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Every Beginner & Hobbyist Photographer should try Luminar Neo (edit like a pro with AI)!
Why do I recommend Luminar Neo to my family and friends? The advanced AI tools are super intuitive and can give impressive results with just a few clicks!
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► CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:10 Disclaimers
01:56 Importing Photos in Luminar Neo
03:00 Organization
03:42 Photo Culling
04:53 AI Preset Editing (Edit Very Fast!)
06:10 Basic Edit Tools: Develop
07:31 Basic Edit Tools: Enhance AI
08:51 Advanced Editing Tools
09:05 Advanced Editing Tools: Noiseless AI
11:02 Advanced Editing Tools: Erase
12:29 Advanced Editing Tools: Supersharp AI
13:47 Advanced Editing Tools: Portrait Bokeh AI
15:05 Advanced Editing Tools: Atmosphere AI
15:47 Advanced Editing Tools: Sky Replacement
17:43 Pro Editing Tools
17:57 Pro Editing Tools: Masking
18:58 Pro Editing Tools: Panoramas
20:04 Pro Editing Tools: Body/Skin/Face Retouching Tools
20:56 Who is this for?
21:44 Pricing
23:05 Why I Recommend Luminar?
► MY MUSIC
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/iu5gau/
- 0:00 Introduction
- 1:10 Disclaimers
- 1:56 Importing Photos in Luminar Neo
- 3:00 Organization
- 3:42 Photo Culling
- 4:53 AI Preset Editing (Edit Very Fast!)
- 6:10 Basic Edit Tools: Develop
- 7:31 Basic Edit Tools: Enhance AI
- 8:51 Advanced Editing Tools
- 9:05 Advanced Editing Tools: Noiseless AI
- 11:02 Advanced Editing Tools: Erase
- 12:29 Advanced Editing Tools: Supersharp AI
- 13:47 Advanced Editing Tools: Portrait Bokeh AI
- 15:05 Advanced Editing Tools: Atmosphere AI
- 15:47 Advanced Editing Tools: Sky Replacement
- 17:43 Pro Editing Tools
- 17:57 Pro Editing Tools: Masking
- 18:58 Pro Editing Tools: Panoramas
- 20:04 Pro Editing Tools: Body/Skin/Face Retouching Tools
- 20:56 Who is this for?
- 21:44 Pricing
- 23:05 Why I Recommend Luminar?
Okay, so let's say you just bought a new camera like this Fujifilm, or maybe you decided to start editing your photos, or maybe you decided to toggle the raw options of your camera. Well, in all these scenarios, you're gonna have one question in mind, and it's gonna be, which photo editing software should you use? In this video, I wanna talk about why I convinced both my best friends, parents, and girlfriend to all use Luminar Neo as their first photo editing software. For those of you who are new to this channel, I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford, a young photographer and filmmaker on a journey to become better at this art. This will not be an in-depth review of Luminar Neo, but I will share why I recommend it to so many people and the tools that I love inside of it. I will create another video where I will share how my best friend uses it to edit fasters much faster than I do, and I'll also create another video where I'll challenge myself to edit a full trip using Luminar Neo, and then give my thoughts afterwards. Now let's head back inside to film this video. Before opening up Luminar, I wanna make it clear that this is not a sponsored video. They did reach out and offer me an affiliate link and also offer me a discount code, which is the very first time I have this on this channel, so I'm super excited, but they do not get to review the video or give any input on it. They didn't even suggest anything for inside the video. I also personally bought a lifetime license to Luminar AI in the past, and also bought a subscription in 2023 for Luminar Neo, so I really do enjoy their product and actually paid for them myself. One thing I do get is the direct link to them, so if you have any question or feedback you want me to pass along, definitely leave it down in the comments below. One amazing thing about Luminar is actually that it is not a cloud storage service. You don't pay for cloud storage. You can use Dropbox, OneDrive, or things like that if you wanna sync your files, but you definitely do not have to do it. Now what is even better is that they have a app right here that allows you to import some photos from your phone, so if you want here, you can come and connect your device, scan a QR code, it takes a second here, then you can come here and click on send photos, select the photos you wanna import, click add, it takes a second and it's gonna appear now inside of Luminar right here, so you can come here and see the photos we've just imported, and let's say I edit one really fast, now I can actually come back here and go inside of mirror and I can see the edit in real time, and if I wanna bring it back on my phone, I can quickly click share, it's gonna export the photo, bring it back on my phone, and here I'm ready to either share it through my device or save it if I want to on my phone. This is a super quick workflow if you want a more professional editing software on your device, but you wanna use your phone photos to make them look a little bit better. One thing I really enjoy about Luminar is just how intuitive everything is to use. Inside of the catalog view right here, we have on the left, our different folders, we have automatic folders for the different years and months inside of it, then we have