It's also not based on a subscription like Adobe's Creative Cloud stuff so you pay once and that's it, which is a major plus for many people.Īnyway, there's a fully functional demo (only 7 days though!) available on Skylum's website, so maybe download it and give it a try? I've been toying with doing the same if I can get enough spare time to properly play with it in a single week, which has been the main issue so far. Their early product ads featured some *really* obvious and cheesy effects, but some of the latest stuff actually looks pretty good - assuming it's really as good as the examples on the ads (which I doubt!).

Skylum, the company behind it, has been around for a while and have a range of tools, of which Luminar is their flagship. It *may* also function as a Photoshop plugin (I've got some other tools that do both), but not looked into it enough to know for sure. AFAICT, it appears to be a standalone, includees raw support and Photoshop style pixel level editing functions, but is mostly centered around a number of 'AI'/computational photography type functions for things like automatically improving skin tone, replacing skies, adding lightning effects, and so on. I'd be skeptical of anything *too* heavily discounted though. A few of the photo magazines are regularly pushing it here in the UK with varing levels of discount and giving it a lot of coverage - a 32-page(!) insert in this month's Digital Camera, for instance - so *some* of those low prices are probably legit as they still seem to be in their 'grow market share' phase.

Jim nix luminar ai