Let’s talk about some of the new features and perhaps more importantly, what’s missing from the program in this initial release. If the program is not optimized for the M1, I get it, but it should have been running well on my Windows machine. Luminar Neo was painfully slow, on the same tasks on both platforms, so if you have a slower machine, you will feel the tie hit while Luminar Neo calculates AI adjustments. The GPU is an Nvidia 3090, it runs Windows 11.

My other test machine is an Alienware Aurora 14 with an i9 and 32GB RAM. I’m running an M1 mac with a ton of RAM, and most AI features like remove phone lines took an agonizingly long time to process a RAW image from a Canon 5D Mk IV. PerformanceĮarly versions of Neo ran pretty sluggish on my test machines, and the initial release of the software is also sluggish. My opinions are based on the initial 1.0 release of the software, not on the pre-release versions I had access to. Before we continue into the review, let me say that I paid for the program, and I am not an affiliate. In the case of Luminar Neo, the initial final build of the program has a few bugs, which is to be expected, but the feature set and revamped user interface are a big departure from previous versions, and worse, some of the features do not work quite as promised.

I worked in software development for a lot of years, and I totally get the process. The final version has finally dropped, so what is my impression compared to earlier versions of Luminar? Early Days Last year, when Luminar Neo was announced, I jumped on board early, and early adopters have had access to the release candidate version of the program for a few weeks now. The Luminar series of programs all have the downside of being too easy to overdo edits and make photos look fake. I always found the program to have specific uses in my photography workflow, in earlier versions I liked the color adjustments a bit better than Lightroom, and in later versions I liked the Accent AI for the vibrance it added to an image when used in subtle amounts. I have been using Luminar in my workflow for a few years now.

Luminar neo vs photoshop