Luminar Neo free for PC, Mac

Luminar Neo is the successor of Luminar AI, providing more features, super helpful layer and mask systems, and allowing you to have more control over your creations. Still simple to use, thanks to all its presets, it is a shining light in the dark jungle of complex photo editing software.

What is Luminar Neo?

Luminar Neo is a universal photo editing application part of the Luminar suite developed by Skylum. It is also a plugin you can combine with Adobe software and Apple products. Luminar Neo stands as the more advanced version of the Luminar suite, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can thoroughly analyze your images and photo to make image editing easy and accessible while bringing stunning results.

What are the key features of Luminar Neo?

• Import and browse: The catalog section of Luminar Neo allows you to quickly import whole folders or specific photos. Note that if you delete images from your disk, it will also delete the version you uploaded to Luminar Neo, but deleting from Neo will only move it to a dedicated folder called Luminar Trash, while the original image will remain intact on your computer.
• Simplified Catalog management: You will find many folders and subfolders in the Catalog section of the app to easily manage all your images, including All Photos, Single Image Edits, Recently Added, Recently Edited (containing Today, Yesterday This Week, This Month), and Trash.
• Cross-software friendly: As you modify your images and photos, you can directly open them in other software like Aurora HDR, Adobe Photoshop, Elements, and Lightroom.
• Presets: What were called Templates in Luminar AI are now labeled as Presets. Presets are designed to suggest global sets of modifications based on the type and content of your image. As a result, it can save hours of fiddling around with sliders and achieve gorgeous results. Note that even if you apply the same preset to different images, Luminar Neo adapts the preset settings to give unique and convincing results.

• Masking: All the different elements of your images will be split into different categories, so you can select them to apply masking effects.
• Layers: You can use the layer system to apply any tool on any layer, in any order, and as many times as you like. Also, you can combine the mask and layer systems, modify previous editing steps, and even use raw files as layers.
• Share: Luminar Share App allows you to share images between your desktop and laptop seamlessly and share content to your social media channels. You can also save and modify your own Presets.
• Powerful engine: The new engine can support high bit depth per pixel, shadows with high dynamic range, and noise reduction for accurate and nuanced results.

• Supported file types and cameras: It is compatible with most cameras and common graphics formats, including PNG, JPEG, TIFF (8-bit and 16-bit), PSD, and HEIC. It also supports raw formats like CR2, CR3, NEF, ORF, RAF, ERF, ARW, RW2, DNG, PEF, PPM, and more.
• Sky AI: The Sky tool has been designed to work with flat and blown-out skies. As the AI identifies the sky's beginning and end and its reflection on water surfaces, it can seamlessly replace the whole sky and adapt the reflection to produce a stunning result.
• Sky Enhancer AI: Using this feature, you can add diverse objects and elements to your images, like birds, clouds, mountains, and lots more. It also provides sliders to set up the amount, the warmth, the relight, and the location.
• Atmosphere AI: You can realistically simulate weather effects like mist, fog, and haze using content-aware 2D to 3D depth reconstruction.
• Environmental improvements: You will find many tools to improve the environmental effects, like Sunrays (realistically emulates sun glow and sun rays), Golden Hour (mimics the golden light of sunset), Foliage Enhancer (enhances the colors of foliage and greenery), and more.

• Relight AI: It can emulate 3D light sources (flash), allowing you to relight the scene in post-production.
• Portrait: It groups Face AI, Skin AI,  Body AI, and High Key. Face AI allows you to retouch facial features. Skin AI controls the texture and smoothness of the skin to create refined portraits or totally modify the eyes of the subjects to make them richer and more expressive. Body AI can slim or add volume to a subject's torso. Finally, High Key can emulate main light source over-exposure effects to produce high-contrast images.
• Portrait Bokeh: As the different elements are detected and sorted based on their type and depth, Luminar Neo lets you gradually blur the different aspects of the background correctly based on their distance from the model. Also, you can alter the depth of field, brightness, and background temperature.
• Supercontrast: You can precisely adjust tonal contrasts and balance, which is super helpful for high-contrast scenes. You can change various settings manually, including Highlights Contrast, Highlights Balance, Midtones Contrast, Midtones Balance, Shadows Contrast, and Shadows Balance.
• Color Harmony: Color Harmony allows you to control color precisely and correct color tones through several tools, like Brilliance, Warmth, Split Color Warmth, Color Balance, and Color Contrast.

• Mood: Very handy to instantly change the whole color scheme of a photo.
• Accent AI: It performs all the usual modifications to automatically achieve a dozen of controls and substitute traditional settings like highlights, shadows, contrast, tone, saturation, exposure, details, and more. As a result, you get more naturally highlighted photos with boosted colors.
• Structure AI: It can add details by applying texture to your photos. Of course, as it recognizes the different elements, it won't apply textures to people but only to objects, grass, rocks, water, etc. 
• Composition: Still, thanks to element recognition, Composition can suggest the best way to crop your photos following the famous rule of thirds. Also, you can manually crop it, adjust the ratio, and the perspective, rotate and flip your image, and perform 3D transformations (vertical, horizontal, and change aspect).
• Image quality: You will find many features dedicated to enhancing the overall image quality, like Details (bring crystal-clear sharpness and details), Dramatic (add a powerful cinematic effect), Remove Powerlines (automatically remove power lines from your image), Remove Dust Spots (automatically remove spots on your image caused by dust on your lens or sensor), and lots more.

How to use Luminar Neo?

1. Open an image or select one in your Catalog.
2.  Click the Edit Tab.
3. Choose among the Essential Tools, Creative Tools, Portraits Tools, Professional Tools, or Presets sections.
4. Choose the desired tool in the list or select a preset.

There are many options and ways to take advantage of using Luminar Neo, so we recommend you browse the dedicated online guide.

Is it free?

We offer you the full-featured 7-day trial version. If you want to use Luminar Neo with no limits, you can purchase one of the different licenses.

Is Luminar Neo better than Luminar AI?

Luminar Neo is the successor of Luminar AI and provides all of its features but also allows you to take advantage of advanced ones:

• Modular engine: The modular engine of Luminar Neo makes it more efficient and is able to evenly balance the load while using various tools. Also, it makes it easier to update for future versions.
• New tools for pros: You will find many new tools to fix common problems photographers face, like Relight AI, Remove Powerlines, Remove Dust Spots, and Remove backgrounds.
• Better AI Masking: No matter whether you're a beginner or a pro, masking is always complex using most photo editing solutions, but that's another story on Luminar Neo. Indeed, as the AI has processed your image, it has automatically detected the different types of objects and applied tags to them (like Human, Sky, Water, Architecture, Transport, Flora, Man Made Ground, etc.) so that you only need to select the tags you want to apply masks to.
• Layers: Even though the layer system is not as complex as what Adobe Photoshop offers, it still brings the experience to the next level as it allows you to apply overlays, make collages, double exposure effects, and lots more.
• Share: Luminar Share App allows you to share images between your desktop computer and your phone.