recently added, recently edited, all of these, then we have all the photos we have inside of our computer that we imported inside of our Luminar catalog, and finally, if we wanna select the photos we just imported, we can come here, select all, and create a new album with it, so I can call this album my phone photos, and now we have an album here with the different phone photos inside of them. One thing they didn't have inside of Luminar AI that they now have inside of Luminar Neo is the ability to call your photos. This is basically sending some stars or flag or reject a photo, so if I go here, I can use my keyboard shortcuts to set, let's say, four star, five stars to a photo, then go do that to multiple photos here, and it's very simple and intuitive to do. If we go back inside of the catalog, we can then come here and use a bunch of different sorting options. We can come here and decide to have only the ratings that have, let's say, no rating at all. Now, there's one issue that I really, really hope they fix to make this even better, is that if I come here and then go in a picture in the middle here and decide to set a rating for this photo of, let's say, three, the photo disappears, but now we go back to the first photo again, so if I come here and decide this photo should maybe be, let's say, like a four, then again, it goes back to the first photo, so it's not really possible to go through the photos and quickly set different ratings to all of them, so this is definitely something I really hope they would fix just to make the flow of setting some stars on your different photos much faster and more efficient. Luminar is built for beginners in mind, and this really shows in their flow, so if you open an image here, the top bar will suggest you to go inside of presets, so if you click on the preset options, it will select some of the best presets for your shot, so if we look at here, Easy Landscapes, you have some of the suggestions. If you click on it, you can actually adjust the intensity. This is really important because sometimes the intensity can be a little bit too high for a shot, so it's nice that you can do it. If you wanna go with some more advanced styles, you can look at a bunch of different styles right here and try and play with them to see whatever looks the best, so for example, this one is actually not bad for the sunset, again, a little bit too intense. We can come down here, and this allows to get some really cool looks without having to do any advanced editing, which is great for beginners. For me personally, what I usually prefer doing is actually going inside of the scenery options here and just using some of these options here. This is a little bit like the auto options at the Lightroom, which will allow to get you a good base to start editing, so if I use Fast Fix here, it looks pretty good. I might tune it down just a little bit, and this is a good start to push the edit even more afterwards if we go inside of the Edit tab afterwards. If we decide to apply a preset here, we can simply click on it, then go inside of our Edit tab, and we can go inside of the second Edit tab right here to see everything that was applied to the photo. We can edit anything inside of here, so we can come back here to landscape, for example, and make the golden hour preset even more intense, and then we can come back inside of the tools here, and you can look at before and after with this edit. You see, very easy to get some good results, and you can always tweak anything as you wish when you apply a preset. Now if we go inside of another photo, so let's say we select this one right here, which is a raw photo, we can do a lot more of the more basic stuff you would do on a photo. You don't have to use a preset, so for example, here I can adjust the exposure, the contrast, I can play with the highlights, I can play with the shadows, I can bring the white and black up and down. We can do curves, we can do color adjustments, so you can do pretty much anything you would do with any of the other editing software. One very, very important thing to know is that if you're gonna use the Develop option on the raw photo, you wanna do it at the very beginning because pretty much anything else you're gonna apply except noiseless raw will actually create a JPEG version of the image and apply your effects afterwards. So make sure you start with the Develop option here and then do the other options. If I got you confused here and you don't understand all of these editing option, I have a good news for you because there's even an easier way of editing your photo. So for example, if we take this photo here, we can simply go inside of the Enhance AI here, and we can simply use this Accent AI, and right away we can see that the phone photo here is better. It's not a dramatic change, but if we take a few photos here, we can see how much the Accent AI will help our photo. So if we start here and we apply Accent AI here, we can see it is making the photo look a lot better. Same thing if we come to the next one here, we can again just play with the Accent AI option here, bring it up, again, adds a lot of contrast and detail. If we look at before and after, we can