Today, Skylum introduced Luminar Neo, and chief among its new features is…layers! It also adds new AI features like the ability to relight the subject of any image, remove backgrounds, and automatically eradicate dust and spots and power lines. Luminar AI does include Local Masking, which can be used in a layers-y way (as I describe in the book). Skylum’s rationale was that layers are too often confusing to new users, and Luminar AI was really meant to reduce complexity. One thing Luminar AI does not share with Luminar 4 is support for layers. When I have some more time, I hope to create a blog post or video that covers how it works. Given the time between when the book was printed and now distributed, a small number of existing features didn’t make it into the book, most notably Portrait Bokeh AI, which has a lot of great controls for automatically identifying the subject of a photo and blurring the background. Rocky Nook makes beautiful books, and I’m honored to work with them.

I had fun creating this book, and love not only what I wrote but also the fantastic print quality and color reproduction in the physical book’s 212 pages. On a personal note, this has been one of my favorite books to write. Luminar AI works as a stand alone app or as a plug-in for Lightroom Classic, Apple Photos, Photoshop, and other apps. It also includes two Walkthrough chapters where I guide you through every step of editing a landscape image and two portraits-and you can download the photos and follow along in Luminar on your computer.

The Photographer’s Guide to Luminar AI covers the new features and also explains how to get the most out of the professional editing tools that are a click or two away. So, my publisher Rocky Nook and I decided to update my Luminar 4 book for Luminar AI. When I dug into the first beta versions of Luminar AI, I was excited to see that a lot of the deceptively deep features were still there, just not emphasized in the marketing. It boasted a new imaging engine, a workflow designed to improve photos quickly, and more great AI features such as expanded portrait tools and more ways to augment skies. Skylum followed that up with Luminar AI, which pushed more into the realm of AI-assisted photo editing. I like to describe Luminar 4 as deceptively deep, because although it has features for quickly improving photos, you could use layers and masks to really dig into the capabilities and perform sophisticated edits. My first book on Luminar covered Luminar 4, which was the maturation of Skylum’s all-in-one photo editing tool that covered all the basics and introduced significantly cool AI features like sky replacement and portrait enhancements. So, let me first talk about Luminar AI and my book, and then I’ll turn to what the Luminar Neo news means. Ironically, today Skylum pre-announced Luminar Neo, a new photo editing app coming later this year.

Luminar ai update