Luminar 4 vs Luminar AI (BATTLE of the LUMINARS!)

Are you looking at Luminar 4 vs Luminar AI and trying to determine if you should upgrade?

I'll take a look at each program in this video to show the key differences, and help you understand if an upgrade (or purchase) is in your best interest or not.

Both programs have a lot of power to process your photos, and there is a lot of overlap. Why would you prefer Luminar 4 or Luminar AI? We'll try to answer that question in this video.

Be sure to check out my course, Luminar AI Elements. It covers all of the features, settings and tools in Luminar AI.

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[NormGilbert]

I requested a refund on Luminar AI.

Glad you like it, I hate it. But since you are an affiliate, you will never be critical of Skylum products.

Other than the portrait and atmosphere tools, there is NOTHING in AI that I cannot also do in L4. That includes reflections and bokeh. Their reflection tool will only work to reflect the replaced sky in a body of water. Try reflecting a clock tower in a puddle of water in AI. Not possible, but easy in L4.

There are many things I can do in L4 that I cannot do in AI. Starting with something as simple as Layer Transform. Try to do a watermark in AI. Sorry, not possible in that you cannot size or position the watermark. You can kludge together a dozen different textures that put the watermark in different preselected places, but why bother with a workaround when L4 already lets me resize and place my watermark anywhere I please?

Try to make the lake a more saturated blue and the brick building a less saturated red/orange. Fast and easy in L4 with layers, impossible in AI. You like Topaz Utilities? They can be invoked from the plug-ins menu in L4, while AI only talks to Adobe products.

Neither product has object masking, placing an object from one image into another. No blur, no background replace, no edge aware erase. In L4 I can label by layers to remind be what I did. Blue Lake, Adjust Foreground. No labels in AI, just a description like paint mask. So they are all label basically the same.

AI is a good, fast, plug-in for other more powerful standalone editors with steep learning curves and monthly payments. I might have been inclined to keep AI had it worked as a plug-in in L4, but alas it does not.

Luminar AI is not what you think it is when it recommends templates. The AI simply recognizes categories of photos: this is a landscape, this is a portrait, this is a city skyline, this is a lake, this is a sunset. That is all it does.

Composition AI suggests bad crops, like slicing a building in half, rather than moving the crop slighting to get rid of it. The automated perspective correction is the same thing as lens and geometry but less. I actually prefer DxO ViewPoint for fixing geometry.

Luminar will never fix the bugs n L4. Yes, within a year of today, if Apple or Microsoft releases an OS that kills L4, they will cobble together a solution. But it will still crash, and it will still lag on certain tools like dodge and burn. I will grant you that AI is faster and more stable.

AI should have been developed as a paid upgrade to L4, as perhaps L5. But that would not have served Skylum's greedy needs to generate cash in Q3 and Q4 via per-ordering and hyping this great, new revolutionary product that is mostly L4, repackaged, and with the stability and speed brought up to where it should have been in L4 from the beginning.

Luminar AI is good for beginners, and it will create a lot of ugly, over saturated, over peaked, fake sky with fake birds snapshots. But it is not a step forward, but a step backward. If I were an adobe user, I can see having AI as a plug-in, although there are editing programs on my iPhone that do a better job than either version of Luminar.

Photographic post processing is both art and science. I can give the same set of brushes and oil paints to a 14 year old and someone who makes their living as a painter and sells their work for thousands of dollars and the experienced painter will turn out better work consistently. Luminar is like handing the experienced painter cheaper brushes and low-quality oil paints. The 14-year-old won't know the difference. But even the most casual viewer will see the difference.

If I can look at your work and know by looking it was done in AI, that isn't to me a good program. But if all you want to do add space shuttle launches and giraffes to the sky, either L4 or AI will get you there.

My recommendation would be just the opposite to yours. If you are primarily a portrait photographer and a heavy volume wedding photographer, the speed of AI will serve you well. But it cost more than L4. If you are doing landscape, architecture, street photography, nature, machinery, table-top, old photo restoration, etc. you'll be better off foregoing the frustration AI and all the things it can't do, and buying L4 instead.

If you are a beginner, know next to nothing about composition, focus, or light, and are happy with a one or two click improvement in your snapshots, AI is for you. But not for me.

[danielc]

Thanks for making this, just getting back into photography after a few years hiatus. I haven't shelled out for either yet so this was very helpful. I've ran the trial versions of both for a few days and really enjoy them. (Along with Topaz Studio) I prefer Luminar 4 but will likely go with AI and hope it improves. Either one beats sending Adobe $10 a month for the rest of my life.

[benadler]

What is still not clear to me is this. Yes Luminar 4 support will end at the end of 2021. But if I retain it and then say get a new computer, can I still install Luminar 4? BTW, not even Microsoft stops support for a product after just 2 years! The reason I won't be going for AI is that it provides nothing that I would use but above all, it is the lack of layers and the lack of luminosity mask.

[patrickgoethals]

i recently purchased luminar AI. when watching different videos I see that there are more icons on the right side than the version I have. the marker for local maskng, the face for portrait, the PRO. logo .. I have the logo of eddit, a logo of a paintbrush for local masking, and a clockwork for the history. It is difficult to follow tutorals if there is a different layout. This is because it is upgrades from luminar 4 or is there another version of luminar Ai, for example luminar pro or something. (i'm new to photo editing so i'm starting from scratch). ps google translate i am dutch; THX 4 the vid.

[duaneshort]

The famous words of Skylum: "In a future release we're gonna . . ." Hahahaha!