see the difference that we have right here. Let's do just a final one. I'm gonna try and get one with a nice sunset or something like that, so we can really see how it works with the whole image. So let's say this one right here, if we come on Enhance AI, we can just bring it up. It will bring all the detail back inside of the foreground here, a lot of the details in the sky, but we even have a Sky Enhancer AI here, which can really bring the image. If we look at the before and after here, before and after, this is a super quick way for a lot of people to edit their photos without having to understand all of the more advanced tools. If you do wanna understand a more advanced tool, they have plenty of them for you. The amazing thing with Luminar is that if you wanna bring your edit further, you can do it with a ton of advanced tools that are super beginner-friendly because usually it just requires a few clicks to apply them. The first tool I wanna talk about is Noiseless AI, and I know I've been talking a lot about AI tools inside of this software, and I know there's a bad rep for AI tools these days, but I actually think that AI tools inside of Luminar allow the software to be a lot smarter and avoid to have overcomplicated UI for the user, so I think this is a great case of using AI inside of some software. Also, just so you know, your phone actually uses AI to process the night photos and apply noise reduction, so I think it's just fair that Luminar can also have access to this type of technology for your other cameras. So if you come in the shot I have right here of this parrot, we can look at it. There's actually quite a lot of noise inside of it here, so if we look here at the head, and that's because it was shot at 12,800 ISO. So now if we go inside of the Edit tab, we can go on the Noiseless option right here, and we can select the middle option and see the results come up right away. So here it looks pretty good. Lots of details still here inside of the head of the parrot, and if we look out, we can see the before here. This is before, after, before, after. Pretty big difference right here. Now if we look quickly at a second shot right here, we have these turtles, and same thing, we can come inside of the Noiseless option. We can select the middle adjustment right here. Usually I start with middle, and then I decide is it a little bit too much, or if I want more of it, and then we can switch it to low or high based on that. So some of these AI tools take a little bit more time to process, so in this case, I will be cutting these out of the edit just so you don't have to wait, but also it's nice on my laptop right here. It's actually using the NPU, which is the neural processing unit, so I can actually use the full power of my laptop to make these effects a lot faster to run. So here we got our result for the turtle right here, and if you look, it's still a lot of detail inside of the head here, and if we look at before, there was a lot of noise, and the noise is kind of just disappear without losing much of the detail. If we look at the global shot, it looks really good once we have it without the noise. The second tool I wanna look at is Erase, and I think a lot of beginners don't really understand how removing some stuff from your photos and posts can really help your photo in the end. I know some people will say this is a little bit like cheating, but I really don't think this is the case. So I have this photo right here, so where I already applied some enhanced AI inside of it, so it's already looking pretty good, but if we wanna make it even look better, we probably wanna remove the little thing here and some of the cables in the top here. So let's look at the tools we have inside of here, so we can come inside of our Erase tool, and how Erase work is basically, you're gonna select a size, you're gonna paint the object you wanna remove, you click Erase, it's gonna take a few seconds, and bam, it's gone, look how much cleaner it looks. So if you look at before and after, this is quite a difference between the two. Now there's even a cooler thing here, if let's say we wanted to remove all the cables inside of the tents here, I don't know why I would do this for some of the tents, they're totally fine here, but if you had power lines or things like that, you can remove them. So you can come here, click on the Remove option, it's gonna think about it for a few seconds, and bam, they're gone, that easily, they're completely disappeared, which is really, really nice. Another really nice tool here is the Remove Dust Spot option. I use this one when I edit my photos inside of Lightroom, and then I send them out when there's a bunch of dust spots, this happens on my mirrorless a lot when switching lenses, and this allows to remove them super simply. I used to pass hours and hours to do this, and now I can move it with just one click, which is amazing. The next tool I wanna talk about is SuperSharp AI, and this basically allows to take a blurry photo and make it sharp again, whether you moved a little bit or you did your focus incorrectly, and I actually use it in a way you might not think. So for example here, I didn't have a ton of light, so