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LUMINAR NEO (OUT LATE 2022) https://skylum.com/ Images to edit

LUMINAR IS AN IMAGE EDITING APP that we’ve covered before through a couple of previous incarnations and now the time has come for another new version. Luminar Neo is the latest edition, due for release later in 2022, but Maximum PC has managed to get hold of a special pre-release version to show you the kinds of things its AI-powered tools are capable of.

Neo brings together features from the previous Luminar 4 and Luminar AI releases and adds some new stuff of its own. Since its launch in 2016 as a Mac-only app, Luminar has gained features and Windows compatibility, concentrating on effects that can be achieved with sliders and automatic selections rather than requiring a great deal of manual input. Its last big innovation was sky replacement, which automatically selected the area of sky in an image and replaced it with a new sky from a cache of sample photos, or from one you’ve taken yourself. Then there were the giraffes—indeed, the ability to add tall African herbivores to an image turned out to be the sort of tool many photo manipulators didn’t know they wanted.

There’s more of that sort of thing than ever before in Luminar Neo, which is turning out to be an intelligent rethink of what makes the app unique. –

IAN EVENDEN

1 RELIGHT

Once you’ve got an image open, it’s time to see what the app can do. One of our favorite features is Relight, an AI tool that splits your image into near and far layers and allows you to alter the brightness of each individually. It helps if you give it a photo that plays to its strengths—perhaps one in which your subject is standing between clear foreground and background objects— and use the Depth slider to set the point at which they’re fully diverged [Image A]. Then you can play with the Brightness Near and Brightness Far sliders, to see what effects they will add.