Luminar from MacPhun

Anybody trying it out? I got it as during a pre-order discount, but have only just now had time to start to play with it. So far I'm finding lots to like about the actual editing, but am not happy about the file sizes when saving in their native format. 35mb RAW file from a EOS M5 with a Denoise layer and a Erase layer and some filters became over 300mb in size. Saving at a TIFF is a more normal TIFF size of ~100mb, but you lose the history and the layer info. And I still have the original RAW file. So you can end up with three or more versions lying around. The original RAW, the Luminar native with edits, and whatever format(s) you need for sharing/online.

Pros:

• easy editing
  
• layers
  
• plugins for many other tools
  
• sharing to online hosts/sites built in
  
• price
  

• large native file size
  
• sharing tools seem to lose EXIF info (did when I exported to SmugMug)
  

Are you still using Luminar? I’m interested to see if it would be worth the change for PS/LR. Can you post any before and afters?
thanks
Willard

Yes, I still use it, but LR is still my primary tool. My 20mb RAW files become 100mb+ files when I edit them in Luminar so I only use it for special edits. Kind of like I only go to Photoshop for special work.

So, the workflow is LR, plugin to Luminar, edit, back to LR. I like certain features like the layers. Oh, and the file size is big when I'm doing a native file format save. That keeps all the edit history. If I'm going back to LR then it is just a TIFF, but that is big too.

I'd have to dig through some files at home to find some I've done in both Luminar and LR. There are a bunch of editing videos on Youtube that can show you the basics too.

Correct me if I'm wrong. The file size gets bigger as you edit more in Luminar is because of the nature of non-destructive editing, no? It's the same as exporting Raw file from LR to PS for further post-processing, the file size will get larger as your layers build up. This can be solved by flattening all the layers, but to me, this totally defeats the purpose of non-destructive editing unless you're not thinking of re-editing the file in the future.

yaopey wrote in post #18326137
Correct me if I'm wrong. The file size gets bigger as you edit more in Luminar is because of the nature of non-destructive editing, no? It's the same as exporting Raw file from LR to PS for further post-processing, the file size will get larger as your layers build up. This can be solved by flattening all the layers, but to me, this totally defeats the purpose of non-destructive editing unless you're not thinking of re-editing the file in the future.

Yes this is true, but it seems that it is a little extreme in this case. Although I mostly just use LR, I now have a computer that can handle writing the edit data to XMP which lets you see just how much data Adobe stores for each edit. I have some images that have a lot of complex local brush work applied to them, and local brush seems to be the biggest method to get lots of data. Even so the largest xmp file on the computer is 16.5 MB, and of 36000+ xmp files only 113 are larger than 1 MB. 25300 of them, 70% of them are smaller than 10 KB! The xmp plus the original file are effectively the Adobe native format for RAW edits. This is somewhat different to requiring several hundred megabytes per edited image to save in the native format for Luminar, and you still have the original RAW file on top too.

Alan

Playing around with the latest version of Macphun's Luminar called Neptune.
Interesting software, worth taking a look if you haven't already

Scott Kelby released a 2 hour course on Luminar on KelbyOne.