I had to step down my camera, but the background here is a little bit blurry, and this is very common when you're beginning photographing, you don't fully understand your settings on your camera, you might by accident have some parts of the shots that are blurry that you didn't really want to. To fix this, all we have to go here is come on SuperSharp, I'm gonna leave this open here, we can use the middle option here, wait a few seconds, and voila, it's much sharper. If we look at before and after, before, after, a lot of the detail was recovered. If we come here, we can see the before and after, the background is just not blurry anymore, which is really great. I can quickly do a second little example here. So for example here, I want the actual seal to be sharp, so I can come here inside of SuperSharp, select the middle option, it should be enough to make it sharp again, and this is a super useful tool to recover some information inside of your shots. So look at this, now we can look at the background here and we can see how sharp it is compared to before. So before, super blurry, and now sharp, blurry, sharp. Just another amazing and super simple, easy tool to use. The next tool I wanna talk about is Portrait Bokeh. This is very similar to how Portrait Mode works on your phone. So if we select the photo here, and we go inside of the Edit tab again, and we go at the bottom here, we have Portrait Bokeh. All we have to do here is select the amount of the bokeh we wanna add. Just to exaggerate here a little bit, I'm gonna go to 100 so we can really see how it affects the image. But what I really wanna show here is that it correctly selected our subject. If we need it, we could correct it a little bit, but for now I won't do this. But now I want you to look at the background right here, and if we do the depth correction here, we will see that I can bring it from far away and closer, closer to our subject. And this is really incredible how good Luminar is to understand the 3D space inside of our image, and making sure that the front part here is not as blurry as the further parts in the back here. This is very important to get some more natural results, and oftentimes our phones are simply gonna make everything blur in the background, and won't use this depth correction to really make sure that only the parts that should be blurry become blurry when applying a Portrait Mode. In my opinion, a lot of these times, these days, I don't use a Portrait Mode anymore on my phone, and simply apply it in post, because the results are often better than what I can get inside of the phone. The next tool I wanna talk about is called Atmosphere, and I really like this one because it has to add some fog, and can make a shot even more interesting. So for example, here was a pretty gray day, so I could wanna add a little bit more fog just to make it a little bit more interesting. And if I add it here, we can see just adding fog works pretty well. But what if it was much better here is the depth option. Again, look at how well it understands the scene, so it will start adding the fog from the bottom and the back of the image here, and slowly bring it down, down, down towards the ski. Slowly, my ski get affected, but not my knees. And as we bring it up, my knees will get affected a bit more. If we go back and forth, you can see how well it understands the scene, and applies the different levels of fog to different parts of the image, which is pretty amazing. The next tool is probably the one that made Luminar so popular, because it is so easy to use, and it produces great results, and this is Sky Replacement. Personally, I don't like replacing my skies. I wanna leave what I saw with the camera, but a lot of people love this feature. So if we come inside of here, and we select the Sky option, all I have to do to do a new sunset here, let's say I think it's not intense enough, I can come here, select Sunset Clouds, click one button, and bam, the result is amazing. If you look at the details around the trees here, it's crazy how good the mask is to remove the background and replace it with a new one. If we look at another shot here that's a little bit more complex, one thing with water is that the reflection of your new sky should reflect inside of the water, but if we come inside of the Sky option here, and we look at our Sky Adjustment, or reflection, I mean, we can play with the reflection amount, and can really see how much the new sky is affecting the water here. So I think actually keeping it almost 100% is great, and if we look at before, after, before, after, we can really see that they changed the whole shot and really made it look like if it was a true shot. Let's look at the final example here, and this one is before, after, before, after. So by just applying these tools, you can really see how they affected here, and the dark clouds here are affecting the dark parts of the image here. It's really impressive how well it works and how realistic the results are. All of these tools have a lot more options you can play with to fine-tune whatever you want inside of them, but what is amazing with the AI is that most of the times by just clicking one button, it can get