Since the application came out just before Christmas, I’ve seen many reviews and coverage extolling its virtues, but this wasn’t matching my experience with it. I wondered what I was doing wrong because it seemed like I was reading about a completely different application. I had actually written a pretty negative review, and I was almost going to publish it, but I held off because something was bothering me about it. There was just a huge gulf between what some people were saying, and what I had experienced, and I hate writing negative things. So, I took some time and thought about it for a while, until it occurred to me…. The coverage I was reading was from people who had never used Luminar before. For them, it was a departure from normal photo editing applications, and through those eyes, I could see how you could think this was a fascinating and different piece of software. However, if you have previously used Luminar 4 and earlier, it was a different story. Instead of a new and interesting photo editing experience, there is a legacy of broken promises and changed directions, and against that backdrop, Luminar AI promises to be an entirely new application, but is instead a downgraded experience with a few new features when compared to Luminar 4. So, I’m left with shades of “Sliding Doors” trying to review this, and two very different experiences depending on if you had used Luminar before or not. To reconcile this, I’ve essentially written two reviews. Review 1 - You’ve never used Luminar before It’s kind of like a “choose your own adventure” script. If you’ve never used Luminar before, it’s an image editing application that uses AI to automate many common tasks and the idea is that this is a new way of working, which should speed up your workflow. By using AI, things that previously took many edits and manual work can be done with a simple slider. It can work as a plug-in to Photoshop or Lightroom.

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