Luminar

I bought this on pre-order and it’s a shoulder shrug. It’s promising, don’t get me wrong, but it is NOT there yet. It’s basically Apple Photos on steroids, building on that GUI philosophy and pushing it toward the power of Aperture/Photoshop territory. Ironically, while it fills out a lot of the shortcomings of Apple’s built in Photos app it replaces those limitations with ones of its own. For example, I downloaded Luminar, started it up, imported an image, and immediately needed to rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. Now… how do you do that? Because you’d think it was in the ‘transform’ tool, which does in fact let you rotate it, but not the canvas! So now the photo resides in a vertical box with the sides chopped off. Okay, how about the ‘crop’ tool? Nope, that’ll only rotate it to a maximum of 45 degrees. Such a basic tool and it’s completely missing here. I mean, maybe it does, but do I need to spend a half hour and several Google searches on finding it? Unbelievable. Can we all just agree that the software manager at Macphun who said ‘it wasn’t important and they needed to ship’ should be fired now? Come on, these are THE BASICS, people. (FWIW I did email Macphun who confirmed that image rotation was NOT a feature in this app.) It processed my Sony RX100 RAW images okay, if a little roughly. It doesn’t take much for some of the filters to really tear apart an image so you have to be judicious about using them. The denoiser is okay, but not great and tends to give pics that plastic look quickly. I wish I could use my Topaz Denoise plugin as an extension; it certainly has much better results than the built in one. I guess what I’m saying is that plugin support would help this app immensely. Also, while some of the filters are powerful and look good they can have some strange fringing where I found the automatic masking can’t quite parse correctly, so you get a weird halo around people’s faces, etc. I suppose you could go in and clone that away, but it’s funny to see how well it handles a tree in the background while utterly dropping the ball on the human in the foreground. Like I said, it seems promising., Maybe in v2 or v3 they’ll hit their stride. But after a few days of messing around and getting nowhere I just pulled it from my dock and forgot about it. I’ll check back on a later version.