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Luminar 2018
- Thread starter MCAsan
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Yet, in Aperture/Lightroom's case, I exchanged one hole with another. The hole that I dug myself in with lightroom is even deeper then Aperture's. I would have been better off sticking with Aperture only leaving that platform when it stopped working.
So far Aperture is still working for me in High Sierra, much to my relief and pleasure. I don't do as much post-processing as I did in the past and so it is just fine having Aperture available for a quick crop-and-resize or minor cloning-out job when needed...... I do keep following all the comments on on the various new editing products coming out, and have been particularly interested in Luminar. I have MacPhun's Healing software and it does a very quick job of removing unwanted stuff from images in a hurry.
Photos is not a replacement for Aperture at all. That's like saying drawing in Notes is a replacement for a CAD system.
That's fair, though I'd say there's a notable difference between a product being declared EOL by its author and a product which I can keep using as long as I need to while I await a replacement. While Aperture has kept on working on multiple new versions of OSX, IMHO there's no assurance it won't break on the next dot upgrade.
To be honest, I've not done a lot with LR collections. I've mostly eschewed collections and organized via file/folder structure with keyword tags in the IPTC fields. Imperfect, but it's been a workable interim solution until a goldilocks solution presents.
I've started playing with Luminar and I'm not really finding it to my satisfaction. Maybe its me, but white balance seems to be a bit off, at least for my liking. Comparing how I set it Luminar and other apps, like C1. I find it more realistic in C1.
I'm not liking the controls either, I know there's a learning curve and I bringing my preconceived notions from using Aperture and Lightroom to the party but so far I don't find the application very intuitive.
I'm not liking the controls either, I know there's a learning curve and I bringing my preconceived notions from using Aperture and Lightroom to the party but so far I don't find the application very intuitive.
My experience with On1 RAW was that it was tediously slow moving from picture to picture (RAW files). 10+ seconds sometimes. There was no fast way to even delete the rejects.
Luminar looks good so far, but waiting on the DAM before I call anything there.
So far, Photos + extensions (inlcuding Luminar) is my preferred method.
And those Sunrays may well be the next great fad, they are really slick.
I will grant that Aperture is/was more powerful than Photos, but that is not a fair statement at all.
Photos will do a LOT of what most people need most of the time. Photos + extensions will do even more.
I do not, partly due to space constraints and partly due to synchronization fears like what unfortunately happened to you. Sorry to hear it.
A few weeks in, and I have mixed feelings about Luminar. I'm still adjusting to the different editing style and learning how to use it, but in general it feels like it's a few steps back from what I was doing in Aperture. I used Aperture for a few things fairly consistently:
1) Correcting rotation of photos (leveling horizons and such). It was a simple process: rotate it to the grid, and it would automatically crop what needed to be cropped to make it happen. Surely Luminar must be able to do this, but so far all I've found requires that I do the rotation and then manually handle the cropping, myself. Maybe that's a superior option to some people? I'm probably missing how to make it more automated, but it doesn't stand out as being an easy or obvious function.
2) Saturation, contrast, and sharpening enhancements. Aperture had some sliders for these functions, and that was it (you could additionally use brushes for some of them). Luminar bills itself as working to your level, allowing you to do minimal slider-toggling yet also allowing you to deep dive into the sliders. They make it sound as if there's a gradation between those, but it seems like it's one (choose a preset) and the other (work with dozens of sliders). The presets rarely get me to what I like, and then the slider adjustments are seemingly more complicated than what I need. Maybe some day, when I learn the program better, I'll say that it's wonderful to have that fine level of control. As it stands, I found it easy to make an image to my liking in Aperture, but despite spending more time on each image with all of the toggles and options, I rarely like the output I'm getting from Luminar. (I give it credit for doing better highlight recovery than Apple Photos did, though...)
3) Noise reduction. Really unimpressed here. Granted, noise reduction in Aperture wasn't terribly great, either, and I often used Noise Ninja (then the golden standard for noise removal - maybe still is?) as a plugin. Regardless, it seems to me that there's either a bunch of noise, or extreme loss of detail and minimal noise. Using the sliders in the middle values doesn't seem to make much of a difference, to my eye. Of note, I have some of their other programs, but do not have Noiseless to try their dedicated noise removal program.
4) Small flaw correction (skin blemishes, stray strands of hair). The "repair" tool functioned like a "smart" clone and stamp tool. Luminar just seems to have the old-school clone and stamper, requiring that you choose the source. Really puzzling, considering that the company also makes Snapheal, a program dedicated to removal of unwanted objects in a photo. I have Snapheal and for the most part I've been impressed with it; not sure if they're trying to keep product lines separate or what, but I'd think that they could have implemented at least a bit of Snapheal's functionality into Luminar, which would remove this complaint. (Yes, I can use Snapheal as a plugin for Luminar, but do I need to go through every single one of their stand-alone applications on top of editing in Luminar? What's the point of having a generalized photo editing application if I need to do that?)
