When you open an image, Luminar AI will use artificial intelligence to work out what it’s a picture of and then suggest suitable templates to give it a particular look. These sound like they are all part of the same thing, but in fact they operate differently. Luminar AI users artificial intelligence in two main areas: 1) templates and adjustments, 2) AI effects. (Image credit: Skylum) Here’s another food shot, but this time Luminar’s AI decided it might fit in the Objects Collection instead. Not a bad call! (Image credit: Skylum) It then offered some Influencer templates, but you have to click on them to see the effect – there are no thumbnail previews to help you choose. Templates and adjustments Once this photo had loaded fully (this can take a few seconds for a RAW file), Luminar’s AI figured out that this might need an ‘Influencer’ template – see the sidebar, top right. The header shoot of Pisa is mine, as is the one of the water tower at the end, but Skylum has been kind enough to supply sample images for reviewers, so I’ve used those elsewhere for variety and to help demonstrate the portrait AI features.

It’s not a Lightroom rival, though, which may disappoint photographers who were following this software’s previous trajectory. It also has basic but effective image browsing tools.

It does do basic image enhancements, but that’s not really its main purpose and they are typically added as part of an editing template.

It sheds a lot of the technical depth of control of Luminar 4, putting almost all its faith in machine learning AI to reach a new, larger audience that Skylum believes has no time for sliders and technicalities and just want spectacular results fast. Luminar AI is officially the replacement for Luminar 4 but spears off in a whole new direction. It can even suggest templates (‘looks’) based on the contents of your images and has some pretty impressive sky replacement and portrait enhancement capabilities. Luminar AI is a photo editor that uses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate many photo editing tasks.

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