it right, and then just doing a few tweaks can get a perfect shot in the end. So this is why having AI inside of Luminar Neo is so powerful and allows beginners and pro photographer get better results much faster. Now let's talk about some pro-level tools. I don't think most people are actually gonna use these, but it's really nice if you wanna push your edit further, you actually can inside of Luminar. The first tool we're gonna look at is masking. This is a really important tool that I talk about in most of my videos if you wanna get some more pro-level tools. Most of the effects inside of Luminar can have some masking, so if you select Develop for example here, you can go inside of the masking option, and you have all the masking options you expect, like brush, linear gradient, radial gradient, color luminosity, AI mask, and object select. In this case, we're gonna use the mask AI, which basically is gonna look at the image and try and find some subjects for us inside of it, which make it very easy to find things inside of it. So now we can see a few results we have right here, so we can click on human, it will select me, and then if I come back inside of the adjustments, I can make it brighter, darker, or I can come inside of the masking options here and actually invert it and control now the background only, so I could make the background darker or anything like that. My only complaint about this masking tool is actually that you cannot put multiple masks together like you can do inside of Lightroom or Capture One, but I really don't think that many people are gonna complain about this. It's still amazing that this is built in so that I don't have to suffer, and that you can have access to this tool. My second tool is panorama stitching. I love taking panoramas while I'm on a trip because it allows you to show more of the scene and really give an idea of the complete scene you're seeing while traveling. This is one of the add-ons they have, but it's super simple to use. If you come here, you can simply select the shots you wanna stitch together, you drag and drop them inside of here, then click on the start option, it will load and try and analyze your photos. Once the photos are stitched together, you get this really cool UI here where you can correct the perspective of your panorama, so you can move it around until you get a nice and straight horizon. This is a great feature that I wish Lightroom had because it's so annoying when you stitch a panorama and everything is crooked in the end. Then you can come here on continue, and it's gonna create a final shot right here. One little gripe I have with this right here is actually that you have to edit your photos before merging them because it's gonna save a TIFF file, not a RAW file, so if you didn't apply your RAW edits to your photos in the beginning, you have to edit them first and then post-process them to stitch a panorama together. Not a big deal, but something you have to remember if you wanna get the best results out of your panorama shots. The third tool is the pupil retouching tool, so you can edit the face and all kinds of things like that. I don't usually do this, but at least for example here, I want it to look like I had a few pounds less, I could come here and remove some of the weight I have around my abdomen. I could change slightly the shape of my body. What I like here is that it's not completely unnatural what they're doing, and also even if you push it, it's actually not gonna allow you to do too much until it starts looking weird, so it's a nice way if you wanna just do little tweaks. I definitely wouldn't use this to try and look like if I had 50 pounds less, but if I wanna look like if I have five, 10 pounds less, it's definitely a tool you can use. Again, the reason that I love these tools so much is that you just need to use Photoshop and hours of training to be able to use them, and now you can just use a few clicks and get them, and even a beginner can use them, or any photographer along the journey. Now I wanna answer, who is Luminar for? Luminar said they are for hobbyist photographers, and I totally agree with this assessment. If you're a pro photographer processing tens of thousands of pictures a year, you're probably gonna be using Lightroom or Capture One, or more advanced editing software. But the reason I recommend Luminar to so many people around me, even though I still use Lightroom most of the times for myself, is that they can get great results without the knowledge of photo editing, and the hours of learning on how to edit photos. What is even better is that the AI tools allow to get very advanced effects without having to learn how any of that works, which is really amazing for people that are just starting out inside of photography, and starting to learn how to edit their shots. By now you probably have guessed that Luminar is not a free software, and that you have to pay for it, but the pricing is a little bit complicated because it's always on sale. At full price, it's about $12 a month for the subscription, and $300 for the lifetime perpetual license. The difference between the two here is that the subscription will give you all the add-ons as