Their other, better-known program, Aurora HDR, suffers from many of the same problems (compared with my old HDR standard, Photomatix).
I still give the benefit of the doubt that a lot of these issues are just my own ineptitude in having to unlearn one old way of doing things and learn the new programs, but I also worry that the company seems to be on a yearly product upgrade cycle, and that quality may be suffering as a result. The programs looks very flashy and promise a lot, but...
The DAM is probably what will make or break Luminar for me. If it's good (and I'll be sure to have relatively low standards for the first version release), I'll keep trying to improve with Luminar. If it's junk, I'll probably pony up for Capture One, which has pretty much unanimously received ratings of being equal or superior to Aperture and Lightroom.
I've already given up on it, sadly. I was really hoping to like this but I think how I work, and the UI/UX is such that its not a good fit for me.
Where are you headed? I spent a good bit of time comparing Capture One 11 with Lightroom 6 over the last few days, and it could be a program that I could learn to like. Unfortunately it costs too much. Lightroom is free as long as I continue to use version 6. Out of curiosity, I downloaded Lightroom CC Classic to see what I'm missing, and it turns out it's very little. The performance improvements that Adobe advertises for CC Classic seem to have gone into the version 6 point releases as well (there have been 13!), so there's no difference there.
Ah, OK the masking could be useful. Not for me, though, and especially not for $120 a year. As for performance, I just don't see much difference between version 6.13 and CC Classic. Importing may be a little faster, but for things like making adjustments in develop, moving from photo to photo, scrolling the library, I just can't see any difference.
No where in a sense.
I'm off of adobe's subscription, though the application continues to function albeit without the edit module. I'm looking for a tool that fits my workflow and has the features, tools that I want. I'm a hobbyist, but I'm particular in that I want to organize my images a certain way. That seems to limit the tools available.
I found C1 to's DAM capabilities to be functional and it works for me. I really like the RAW rendering it does, over LR, I find I need to do less to the images. I can use an external editor it seems, but I've not really delved into how well that works. The cost is the major mitigating factor for me, 300 is a very steep price.
Attended a CiP 11 webinar today. C1P 11 now has color masking, but no luminosity masking. It now has layers, but without blend modes. and they have added annotation capabilities.
I don't understand that decision set...adding annotations but no luminosity masking or layer blend modes.
I don't understand that decision set...adding annotations but no luminosity masking or layer blend modes.
There is no import option in Luminar right now, because its a pure image editor at this point. You select the file you want to edit from a file dialog. I'm doubtful that it would be able to read an aperture library to select an image, given the length of time that has transpired since apple announcing the EOL of Aperture.
I doubt that Macphun/Skylum will build a plugin/extension for Aperture or Photos to export images from those managed libraries into referenced folders. For those coming from Lr there will be a plugin to help move over all managed folder references, collections,...etc. But I doubt they will try to port side cars. If you want to keep any edited photos, likely you will need to export them as a tif and import both the raw and tif. Likely same basic process as On1 has done for folks in Lr to move to Photo RAW. I guess we will know more about this in Q1 2018.
I thought that was pretty cool, the annotations. Wish it was there was I had C1.
I suspect the utility is in the genesis of C1, which is in sessions and tethered work. Being able to let your underlings know what to do with a photo right as they're being shot would be pretty darn nice. Making notes to self would be handy, but it's more like critical when working with others.
And as for layers, I just guess at some point you have to decide if you are Lr/Aperture or Affinity Pro/Ps. You can keep bloating on features, but sometimes it makes sense to leave some stuff out. I'd bet a lot of studios would use Ps for some heavy lifting with composites and so on for say product and fashion photography with C1, so just some lightweight layering tools is enough. Kind like just including panos and HDR in Lr, and NOT layers, which are better done in Ps.
But heh, maybe they just finished color masking and not luminosity masking in time for release, but their suscribers will get the luminosity masking soon....
I loved the way Roger in the video kept whining about how tough it is to crunch all that raw data to do things like layers so that is why they don't have blend modes. I kept thinking that if Macphun has layers with blend modes in Luminar and Aurora....there is zero excuse at Phase One. And now even Lr has luminosity and color range masking. Indeed all Lr needs is layers with blend modes and many Lr users would not ever open Ps.
Which is precisely why it is not included in Lr.
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Thank you for taking the time to post this review. IMO, the best and most informative review yet that I have read.
I was planning to take the dive with Luminar but two things stopped me:
1. They promised a DAM in 2017 and failed to deliver; and,
2. They spammed me with with some crazy mac cleaner garbage. I concluded they must have a major cashflow problem if they must resort to selling their email list.
So, I decided to wait and see what others had to say. I am still using Aperture but long for a change.