What’s In A Sunset? Macphun Luminar Windows Beta

I’m always willing to try new software and when Macphun anounced a beta version for Windows of their popular program for Mac called Luminar. I thought, why not? Especially as one of my favourite plugins NIK Color Efex is no longer supported by Google.

Luminar is already a well established piece of software for the Mac, so it will be interesting to see how it shapes up in Windows. As Macphun say;

Faster, even more powerful and now featuring Accent, the world’s first AI-powered photo filter. Make photos beautiful in seconds with 1 slider. Luminar adapts to your photo style to make complex photo editing easy and joyful. Prepare to be astonished.

So the first thing to note, this is still a beta version, it’s nowhere as feature rich as the Mac version, but I can still get a flavour of how the software works.

The first thing I noticed, there are quite a few ready-made presets, one click looks, that could fit a variety of purposes.

In the photograph above I have selected a  preset called Artistic Copper Strong. It’s quite good for any photograph that features a sunset.

But you can also use filters to affect certain elements of a photograph, such as sharpness, colour, foreground, All in all there are about 65 filters you can use to affect your photograph

This one was developed using some of the filters from Luminar

Maybe it’s me, but during my first day of trialling Luminar I started gravitating to trying it out with sunsets, I seemed to be having better success with those. Photographs taken during the day didn’t seem to gain much advantage using Luminar. However it is early days, so I might change my mind.

Anyway, here’s a few photographs that I processed using Luminar

It’s far too early to draw a conclusion as to whether or not I would incorporate Luminar into my workflow. First of all the program is not complete and Macphun have a long way to go before the Windows version will equal the power of the Mac one. But it is still in beta.

At the moment, I have found it great with sunsets but I’m still indecisive as to ordinary photographs, personally I think NIK Color Efex does a better job.

Disclaimer: I’m not being paid to write this, nor am I getting free software, or anything like that. Macphun have made the beta free to download to all Windows users but the final version will be a paid model. I have included links to the Macphun Facebook page and their website in case anyone wishes to have a look at Luminar for themselves.

Here’s what others are saying about this weeks challenge

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