This morning, Skylum gave a more in-depth preview of the new workflow in LuminarAI, set to be released later this year.
Counteracting the limitations of presets and other artificial intelligence tools, LuminarAI puts its emphasis on making effective decisions regarding edits to your photographs. The AI has been trained from input from artists, photographers, colorists and scientists.
“With LuminarAI, we wanted to ensure that AI not only was easy to use, but that it also provided creatives a way to express themselves. Through our unique 3D depth mapping and segmentation technologies, we’re able to recognize the contents of a photo, recommend edits and then allow creatives to refine every aspect of that recommendation,” said Alex Tsepko, CEO of Skylum. “Doing this lets creatives retain their unique style in their edits without tedious, manual work. Professional results, but in a fraction of the time.”
Recognizing your photos
The minute you open a photograph in LuminarAI, it goes to work. The contents of the photo are identified, problems are analyzed and the depth of the photo is calculated. After this analysis, LuminarAI makes editing suggestions, through an approach called Templates.
With Templates, beginning editors can get inspired through recommendations on how to edit their photographs. At the same time, experienced editors can choose to have more control, selectively applying and modifying AI tools as they edit their images. They can then create their own Templates, saving up to 90% of their time spent editing.


As you continue to edit images in LuminarAI, it learns from you. Meaning, it learns how you modify things like lighting, composition, detail and color.
You can also take advantage of Local Adjustments, letting you make targeted edits to specific areas of your image.
Once your first image is edited, you can then sync your adjustments across a series of images. LuminarAI recognizes the intent of the edit and conforms the other selected images to match the goal. The AI tools adapt on an image-by-image basis, handling variations in lighting and subjects. These edits can also be saved as a custom Template for future use.


Inspiration to get moving
If you’re feeling uninspired, LuminarAI can help, too. When your images are analyzed, you can try out different Templates before applying them — just by hovering over each one. LuminarAI has built-in Template Collections that are catered to the subject of the image, with things like wildlife, macro, astrophotography, underwater and more.
This also helps creatives learn how to further manually control the AI tools in LuminarAI, as exploring a Template reveals which technologies were used.
Thanks for the article.
“As you continue to edit images in LuminarAI, it learns from you. Meaning, it learns how you modify things like lighting, composition, detail and color.” I have Lumiar4 and earlier versions and am not an expert on using them. “it learns …” it bothers me. What will it do when I am not doing a good job
Hey Nadarajah, thanks for your comment. I can’t say for sure, but chances are it’ll still recommend edits based on the content in your image, in addition to things you might do. Either way you have complete control to accept or modify these as you wish.
And who’s to say you aren’t doing a good job? That’s all a part of the learning experience :)
Skylum has removed the Roadmap of Luminar 4 from their website and they are telling us “When we launched Luminar 3, we made a mistake: we said that our goal was to develop a great Lightroom alternative. Therefore some people have purchased Luminar as a subscription-free alternative to Adobe products. ”
I am one of those who purchased Luminar3 and the earlier version 2018.
Forgot to add this link https://community.skylum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360009673340-where-is-the-roadmap-for-Luminar4
Correct. It marks a shift in Skylum’s direction, focusing more on creativity than the entire organization and management experience. It’s why Luminar is so powerful as a Lightroom classic or photoshop plugin.