Skylum Luminar Neo (2026) review

There are many software packages out there designed to help you organise and edit your photographs, so how do you differentiate yourself from the herd? How about by using AI as much as possible? That’s the direction Skylum’s Luminar Neo has taken, and I’ve taken a look at the results.

Skylum Luminar Neo: Pricing & plans

• A welcome one-off fee
• Subscription options for regular updates
• Keep all features you buy if you cancel

You can pick up Luminar Neo with a 7-day free trial by clicking here.

First the good news: it’s multi-platform, available for both Windows, Macs and mobile platforms (Android, iOS and Chrome). And here’s even better news: you’re not expected to rent this software; it’s a one-time purchase.

The desktop-only version (for either platform) will set you back just under €100. Choosing the ‘All Platforms’ options for around €130 gives you cross device editing, be it on desktop or mobile machines. That tier also allows you to upload your chosen shots to a web gallery.

Finally, the top level will allow you to edit your shots online (that feature isn’t yet ready for prime time), and incudes one year of ‘Luminar Prime’, for €160.

It’s worth focusing on that subscription for a little bit to explain something important: this is a true subscription. It’s like when you subscribe to a magazine: cancel your subscription, and you still have those issues that dropped through your letterbox. Here, subscribing to Luminar Prime unlocks new features over time, and these unlocked features remain yours once your cancel. This is a very important distinction. Once the first year is done, it will cost you around €5 a month or €60 a year to keep using it.

Between you and me, that’s what all subscriptions should be about. Anything else is just rentals.

Be aware that these prices fluctuate a lot and there might be better deals available when you check their website.

Skylum Luminar Neo: Interface

• Clear menus remove the guesswork when editing
• Easy to choose the right tool when you need it

The installation process offers you the option of adding a Luminar plugin to either Photoshop, Lightroom, or both, which would offer you all the tools inside a more familiar interface. I though it was important to mention, even though I won’t be looking into this option in this review.

Reviewing so many similar apps as I have, you end up recognising the interface instantly as most are incredibly similar. Sure the sidebar may be on the left instead of the right, but the tools and especially the icons used to activate them are immediately recognisable.

Not so with Luminar Neo, and that’s actually a very good thing. Rather than handing you a bunch of icons for you to use on your photos, the tools are divided into categories. And forget about icons: each section is clearly labelled. Take ‘Essentials’ for instance. That’s where your usual color correction is located, in such submenus as ‘Develop’, ’Enhance’, ‘color’ and ‘Detail’.

Working on a Landscape? Then you need to explore the ‘Landscape’ category, where you’ll find such tools as ‘Sky’, ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Water Enhancer’. Taken a photo of a person? ‘Portrait’ is where you need to go. ‘Professional’ is where some more advanced options are stored, and ‘Creative’ allows you to let loose and have a little more fun with your image manipulation. Clear, simple, and effective.

Skylum Luminar Neo: Tools

• Tools work extremely well
• Simple to make even complex changes to your photos

A good, intuitive, and easy to use interface is one thing, but if the tools aren’t up to scratch, it’s just a fancy wrapper full of useless features.

Thankfully, Luminar Neo is far from that.

Let’s start with Presets. Luminar Neo comes with a bunch of them, many of which are free. Those that aren’t can be identified with a small shopping trolley icon top right of their thumbnail. As always when it comes to presets, their results will vary but what I appreciated was the fact the software analyses your image and presents you with categories that should match what you’re working on.

For instance I brought up a photo of a sunrise, and was offered ‘sunsets’, ‘scenery’, and ‘easy landscapes’ menus for me to explore. Easy, simple, and of course you’re by no means forced to go down that selected road, but it’s nice when an app feels like it’s working with you.

How you work on an image is done with the help of sliders, which makes the process very simple to do and undo. If you’re more of a ‘type the value into a field’ kind of person, you’re free to do that too. You’re also able to work with multiple layers, letting you perform more complex effects on a photo with ease.

You can achieve very good results on your own that way, especially if you know what you’re doing. This is very similar to practically every other image manipulator out there. But what about all that AI I mentioned at the start? That’s where it gets more interesting.

Skylum Luminar Neo: AI

• Many AI-based tools to speed up workflows
• Doesn't feel like it's taking over the creative process

This is not generative AI. There are no text prompts or anything like that. This kind of AI is a collection of complex algorithms designed to facilitate a particular task. Think of them as a powered screwdriver as opposed to a manual one. If that’s still not your thing, you can recognise them in the sidebar as those tools are all labelled with a small orange ‘AI’ next to their name.

But I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand so quickly myself. Let’s take a look at a few examples, starting with ‘Sky’.

This is the big tentpole feature you might have seen in adverts as it offers the most striking alteration: Luminar Neo can analyse your image, identify the sky and replace it with another. You have 35 to choose from, with the option of acquiring others.

Replacing the sky can be seen as a simple process: just mask what’s blue, cut it out, and add a new sky behind it on a separate layer. But ‘Sky’ goes further, noticing where the sky is reflected somewhere in the image and applying the change there as well, even going as far as altering the colors of the rest of the photo so it blends in with its new sky.

The result can be fantastic. I have a photo of the Eiffel Tower I use to test such features out, as the complex metallic mesh can be a challenge to mask, and Luminar Neo passed with flying colors.

It’s not always perfect of course, but most of the time the results were impressive, and achieved in seconds whereas it would’ve taken me ages to do the same manually.

Speaking of masks, Luminar Neo doesn’t have a dedicated tool in its list, but that’s because it’s embedded into pretty much all the others: select a tool, and switch to its ‘Masking’ tab to affect the image solely on a section of your choice. AI does the selection based on your input. For instance I told it to select the human in a photo, and after a few seconds, the mask was perfectly done with no further input needed from me.

The Bokeh AI tool is also excellent, giving you control over where the effect should be thanks to an easy to understand interface where you drag a slider up or down to limit the extent of the effect.

Perhaps the tool I was most impressed by was the Light Depth Tool. Somehow, it does its best to recreate the 3D environment the photo was taken from, allowing you to alter the light in various ways, even placing it in between objects. It’s most impressive.

Skylum Luminar Neo: Extras

• Good selection of additional fine-tuning tools
• Pales in comparison to Lightroom for organizing photos

And that’s not all: there’s an ‘Extras’ section where you’ll find tools to help you restore old photographs, increase the resolution of an image, stitch shots together to create a panorama, and more.

Luminar Neo offers you a wealth of features to help you fine tune your images to perfection.

If there’s one thing I’m not that impressed by though, is its organisational feature. Sure you can find folders on your computer and add them to the left sidebar, or create albums and add photos to them, but to be honest, that kind of functionality has been available for years and has been surpassed by most of its competitors.

Put it this way: it’s no threat to Lightroom on that front and maybe that’s why you were given the option to insert Luminar's tools into Lightroom upon install: this software knows its limitations.

Should I buy Luminar Neo?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

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(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)

How I tested Skylum Luminar Neo

As always, when an app is compatible with multiple platforms, I choose the underdog (ie the Mac). I used a laptop running a high-end Apple Silicon chip for my testing, and my machine had no problem with the software.

I did notice that when using some AI tools, it can take a few seconds for the analysis to be done, and the computer’s thinking process was too subtle for me.

Yes there’s a small message beneath the image saying ‘Analysing’. But if you’re more focused on the sliders at the time, you could end up wondering why dragging them isn’t having any effect - until the AI work is done and your slider went to 100, blowing the image up. Thank goodness, like all modern image processing app, everything you do to a photo is non destructive.

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