long as you're paying the subscription, so panorama stitching, all the Gen AI stuff, and a bunch of features like that that they add over time. If you get the lifetime license, the difference is that you're gonna have to pay for every single one of these add-ons afterwards, and they range between $20 to $50, so really decide which one is best for you. But now if you go on their website, they actually have an option for 12 months at $69, and a lifetime perpetual license at $119. Both of these also add a bunch of other add-ons, so you can save even more money by getting these. So this is definitely an option I would look into, and it's super cheap compared to Lightroom that cost me $40 per month. If you wanna save even more, you can use my discount code, loebba at checkout to get another 10% off on your purchase. So this is crazy cheap what you can get. Finally, if you are not sure right now if you wanna get it or not, you can actually do a seven-day trial to really test the software and see if you wanna do it or not. You can go check all the links down in the description for this. I hope this video made you realize why I recommend Luminar Neo to so many people. Their AI tool really allowed beginners to get better results, and allow a lot of photographers to get better results much faster. I also wanna say two other cool things about Luminar. First of all, they've been doing AI tools before AI was even a buzzword that everybody was talking about. So it's not just some trend that is happening right now. They've been doing these tools for a very long time. The second thing is that Skylum, the company behind Luminar, actually is a Ukrainian company, and they've been working in the middle of the war and pushing a bunch of updates nonstop, which is very impressive and really show the dedication they have to their products. Finally, I wanna finish this video for people that are on Windows On Arm like I was. I downloaded Luminar from their website, but the performance was kind of terrible. Then I did a little search online to understand what was happening, and it said that we have to go through the Microsoft Store to get it if you're on Windows On Arm to get the correct version. And once I did that, the performance is a lot, a lot better. It's actually as good as Lightroom. And what is even better is when I use the AI tools, my tablet doesn't become completely hot when this is happening. If you enjoyed this video about Luminar, definitely subscribe and have more content on Luminar coming up really soon. And also hit the like button if you enjoyed the video. See you in the next one!
What is this video about?
I get asked a lot what photo editing software people should use when they buy their first camera or decide to start taking their raw files seriously. So I spent time with Luminar Neo, and here's why I've been recommending it to my family, friends, and everyone new to photography: it's built for beginners, but it doesn't feel limiting.
The real magic is in the AI tools—and I know AI has a weird reputation these days, but here's the thing: these tools are genuinely smart without being complicated. You can import photos directly from your phone via their app, which is a nice touch for quick edits. Once you're in the catalog, you'll notice organization features like photo ratings and albums that just work.
Where Luminar Neo shines is speed. The preset system suggests edits based on your image type, and you can apply them in one click. If you want more control, the Enhance AI tab has things like Accent AI that recovers detail and contrast automatically. I watched it work on phone photos, landscape shots, and everything in between—it consistently improved the base image without looking overdone.
Then there are the advanced tools. Noiseless AI removes grain while keeping detail intact—I tested it on high-ISO shots and it was genuinely impressive. The Erase tool removes unwanted objects (or even power lines) in seconds. SuperSharp AI recovers sharpness from slightly blurry photos. Portrait Bokeh applies depth-aware background blur like a phone's Portrait Mode, but often better. Sky Replacement is probably what made Luminar famous, and for good reason—the masking is incredibly accurate and the reflection adjustments make it look realistic.
For people doing heavier work, there's masking with gradient, brush, and AI object selection. There's panorama stitching with perspective correction built in. There are face and body retouching tools that don't require hours of Photoshop training to use naturally.
The pricing is where I think Luminar really wins compared to Lightroom. The lifetime license is $119 right now (usually $300), and the subscription is just $12/month. If you use code loicba at checkout, you get another 10% off. I mostly still use Lightroom myself because it's my workflow, but Luminar is genuinely the better choice for someone starting out.
One thing worth noting: if you're on Windows on Arm (like I was testing), grab it from the Microsoft Store, not the website. The native version performs so much better.
If you're a hobbyist or someone just getting into editing, I think you should try the seven-day free trial. I'm confident it'll be worth your time.