Skylum Luminar Neo

Overview

What this release is

Luminar Neo takes a different route to the same destination as the traditional editors. Instead of giving you a mask tool and expecting you to build the selection, it works out what the image contains and hands you a slider that affects only that part of it. Change the sky, relight the subject, adjust the depth of a scene, and the selection work happens underneath rather than in front of you.

Sky replacement is the tool it became known for and it remains the best demonstration of the approach. It finds the horizon including through tree branches and thin structures, replaces what is above it, relights the foreground to match the new sky, and adds atmospheric haze and reflections in water where they belong. The result survives a close look, which was not true of earlier attempts at the same trick.

Relighting works on the scene in three dimensions rather than as a flat image. It builds a depth estimate, then lets you brighten the near field and the far field independently, which recovers a badly backlit subject without the flat washed out result that a shadow slider produces.

Portrait work has its own set of tools covering skin, eyes, lips, face geometry, and body proportions, all with automatic detection. Beyond that there is full raw processing with profile support, lens correction, noise reduction, and the usual tonal controls, so the program can handle an image from card to export without a second application.

Everything sits on a layer stack with masks, blend modes, and non destructive edits, and there is a catalogue for organising a library alongside a plugin mode for the larger editors. This build is the full application with the complete extension set and the entire preset library included rather than sold separately.

Feature set

What you get

Changes in this build

What changed

• New sky library additions with better matching on twilight and overcast scenes
• Faster processing on high resolution raw files through improved GPU use
• Portrait detection improved on profile and partially obscured faces
• Catalogue import speed increased on libraries above fifty thousand images
• Fixed the edge artefact that appeared where a replaced sky met fine branch detail

Installation

How to install it

1. Turn off real time protection before extracting.
2. Extract the archive to a short path on a drive with at least 6 GB free.
3. Run the setup executable as administrator and complete the installation without launching the program.
4. Apply the included licensing step so the extensions are unlocked before the first run.
5. Open the program offline and let the extension library register on first launch.

Hardware

System requirements

Package

Release information

Questions

Before you start