There are always a lot of questions on processing software on this site, including questions about Luminar. My primary processing program is Lightroom and I love this program for many reasons; it suffices for about 90% of my photos. From within LR I use many other programs depending on what I want to accomplish. I'™ve been playing around with Luminar to see what it can do and I am impressed with the filters supplied in this program, the algorithms are definitely beyond what LR can do.

I was in the Grand Canyon last year and I went back to some of those images to see if Luminar could do anything to improve them and I found that it could and did improve the images. As it was the storm season there the light was not always the best and I wanted to see if I could improve on that in Luminar. Note that the program is based on a supplied set of filters that you can apply across the board to the image, just use a brush on, just use a graduated mask on, or just use Luminosity on. If you have used Photoshop, after clicking around on things, you'™ll soon get the hang of the program. I think this is a good program for a beginner as the beginner can simply start out by using the filters as supplied and then learning more about what they do. In the end, in any program, you need to understand what happens to the image when you apply a filter and this knowledge comes with experience. Each filter, once applied, can be decreased as desired. I did use Photoshop on many of the photos but I think Luminar was able to really pull out some differentiation in the images and to improve them overall.

I like images that are sharp and detailed and Luminar helped a great deal with this on the mid-tone ranges in the images. I have included some images to show you the difference in the images from one program to the next. I do believe that we now have a tendency to oversaturate images and Luminar does seem to lean in this direction but for these images I tried to find a œhappy medium of reality and processing. I am posting these photos in a second post so that the post does not get kicked to another section.