Luminar 2018:- Best Photo Editing Software for Mac & PC

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Luminar 2018: Taking Your Images To The Next Level

If you’re looking for a reasonably priced, subscription-free photo editing software that can challenge Adobe Lightroom, give Skylum’s Luminar 2018 a try.

 

photo editing software

This image editing software has a whole host of features, including batch processing, a sophisticated AI filter, professional developing tools, and a RAW develop module. It’s available in Mac and PC versions, and the recent Jupiter update saw over 300 performance improvements in less than three months.

So, what are the advantages that Luminar 2018 has?

Features of Skylum Luminar:- Best Photo Editing Software

1. User Interface

The layout of the user interface in Luminar 2018 allows for quick access to all the tools you need to edit your images. There’s no bewildering array of toolbars or cluttered sub-menus here – everything is simple, clean and easy to use.

The interface is also completely adaptable and scalable to suit everyone. It will grow with your skill level, and as you improve it will give you the tools you need to do the job.

A complete beginner could upload an image to Luminar 2018 and start working on it immediately, and yet professionals could also find all the tools they need, such as brushes, masking, layers, blending modes, texture overlays, history, and many more. For those who make a living from photography, a fast, powerful and intuitive image processor is a must-have, and Luminar 2018 is all of those things.

2. Create Totally Unique Looks With Presets

Luminar 2018 has a range of adaptive presets for all your photos from street to portrait, without you having to spend time adjusting anything with the sliders. Presets allow you to make instant changes to your images with just one click of the mouse, and they give it a certain look or style. Luminar 2018 has an extensive range of presets, created by professional photographers to give great results.

Of course, you can control the exact strength of the effects applied to your image, and you can create new layers to add new presets to the same image, making it totally unique and creative.

3. LUT’s

LUT’s (Lookup Tables) are commonly used in the movie industry to color grade, and now Luminar is introducing them to the photography world. LUT’s are one-click options that simulate film stock and creative color grades, and as with presets, you get to choose the strength of the LUT you want to add to your image. Luminar 2018 comes with a host of pre-installed LUT’s, and you can add new ones.

4. Editing Filters

One of the best things about Luminar 2018’s editing filters is that they are divided into categories that make it easy to find them when you need them.

There are over 50 non-destructive filters to help make your images the best they can be, and they are all useful. Just a few examples are:

  • Sun rays: this filter adds fully-customizable, realistic-looking sun rays to your image.
  • Foliage enhancer: makes your landscapes come to life with vibrant colors.
  • Structure: make your images pop with increased contrast and details.
  • Polarizing filter: this works like a traditional lens filter, and produces deeper blue skies and more contrast.
  • Dodge & burn: for professional lightening and darkening of specific areas of your image to enhance it.
  • HSL: the hue/saturation/luminance filter allows you to change the lightness, brightness, and hue of individual colors.
  • Top/bottom lighting: this filter allows you to add natural-looking light from the top and/or bottom of your image.
  • Accent AI: let artificial intelligence save you time by automatically analyzing your image and making corrections where needed.
  • Matte look: give your photos an aged look. This filter uses flatter colors and higher contrast and works well with landscape and portraits.
  • Black & white conversion: change your color photos to great-looking black & white images, with controls to adjust the style of your monochrome conversion.

5. Non-Destructive Editing

Luminar 2018 allows you to work on many different layers (just like in Photoshop) leaving your original image completely unchanged. These layers utilize blending modes and masking too, enabling you to work on the smallest details without touching a single pixel of your original image.

6. Powerful and Fast RAW Developing

Luminar 2018 boasts an impressively fast RAW develop module, which offers all of the control and fine-tuning that you would expect from a professional RAW editor. There is also the option to save you develop filters as a preset, and apply the same settings to your other RAW files through batch processing.

7. Artificial Intelligence to Help You Edit Faster

Skylum is investing heavily in AI technology for its photo editing software, as it believes this will be the future of photography. Luminar 2018 uses the power of artificial intelligence in the Accent AI filter.

This smart filter automatically analyzes your image and corrects it using over a dozen controls at once. This gives great results with just one slider, saving you time and effort. Accent AI will adjust many of the traditional editing controls, such as shadows, highlights, contrast, saturation, exposure, tone, details, and others.

8. DCP Profiles

Luminar now recognizes the industry standard Digital Camera Profile (DCP files) that some users may already have on their computers, or have bought. These profiles ensure consistent and accurate colors, so are an important part of image editing. This feature is available for Mac now and will be added soon for Windows users.

Final Thoughts

Luminar 2018 offers a real alternative to Photoshop and Lightroom, for a fraction of the price. It’s fast, clever and easy to use, and if you’re in the market for a new image editor, then look no further.

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