What's the book on Luminar?

[Chris Werner]

I just purchased an X-T3 (yay!) to replace my dated X-Pro 1 and apparently get a free copy of Luminar as a result of a rebate someone is offering. Before Adobe went subscription I used Lightroom, and after (which has mostly been a period of photographic inactivity) I went back to using ACDSee, which I had also used before Lightroom. I'll obviously take a free copy, especially since it's apparently a lifetime license, but I try to be minimalist in my software and use as few programs for a given purpose as I can manage. So I'm curious how users feel about it, and the extent to which they consider it a one stop shop. Thanks!

 

Chris.

[mawz]

Buggy, gimmicky crap. And I'm being polite. Their business model is to release new paid options rather than patch their current release, and hope suckers pony up for the new gimmicks (and old bugs)

If you want free, Capture One Express for Fuji is FAR superior, so are Fuji's two free options.

[Chris Werner]

Ha! Say what you really think! 😂

Thanks for the honest feedback I don't care a whit about free. I just want a good comprehensive package but no subscriptions please - that's why I dumped Adobe. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. In the meantime, I'll get up to date on ACDSee.

Thanks again!

Chris.

[Chris998]

Fully agree with mawz,

Luminar is crap, in my humble opinion,

slow, buggy, the so-called library is not thought through, and useless if you have more than handful of photos. A few years ago I used some limited Macphun (that is how they were called before switching to Skylum) products and gave Luminar not one try, but several, and paid for at least three versions, to no avail. Skylum's Aurora HDR was the same sad story. Will never touch any of their software again.

I have been using Capture One for many years now. I gave Lightroom and Photoshop a try as well, but they didn't work well with Fuji X, at least at that time.

For Fuji X, Capture One works really well, especially if you shoot RAW, which you should with a Fuji X, and if that is the only camera brand you own, Capture One Express for Fuji is even free, if I am not mistaken. I also use CO with Leica, Sony and Canon.

[mawz]

On 8/5/2020 at 6:34 PM, Chris Werner said:

Ha! Say what you really think! 😂

Thanks for the honest feedback I don't care a whit about free. I just want a good comprehensive package but no subscriptions please - that's why I dumped Adobe. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. In the meantime, I'll get up to date on ACDSee.

Thanks again!

Chris.

Capture One Express for Fuji is free and quite capable. I use the paid version personally, but the free version covers most needs if you don't batch process and don't mind not being able to make your own styles.

[George_P]

... and layers. I agree with mawz. And the paid version is also worth it for the layers feature and the intelligent masking modes (luminance etc.) They have very good tutorials, have a look. 

[khollister]

I use Luminar quite a bit for specific things, but I agree that the Library features are pretty poor - no keyboarding or searches of metadata for one. I use Capture One to do fundamental editing and RAW conversion and will send TIFF's to Luminar (Or Color Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro) for specific creative effects. Luminar also does compositing, which C1 doesn't have presently. 

I'm on a Mac and have not found it to be buggy.

I still use Lightroom to maintain my catalog of "finished" images since the catalog functionality in C1 is hideously slow IMHO. When I finish an image in C1, I create a TIFF with all the adjustments baked in and then import that into LR. I would love to ditch Adobe altogether, but LR is too damn good at cataloging and searching thousands of images.