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Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Luminar 4 , don't buy before testing

Skylum just released Luminar 4 on November 18, 2019 as a PAID upgrade from Luminar 2018 or as a stand-alone program.

Since I was a previous user since version 3, I decided to give it a try and ordered the "early bird" upgrade. Well, I must admit that it was a huge mistake.

I confess I was influenced by the good reviews on the media, but later I realized that all the websites that rated L4 so high were profiting from Skylum. Take a read here and think. Is this just a coincidence? 


V4.1 still has some severe flaws that weren't corrected or even addressed yet. If you have Luminar 3 my advice is to NOT pay for the upgrade unless you test it to bones before.

L4 was promised and advertised as a Lightroom killer. What a bad joke.

It has some cool features like the Accent Ai, Sky Enhancer Dehaze,  Color Balance, Advanced Contrast but it's severely crippled.

The main issues are:

  • Slow like hell
  • It's NOT possible to remove an image from the catalog in a simple way. 
  • The file navigator does NOT show the images file names under theirs. thumbnails, you need to see the file information panel.
  • The claimed DAM is simply too primitive to be called "DAM".
  • The program eats memory like crazy.
  • Bugs, bugs, bugs... 
The DAM features are so badly designed and severely crippled without the possibility to remove selected images from the catalog. If you try to do it, Luminar will move the images to its own trash can and if you decide to empty it, your images will be deleted from disk!

There are awkward workarounds to do this, like flag unwanted the images as rejected, create a new "rejected" folder, move the images to there, and then removing the folder from the catalog. Are you kidding me Skylum?

The sky replacement tool is, well... Ok if you really like to ALTER the reality of a scene. For me, it's kind of meh. Please forgive me if you like this feature.

The details and landscape enhancers are nice features for beginners. Not bad, but they don't qualify for a paid upgrade in my opinion. 

Skylum posture is ambiguous about what will happen to Luminar 2018 and the roadmap for V4 isn't clear just very vague and unconvincing statements. 

My recommendation is to NOT buy or upgrade it unless you test it (well) before and be satisfied with the present features or keep using Luminar 2018.

Do NOT rely on Slylum's promises waiting for something they said they're working on and they will release "when ready". This may take YEARS. I don't like the idea of paying in advance for something I can't be sure if I will receive it.

The fact they did that "Early Bird" version 4 campaign based on an unstable and unfinished product was pitty.

I ended up returning it and got a refund.

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