Review: Luminar 2018

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

On 1 November, Skylum (formerly MacPhun) announced the new version of its flagship application, Luminar. Luminar 2018, now available to pre-order, is a major upgrade over the current version, Luminar Neptune.

This does not look like an incremental update, but a dramatic upgrade, and it feels almost like a completely new application, now available for both Mac and Windows platforms.

What is (not yet) included

Main new features

The noise reduction system has been completely replaced. Noise reduction is no longer a separate step, but is now a proper filter. It also works effectively in real time. This is such a big difference from the previous version that the two are hardly comparable.

You have sliders for luminance, colour noise and a boost slider that controls the overall effect. It works quickly and reasonably well. You really only need small amounts of luminance reduction for it to be effective.

The sharpening has also been improved and the controls are slightly different from the previous version, with the addition of a "halo reduction" option. The combination of these two new filters gives you much more control over the quality of your image and makes a huge difference to the result when used carefully.

The overall performance of the application has increased considerably. Loading is much faster and decoding raw files is noticeably quicker too. I opened the same file in Luminar Neptune and then in 2018.

2018 was at least twice as fast, if not faster, when opening a raw file. The whole thing feels much simpler, and the difference is very noticeable!

RAW quality

For shots taken with cheaper lenses that have significant aberrations, this is the only issue that really degrades the image. Overall, they all look free of noise and sharp, without any obvious artefacts.

There is, however, a very useful new filter that could provide the basis for correcting this in the future. There is a new filter called LUT mapping (LUT = Look up Table). You can load a standard LUT file and apply it to your image.

LUTs are quite common in the video editing world. Many of them are used for creative purposes. They can be used for all sorts of things, from correcting log gamma to film colour simulations.

Other new filters

The other cool new filter is the Sun Rays filter. At first it looks like a gimmick, but it is actually quite good. I do not know how they do it, probably some kind of luma key, but the rays look as if they really come from behind part of the scene.

For example, if you drag the effect over trees, it looks as if the rays are coming from behind the trees.

The result is quite realistic, especially if you spend some time adjusting the settings. It is probably most useful for improving shots that already contain a sun flare.

Another nice new filter is Brilliance / Warmth, which adds a set of two controls. One is called "Vividness" and looks a little like Vibrance.

I do not know exactly how it works, but it works. The other control lets you give the image a warmer or cooler effect, and this works slightly differently from simply adjusting the white balance. It produces natural-looking results.

A few more new features

Overall impression

This makes it difficult to use presets for saving general settings for individual filters, as you would in Lightroom.

For example, if you save sharpening settings as a preset and then want to apply them to another image, you remove any other filters you currently have when you select the sharpening preset you created.

You can get around this by adding another layer, but I would like to see an option to add to the current layers instead of overwriting them.

With Luminar 2018, you can create seriously advanced setups. And you can carry out much more complicated edits than in Lightroom. Although Lightroom can perform masked selective adjustments, for example, these are limited.

In Luminar, each filter can have its own mask and blending mode. On top of that, filters can be grouped into layers, and each layer can also have a mask and blending mode. You can also combine multiple images in the same document for multiple exposure effects, textures and so on.

Combined with the ability to use plug-ins now, Luminar is becoming a very comprehensive and sophisticated editing application. They are doing this by following their own direction instead of trying to become a "Lightroom-like" clone.

I cannot wait to see the asset management side of Luminar when it is released. Its preview looked very good, so if they put as much energy into this as they have into the rest of the software, I think we will have a serious heavyweight competitor in imaging software.

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