Once a preset was applied, the Develop tool stopped working – or it appeared to. Worse, we had some serious operational issues on our test machine, a quad-core iMac with 16GB RAM, so not exactly underpowered. It’s a long way from the speed and intuitiveness of DxO’s control point adjustments, for example, or even a radial filter in Lightroom. The Relight AI tool proved a disappointment too, just making a fairly crude and obvious guess at where the foreground and background were and offering simple exposure controls to darken/lighten them.

They don’t even approach the scope and inspirational quality of the presets in the DxO Nik Collection (opens in new tab), for example, ON1 Photo RAW (opens in new tab) or Exposure X (opens in new tab). Luminar AI used AI to analyse your photos to suggest suitable Preset collections, and we assume Neo does the same, but the presets on offer just look like random variations of contrast and color tone. On the downside, Luminar Neo’s presets are distinctly uninspiring. (Image credit: Rod Lawton) (opens in new tab) It had to think about this image (left) for a short while, but then it magically removed the power lines (right) as if they were never there. The power line removal tool is rather remarkable. Luminar’s Face, Skin, Body AI and other portrait tools are the best there are, and worth the price alone if you regularly need to enhance portraits – and they are as subtle and sympathetic as you need them to be.

The dust removal works well too, though you may need to apply it a second time if you do a lot of contrast enhancement work that brings out some more that was missed the first time around. The new power line removal tool is uncannily good, even in city streets where the lines run across buildings and stonework.

The AI Sky Replacement tool never ceases to amaze, and for the most part it blends new skies with existing images with no visible edge effects or artefacts – though sometimes you can get a ‘glow’ effect around foreground objects. Some of Luminar Neo’s AI tools are quite remarkable. We threw everything at this image (obviously), but while Luminar's AI can do the heavy lifting with special effects, you still need a clear idea about the image you want to achieve (unlike us).

Skylum luminar ai