This morning, Luminar Neo added its much anticipated Portrait Background Removal tool. Since its announcement last summer, there have been many competitors coming into play in the masking game, namely Adobe. This past fall, Adobe added a Select Subject and Select Sky mask option to the Lightroom ecosystem and Camera Raw.

It seems like both companies are going head-to-head in the masking game. So how does Luminar Neo’s new Portrait Background Removal tool stack up?

How it works

The tool is rather simple, and right now, it only works on portraits. Open up your image in Luminar Neo, click the Edit tab and open the Layer Properties tool. Then, click the Masking tab and select Portrait Background.

When you select this, it’ll evaluate your image. Depending on your system, the size of your image and the complexities of it, this can take a while. On my Mac Studio machine, it was pretty quick in evaluating the below image, but removing the background took roughly 10 seconds to complete.

Luminar Neo did a decent job on this image, but it did miss an area between my friend’s hand and his camera strap. I can edit that out with the Masking tools, but I still find Luminar Neo’s Masking tools need a bit of work, as it can be difficult to get perfect in small areas like this.

The biggest win for Luminar Neo here is that this works seamlessly with Layers. This means I can easily add a different background behind my subject. In the build I had of Luminar Neo, adding an image to a Layer didn’t actually work, but I suspect that’s a bug that’ll be worked out.

Some big head-scratchers

There’s a few qualms when it comes to Luminar Neo’s implementation of the Portrait Background Removal tool. First off, many users won’t notice the new tool right away — it’s buried inside the Layer Properties tool.

Secondly, if you want to refine the removal after exiting out of the Layer Properties tool, you have to go back in, click Remove and then you can refine the removal. It’s an extra step that’s confusing (given the name of the Remove button) and unnecessary. It also adds to the time necessary to get the look you’re going for.

But most of all, once you’re in the Refinements Brush area, you’re met with options that look like no other tool in Luminar Neo. It’s almost as if someone totally different designed this tool, compared to the rest of the program. It doesn’t feel in-sync with the rest of the program (especially when looking at a tool like SkyAI), despite the Refinements Brush making sense and generally working well. There’s just not a lot of consistency.

What’s even more confusing here is that the Refinements Brush is not editing the mask. It’s simply determining the subject and background. So if you want to edit the mask, you have to go to the Layer Properties tool, click on Masking and then use the Brush to edit in or out your mask.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of potential work to make this tool work perfectly with your image … and that can take a lot of time to get right.

How it compares to Adobe

Portrait Background Removal is easy to compare to Adobe’s Select Subject tools. While you can’t remove a background inside of Lightroom, you can use Photoshop to do so rather easily.

With that said, how does the masking compare between the two programs? Below, you’ll see Luminar Neo on the left, and Lightroom Classic on the right, with the same image.

I had mentioned that Luminar Neo did not exclude the area between my friend’s hand and camera strap. However, Lightroom Classic saw this as a part of the background, and not of the subject. Adobe also did a slightly better job with edge detection, with Luminar Neo leaving a thin stroke-like appearance around the edges of my friend.

The one other major difference here is that, for now, Luminar Neo will only recognize people. With Lightroom and ACR, it’ll recognize people, objects, pets … you name it. Anything that’s considered a “subject.” That said, Luminar Neo’s MaskAI tool can recognize more than just humans.

In terms of speed, Adobe is quite a bit faster. While Luminar Neo took roughly 10 seconds to remove the background, Lightroom Classic took 3-4 seconds. And oddly enough, just trying to select the person with Luminar Neo’s MaskAI tool took longer, at roughly 15 seconds.

Finally, the fact that you can now copy and paste masks inside of Lightroom is a huge win for Adobe in this arena. No more manually having to click to select a subject — it all just works.

Portrait Background Removal is a great idea, but needs some work

Skylum has developed a tool that, for the most part, works well. But it’s not perfect. Edge detection needs some work, and the tool feels clunky compared to Adobe’s masking implementation. The tool has potential, but needs a bit of work to make for a perfect option for photographers.

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