Back in November, I wrote a post about quick and easy portraits using Luminar 4. Now Luminar has had two software updates with versions 4.1 and 4.2. Luminar claims they have made more improvements in the Portrait panel, which enables even better performance and results.

So, I took a few photos into Luminar and had a play.

Face Detection Network

In general, I do not photograph groups, so I cannot say how it works on more than two people, however, it did pick up two people easily. I did find that the artificial intelligence still applied settings to BOTH people in the shot. Using the AI Skin Enhancer evened out skin tones on two different skin types, quite easily, but it did not even out on the hand, but it does boast face detection — not body parts.

Shine Removal technology

Possibly due to the angle of the face, I found I really did have to crank the Shine Removal up quite high to see any visible sign of reducing the shiny areas of the face. But it did do a fair job. I did notice it seemed to remove the dark circles under eyes as well.

Slim Face 2.0

I am not a huge fan of face slimming, but I did have a play with this and it did seem to slim both straight on and side on faces. It did so proportionally and did not really distort the image noticeably.

Clone Stamp/Erase tool

This was supposedly updated in version 4.1. I was not a big fan of these tools in the initial 4.0 release — in basic landscapes without distracting elements it did a fair job, but if you brought in busy scenes it did not perform well. I tried again in 4.2 and still felt it was not living up to the hype. It did a bad job and being unable to undo in the Erase module is a big let down. While it could be argued I should slow down and take more time with this tool, I can correct so quickly in Photoshop or Lightroom.

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