Luminar Neo is a photo editor and organizer from Skylum for Windows and macOS. It relies heavily on AI tools to handle tasks such as sky replacement, portrait retouching, noise reduction and object removal. It runs as a standalone application with its own catalog and as a plug-in for Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. Luminar Neo is a paid product, and you can try the desktop version for free first.
Catalog linked to your folders
Luminar Neo does not copy photos into a private library. When you add a master folder, the catalog links to that folder and its subfolders on disk. Folders managed inside the program link directly to the folders on the drive, so changes made there affect the drive.
Albums sit on top of this as virtual groupings. A photo can belong to several albums without its file moving, and removing it from an album leaves the original untouched. Edits are non-destructive, so the original stays intact and you can change every adjustment later.
People moving from Lightroom Classic can migrate a catalog. Folders, collections (which become albums), metadata and many basic edits transfer. Keywords, smart collections, masks and generative edits do not.
One-slider and scene-aware adjustments
Much of the editing in Luminar Neo works by analyzing the photo first and exposing a small number of controls. Enhance AI is the clearest example: one slider drives more than a dozen underlying controls, including shadows, highlights, contrast and saturation. Develop holds the RAW controls for exposure and detail.
Sky AI detects the sky, swaps it for one from a collection and adjusts the scene’s lighting and water reflections to match. Light Depth treats foreground and background as separate zones, letting you set brightness for each and position the main light. Further landscape tools add fog, haze, sun rays and warm light. Color Transfer copies the color look of one photo onto another.
Portrait retouching tools
Face AI recognizes the face, eyes and mouth and adjusts them separately. Skin AI finds blemishes and smooths skin while keeping some texture. Portrait Bokeh AI simulates background blur behind a subject. Portrait background removal separates people from the scene so you can change the background.
Generative edits and object removal
Luminar Neo offers several ways to remove or replace content. Erase fills a selected area with texture sampled from its surroundings, and the Clone tool paints pixels from a source area. The generative tools go further:
- GenErase removes objects you paint over with a selection brush and rebuilds what was behind them.
- GenSwap replaces a brushed area with something described in a text prompt, such as a palm tree, and keeps several versions so you can switch between them.
- GenExpand extends the scene when you drag the crop frame past the photo’s edges, optionally guided by a prompt. Each pass adds up to 25 percent of the canvas.
The program saves generated results as new files in a Generative Creations folder rather than overwriting the source photo.
Masking adjustments with Mask AI
Luminar Neo supports layers for combining multiple elements in one project, and you can use RAW files as image layers. You can apply any tool to any layer and add a tool more than once, each instance with its own mask. Mask types include Brush, Linear Gradient, Radial Gradient, Color, Luminosity, Mask AI and Object Select AI. Mask AI detects up to nine kinds of elements such as people, sky, buildings, water and plants, so you can limit an adjustment to one part of the scene. You can invert masks or copy them between tools.
Merging, upscaling and sharpening
A group of Luminar Neo tools works with several frames at once. HDR Merge groups bracketed exposures automatically using EXIF data. It aligns them, reduces ghosting from moving objects against a reference frame you choose and removes color fringing. It saves the blended result as a TIFF. Focus Stacking takes up to 100 shots focused at different distances. It aligns and crops them, and keeps the sharpest parts of each for a picture that is in focus throughout. Panorama Stitching joins a series of photos into one panorama.
Upscale AI enlarges photos up to 600 percent, Noiseless AI reduces noise in RAW and JPEG files, and Supersharp AI targets motion and focus blur. Restoration revives old, damaged photos.
Presets and batch processing
Presets apply a saved combination of settings in one click, and the program suggests presets based on the content of the selected image. You can apply the same adjustments to many photos at once through batch processing. Luminar Neo opens JPEG, PNG, TIFF and RAW formats from more than 1,000 cameras, and exports to JPEG, PNG, TIFF and PSD.
Plans and other platforms
The Desktop Only plan covers the Windows and macOS application on two devices. The generative tools, Restoration and the AI Assistant are included for a limited period and then continue through the Luminar Prime subscription. All Platforms adds Luminar on Mobile, with edits that move from mobile to desktop. Max adds a year of Luminar Prime, which renews the AI tools and the library of presets, LUTs, overlays and skies.
