shake Reduction tool: to fix blurriness from camera shake. But it attempts to sharpen simply out-of-focus shots, too.

Luminar Neo's Supersharp feature makes a nice improvement on this shot of a Snow Goose. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

As with the Noiseless AI extension, you get Low, Middle, and High adjustment options.The tool takes some time to work its AI magic, so don't expect instant results after clicking the button.

HDR Merge

HDR Merge is a standard tool in many photo applications, but with Skylum it's an extension. I'm used to right-clicking on the component images to create an HDR merge from a menu option, but with Luminar Neo you must drag the selected images (from 1 to 10 of them) over to the HDR Merge panel on the right. You then click the Merge button, and after half a minute or so, a new thumbnail appears in the center panel. My first try didn't turn out sharp; you need to hit the settings gear and choose Auto Alignment (and optionally Chromatic Aberration Reduction, and Ghost Reduction) for a decent result. In fact, the result was brilliant after doing this, but you don't get options for different styles as you do in CyberLink PhotoDirector and ACDSee Photo Studio.

Luminar Neo's HDR merge tool combines light and dark photos for a balanced result. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Panorama Merge

This is one that most photo apps have had for years. With Luminar, you drag the contiguous photos onto the right-panel Panorama entry. You get choices of spherical, cylindrical, Mercator, and plane methods, and the fun thing is that you can grab and move the image in 3D space to realign. Unlike the panorama in Lightroom and some other software, though, there's no option to fill the black edges with content generated from the existing image. But at the end of the process, a Crop button removes the empty areas. The tool matched the images perfectly, as most do these days.

Panorama Merge convincingly joins adjacent shots of a scene. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Editing With Layers

Layers let you add overlays and use various blend modes—Darken, Multiply, Screen, and so on. They’re not as complex and intimidating as Photoshop’s layers, but they’re quite useful and powerful enough to create some cool effects. You can use them with your own images for a double exposure effect. You can apply adjustments like Exposure to just the new layer, but when I selected the original layer, the adjustments applied to all layers—Photoshop gives you more control over the selection of layers for editing.

In the Mood section under the Creative category, you find a generous selection of LUTs in categories like Cinematic, Creative (including B&W choices), Cross Processing, and Portrait Lighting. Sliders adjust the strength of these effects as well as their contrast and saturation.

The result of turning Dehaze up to 100% on an image of a hillside. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Upscale AI

For low-resolution photos, Upscale AI smooths out pixelation, such as the staircase effect showing on the before image (left) in the 'N.' (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

The Upscale AI tool, like the HDR Merge, works from the Catalog view, in which you drag image thumbnails onto a target on the right.

Landscape Editing

The Landscape tool section includes Dehaze, which doesn’t add a color cast the way Lightroom’s does, along with Golden Hour and Foliage Enhancer, both of which add a nice touch when used in moderation. Foliage Hue can change your scene from spring to fall and vice versa.

Presets

Luminar Neo includes a whole mode just for presets. They appear on the right side of the program window, and the app even suggests presets for the current photo. These presets can turn a drab shot into an arresting one with minimal labor. Choose from illustrative thumbnails for Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Lifestyle, Filmatic, and more. Again, sliders let you increase or decrease the effects’ strength, and if what’s included isn’t enough, Skylum sells more sets of presets on its website.

Luminar Neo includes a wealth of presets for various use cases. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Blur Tool

Another recent addition to the program's effects is a Blur tool that's loaded with capabilities. As with the Background Remove Background tool, It can auto-mask based on people, pavement, architecture, and so on. It lets you create effects like tilt-shift and motion blur, as well as including the standard Gaussian blur.

Focus Stacking

Shallow depth of field is a desirable effect, but this tool lets you do the opposite: Get different distances all in focus. I took four shots at different focus lengths and dragged them onto the Focus Stack tool. It aligns the photos and uses the in-focus part of each.

Using Focus Stacking allows the number on the closest dumbbells to be most in focus. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Performance

Using some of the AI tools made my graphics card fan whir up when testing on Windows 10, and it could take a while for an image to update with an edit. I prefer seeing some indication of processing, as Lightroom does. It also crashed once, though I had a lot of programs running at the time.

Luminar started life as a macOS photo-editing app, so I also installed it on an M1-powered MacBook Air to see how it performed there. The AI is done on your local machine, not in the cloud, which is a plus. As mentioned, there’s no importing from memory cards, so that’s not a performance factor. The program was very stable, which can’t be said for all apps that do high-level AI computing on large media files.

Mobile App

A companion mobile app for Luminar Neo lets you transfer photos from the desktop version of the app to your smartphone. The app lets you see live edits on the phone. You simply scan a QR code with the phone and you’re good to go. You can also send images from the phone to the desktop app. They appear in a newly created folder in Catalog view. Other options include exporting an edited shot to a local folder or to your email client.

Luminar Neo's mobile app lets you transfer photos between your PC and smartphone. (Credit: Skylum/PCMag)

Printing

The up-arrow button lets you save your edited photo to a folder of your choice or send it to your default email app. You can save in several file formats, including JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, and PSD, and you can resize and choose a resolution. There's no option for direct sharing to social networks. The Print option in the main menu exports the editing photo and brings up the OS’s printing feature, but it has no layout or contact sheet options.

Bring AI Fixes and Effects to Your Photo Editing

Luminar Neo is designed as a photo optimization and enhancing tool, replete with AI photo fixes and effects. It’s a pleasure to work in, thanks to a clear, usable interface. And it's a heck of a lot of fun! While you can organize your catalog with albums and pick/reject, Luminar Neo isn't a full workflow solution, so you might be better off using it as a Lightroom Classic plug-in. It does some impressive things with your digital photography, so it’s well worth getting if you love perfecting or creating with your images. For a full complement of state-of-the-art editing tools, Photoshop and Lightroom Classic are our Editors' Choice winners.