This morning, Skylum announced that Ivan Kutanin will become the company’s new CEO. Kutanin replaces current CEO Alex Tsepko, who will shift his focus to market growth and partnerships as Chief Expansion Officer (CXO).
“When asked to be CEO, the company faced many challenges. We needed to rethink who we were and how we could bring unique value to the market. That led us to rebrand as Skylum and reimagine the photo editing experience to help everyone create stunning imagery more efficiently,” said Tsepko. “The market responded enthusiastically and Skylum doubled growth annually for the past three fiscal years.”
With LuminarAI, Skylum rebuilt the Luminar platform from the ground up, placing an emphasis on artificial intelligence.
“As the company looks forward, we believe Ivan is the perfect choice to lead the next phase of Skylum’s growth. His expertise in both engineering and business allow for expanded adoption of our exciting technology in new business segments,” said Tsepko. “I look forward to finding and developing new partners and markets for the tools and solutions developed under his leadership.”
Kutanin has been an integral part of the company’s growth. Initially focused on product development for Intensify, Tonality, Aurora HDR and Luminar, he has since joined Skylum’s board of directors and has helped to unify operations.
“Thanks to Alex’s hard work, we have a company filled with amazing people and technology. I am honored to have this opportunity to help fuel Skylum’s continued growth,” said CEO Ivan Kutanin. “Our customers rely on images to tell stories, drive business and communicate efficiently. My focus is to make Luminar an indispensable tool for our users by taking full advantage of the powerful tools in our expanding AI ecosystem.”
Skylum intends to bring the Luminar Imaging Platform to new markets — becoming a complete ecosystem. Near term plans include expansion to mobile platforms such as iOS and Android. The company plans to enter 30 new markets and secure key partnerships with various industries including photography, technology, entertainment, e-commerce and others.
“At Skylum, we believe creativity is a fundamental human need. With this in mind, our products should inspire our customers and unleash their creativity. To accomplish this goal, we create AI tools which help people look at their creativity from a new vantage point and find unique opportunities for self expression through visual storytelling,” said Kutanin.
“To that end, we continue to invest in our proprietary Artificial Intelligence tools to address new challenges and develop creative solutions which serve both current and future customers. As we expand research and development, our role as an innovation leader in the imaging space will create new opportunities in the broader AI market. The path before us is truly exciting.”
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I’ve been very disappointed with Luminar. Back at version 3 it was pitched as a LR replacement. They put some work in to the library features, but quickly got sidetracked and distracted with the AI features, which had some nice applications, but then went in non pro directions with the sky replacement feature. The library feature remains extremely buggy and they seem to have lost interest in improving it.
As a RAW editor, it’s fine. As a tool to manage your library, it’s unusable.
Skylum’s been pretty clear over the last couple of years that the catalog will not ascend to the level of a true digital asset manager.
For Luminar to be the best creative software, in comparison to PS or LR, adding in cloning & stamp feature would be a great start. As will fixing the erase to actually erase an item. PS can lasso the item and poof its gone, with luminar not so much. Instead of redirecting everything with AI based, work on editing features we can use to make creative images. Not what the masking wants, which isnt right 75% of the time. I got tired of paying for PS & LR monthly, so I tried Luminar and its not my favorite program, as… Read more »
I love Luminar AI, it is the only tool I use on my Mac for photo editing, with great results.
However I want to move much of that work to an iPad, but they’ve been promising that an iPad app is coming soon for the last couple of years. Do we wait much longer, or go ahead and invest in other apps?