Luminar: Image Editor&Enhancer

First, I admit I made a mistake. I had apparently done the trial at some point in the past. Obviously, I wasn’t impressed then, either. I clicked on the year subscription this time thinking that I was getting a 7 day trial. With no warning that I wasn’t, I was charged the full amount. I used it for a few minutes and started to delete it. Instead, I’m going to make some videos demonstrating it to let as many people as I can not to get ripped off too. It will probably be a popular app with teenage girls because it has a lot of features, and you can do the usual extremely fake-looking editing that is popular with them. I tried the face shine removal, and it’s worthless. I did the blemish removal, and it makes the skin look plastic. There is a body reshaping tool, and instead of smooth, gradual changes they are abrupt with no real control. I have no idea how this app has good reviews. They won and got my money, but I will never use it again except to demonstrate how bad it is to other people. There are so many great apps available, but this one is a massive waste of money. Editing this to add to the bad, although with a company like this, they probably don’t let the bad reviews be seen. I decided to try this one more time since I had been ripped off for $32, and I realized even more about how ridiculous it is. A great example is that there is a feature that “allows” you to change the exposure of the background independently of the foreground. I had a model sitting and wanted to darken the background behind her. It did it by apparently putting a radial gradient from the top down. It darkened the model’s face and top half of her body too. This is probably the most embarrassingly bad app I’ve ever used.

I haven’t really been seeing many updates on Luminar mobile. It is a really nice app but since I started using it like 4 months ago I haven’t seen any major upgrades. I often find myself using “Peachy” for editing and coming back to Luminar to do a minor change like adding a sky or add another filter, talking of which there isn’t much variety here, there’s only like 10. Paying 44$ for lifetime access to barely get anything is kinda of a stretch. Tho I might buy it, but I’m not fully satisfied with the mobile app. Yeah I think it’ll get your work done but I think Luminar can be way better than lightroom etc.. even on the computer version and I don’t like how Luminar is going more towards a “yearly” subscription direction over a “1 time buy”. Please update and add additional features, I believe Luminar mobile has a lot of potential.

I really liked using this app compared to many others simply because it takes so less time to edit a picture. I mean it's so easy to make my pictures pop. Adjust the AI slider to my liking, bring the shadows and whites, done! But when it comes to export the picture, that's where this app's problem lies. A 12MP picture is exported as a 3MP picture! Seriously why? There are only 2 export options, large and small. I get my 12MP pics exported as 3MP and the file size reduced to around 700Kb. That's a lot of details lost. This is with the large file export option selected. One other thing, this app like many others uses AI to detect the subject during auto masking. And many times, it doesn't mask or detect the subject properly. Other apps like Photomator and Lightroom has included a brush for such cases where we can edit the mask easily. Luminar doesn't include any brush. Update: I just found out that this happens with the Raw files (taken from the phone). With HEIF or jpegs this doesn't happen. Please fix this issue. Raw files are usually the ones many people like to edit more. I was this close to buying the Lifetime membership but until this gets fixed, I'm starting away.