Thus far, we've focused on the cool things that Luminar Neo offers. To our minds, these three AI tools performed brilliantly, and depending on your needs, one or more of them may well justify the price of Luminar Neo by themselves. Plus, when you've got an image that you're just not sure how to crop, it does take the decision out of your hands and help you move on. However, it does save you vital seconds, and if you're cropping hundreds of images in one sitting, that time saving can add up. More experienced photographers should know how to crop their shots, of course. It does exactly what it says, in a single click. The best of these is Remove powerlines, which appears under the Erase tab. What's special about Luminar Neo, though, are the specially designed AI tools. You can crop your shots, use layers, and play with exposure, saturation, smart contrast, highlights, shadows, blacks & whites, curves, colour balance, contrast, sharpness, noise reduction, optics… all the usual stuff, basically.

They include all the basic image editing tools you'd expect to find in paid-for software aimed at non-professionals. The latter are organised into four sections (Essentials, Creative, Portrait and Professional). Luminar Neo has three modes: Catalog, for viewing your images, Presets, for applying presets to them, and Edit, for using in-built tools. Basically, you download a free companion app (Luminar Share) to your phone, scan in a QR code from your desktop computer, and then follow the steps. Once we'd got beyond that initial hiccup, this was pretty straightforward and quick to do. The thing we were trying to do at the time was wirelessly import pictures from our smartphone. This is a pretty unusual way to organise a menu, and we only realised it was there by Googling. There was one exception to this: we didn't realise that a bunch of menu items can only be accessed by clicking on the logo in the top-left corner.

Luminar ai vs luminar neo