Luminar Neo hands-on: User-friendly AI photo-editing software

We may earn compensation from reviewed products. Learn about our editorial policies.

There’s a lot floating around about AI at the moment. Apple Intelligence has been released globally to, let’s just say, mixed reviews and other AI platforms are becoming more prevalent. Enter Luminar Neo, a dedicated photo editing app driven by artificial intelligence.

From all of the AI I have used over the past year, it’s become clear that the best attempts at harnessing its power come from trying to do something specific rather than be a jack-of-all-trades.

Luminar Neo has a crack at doing just that by providing a comprehensive suite of AI-powered photo editing facilities. I’ve tested it over the last few weeks and been impressed with what is a very user-friendly experience. Let me show you what Luminar Neo is capable of.

Photo editing tools

When you boot up Luminar Neo for the first time, you realise just how many tools there are to play with. From basic things like altering colour, exposure and saturation to replacing the sky and erasing objects; there is a lot you can do to your photos.

There’s no better way to demonstrate this than with some examples.

Natural light

You can see I’ve done various things here. First off, the Sky AI tool. This feature allows you to replace the sky in your image with a range of different alternatives from dreary overcast clouds to streaky blue skies and starry nights.

It worked flawlessly pretty much every time I tested it with different lighting and exposures. Altering something so integral to a photo’s mood as the sky could produce very unbelievable results, but thankfully the software automatically readjusts lighting and colours to make it fit in.

Obviously, you can’t stick a night sky on a daytime photo and expect it to look realistic, you still need to use your own intuition and photographic eye.

For the keen-eyed reader, you’ll also notice that I used the GenErase tool to remove the buildings in the background and a small tree on the right. Now, I was apprehensive about this because a lot of AI software struggles to produce a convincing replacement for the background. You often get wiggly lines or blurry patches. 

But you can see Luminar Neo handled it well here too.

Both areas where the objects were removed look completely natural, but I was most impressed with the tree on the right. For one, it doesn’t have very defined boundaries, which is what tends to work best with AI removal, and it’s also blurry with a non-linear background.

It’s unnoticeable that it’s gone though which I think is a huge win. Erasing objects is one of the main things people will start to use AI for, especially on their phones, so the fact that Luminar already has it down is a big plus.

It doesn’t work on everything. You can’t erase huge objects in the foreground with complex backgrounds and expect a clean result. Again, this software is there to help you maximise your creativity as a photo editor, not completely replace your input, so use your intuition for the best results.

There wasn’t a huge amount of noise in this photo but I used the Noiseless AI tool which added some crispness and I also used the masking tool to increase the sharpness of the dog which really made her pop.

To finish it off, I upped the greens and yellows to make it a more vibrant and contrasting image. Let me know how you think it looks!

Low light

I wanted to see how Luminar dealt with lower light conditions too and I think this one is my favourite of the two examples.

For this image, I used the Twilight Enhancer AI tool which you can adjust to match a desired look, like golden, blushed or emerald. This has done a great job of making the image much richer by recolouring the sky and altering the overall mood towards something warmer.

I also dipped the exposure down a fair bit which made the whole image a bit too dark. Handily, Luminar Neo has a tool called Relight AI which allows you to adjust the brightness of near and distant portions of your photo. So I went ahead and did that for the glow coming from the building.

To boost that even more I used the Neon & Glow tool, with some masking over the light source, to get the desired cosy vibe. And I genuinely love the result!

Judge for yourselves but I think the edited images look great, and 90% of the work was done simply by moving sliders and letting AI do the heavy lifting.

Portraits

Luminar Neo also has a dedicated suite of tools for editing portraits.

Whenever I’m using portraits, it’s for YouTube thumbnails so I had a go at trying to make my face ‘pop’ a bit more in that style.

For this I first used the Enhance AI slider; Luminar’s ‘do-it-all’ tool that does a bunch of things to the entire image like relight, retone and sharpen under one single slider. That sorted out some of the imperfections in lighting and focus.

I then switched over to the Portrait Bokeh tool to, well, increase the bokeh (the background bluriness for the uninitiated). Face AI allows you to adjust lighting specifcally on your face which is complimented nicely by the Skin AI tool that finds areas of glare on your face to remove them as well as smoothing imperfections.

Again, the desired effect was certainly achieved here. I especially loved the face-specific tools that made adjusting the lighting in that area so easy.

User Experience

I can’t stress to you how easy all of this was. The only learning curve involved with Luminar Neo is knowing what some of the terms mean. For example, if you’ve never used photo editing software before, you may not know what ‘noise’ is in an image, or what masking lets you do.

But the app comes with plenty of tutorials, example images and presets if you really want to have minimal input. There really isn’t anything to fear though.

This isn’t like booting up Photoshop for the first time and being overwhelmed by what a Polygonal Lasso does. You can get going within about half an hour of playing around with different tools. Once you get the hang of masking, the rest is done mostly by using sliders.

But that isn’t to say Luminar Neo lacks depth. I have been using it for weeks and am still discovering new ways to use tools to reach my desired effect. Tools that will have particularly wide appeal are GenErase and, my personal favourite, GenSwap which are so fun to use and add another dynamic to the editing process.

As you can see, I’ve swapped the pooch here for an old TV and some bins. Not glamorous but well executed nonetheless!

There’s a bunch of other tools that I haven’t mentioned here such as HDR Merge which lets you merge multiple takes of the same photo to create the perfect representation of what you shot. You also get access to Focus Stacking to improve photo quality and Panorama Stitching to merge multiple different photos of a scene into one large Panorama.

I should also mention that Luminar Neo is compatible with Mac and Windows computers, with Luminar Mobile available for iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro.

Who should buy Luminar Neo?

Luminar Neo is pitched perfectly for the hobbyist photographer who wants an accessible app that still has advanced features, and also anyone who just wants to spruce up pictures they take on their smartphones.

It really is a dynamic suite of tools. Whether it’s portrait or landscape photography, Luminar Neo has a lot to offer.

I am by no means a professional photographer, although I do dabble, and have limited experience in editing images. But I know a bit and Luminar felt like it could really help those trying to learn more about how to process photos they’ve taken.

Plus who doesn’t love replacing people in photos with random objects for a laugh?

Let me know what you think about the editing below!

This article was supported by Skylum