Luminar Neo marks a year of creative upgrades with a special offer for you

Are you a photographer? If so, you should know about Luminar Neo, the full-featured photo editing app from Skylum that’s celebrating its first birthday.

The team behind it, based in war-torn Ukraine, has relentlessly improved the award-winning software over the past year. With a multitude of new features — including several AI-powered tools that make photo editing magically creative — Luminar Neo offers serious photographers total control over their images.

Skylum is marking Luminar Neo’s one-year anniversary with a fantastic opportunity for savings. Read on for more on the app’s new features and the “1+1” deal on offer.

Birthday offer on vastly updated Luminar Neo photo-editing app

After Luminar Neo‘s somewhat rocky launch in early 2022, the photo-editing app for Mac and PC enjoyed a great first year. The software really came into its own, with 29 updates and seven extensions that brought advanced functionality (along with a bunch of bug fixes).

And Skylum enthusiastically plans to keep developing Luminar Neo, even amid an ongoing war in the company’s home country. Clearly, Skylum’s already doing a lot right, as the software won Red Dot and TIPA awards.

Expanded functionality and 29 big software updates

Updates released between March 15, 2022, and this month have done a lot to perfect Luminar Neo. The 29 updates addressed glitches for smoother use, of course, but they also added key features — including seven new AI extensions to greatly expand users’ creative options.

7 new AI extensions in Luminar Neo

1. Magic Light. This extension enables you to “draw a street story with more lights,” as Skylum puts it. It lets you place visual accents, like highlighting street lamps and adding dramatic long-exposure rays to cars’ headlights. Intensity, size, glow and clearness sliders, plus masking options, add to your control.
2. Supersharp. This extension refines the blur on an object’s outlines caused by movement, missed focus or a shaky camera. It logically stabilizes the whole photo. The neural network at its core analyzes depth, perspective and the environment of the photo, resulting in a crisp and sharp image.
3. Focus Stacking. You can make every part of your photo crisp by stacking up to 100 images with different depths of field. The Focus Stacking extension will align, crop and balance them automatically. The AI algorithm chooses the parts with the best focus across all photos and corrects lens and chromatic aberrations in RAW files.
4. Upscale. This extension lets you upscale a photo up to six times and enhance image resolution in a natural way with AI. You can crop an interesting frame from a panoramic landscape, get high-quality zoom-ins of wildlife, improve macro shots, enhance old photos, prepare images for printing and more.
5. Background Removal. This one will automatically remove the background behind one or multiple subjects in your photo. The neural network in Background Removal AI can detect the main subject and up to nine types of other elements in your photo, and you can select which ones to keep. Plus, you can use a refinement brush to fix any imperfections.
6. Noiseless. Luminar Neo’s Noiseless AI gets rid of the noise in images while keeping all details intact. Unlike many other denoise tools, it does not smooth out your image. It recovers all the details and retains a natural look for the photo. It works well with both with RAW and JPEG files.

Plus, updates to Mask AI

Now you can select a human in your photo and automatically remove the background behind them — no tedious editing required. In fact, the powerful neural network behind Luminar Neo’s Mask AI detects up to nine separate elements in a photo: people, skies, architecture, transportation, water, flora, mountains, natural ground and artificial ground.

The tool lets you automatically mask the desired area with just one click, and easily copy and paste mask adjustments. Plus, you can enjoy the manual Gradient and Radial masks, as well as the new interface in the Masking tab.

You can easily achieve precise selections, utilize a smart refinement brush, and save the portrait as a separate PNG file. (Find the feature in Masking options.)

Other highlights amid hundreds of new features and improvements

Luminar Neo is packed with features, but a handy interactive onboarding guide will show you how to use the app to edit sample images. With it, you can quickly learn where to find all the software’s tools and how to edit photos in specific genres.

New features include:

• The AI-powered For This Photo feature in Luminar Neo’s innovative Sky AI tool will recommend a sky that works well with your photo. And in Presets, it will additionally recommend one Preset collection available on the Luminar Marketplace for you to discover and experiment with.
• You can select your favorite tools and have them at your fingertips whenever you need them. Simply right-click a tool you like and add it to your favorites. You’ll always see your favorites at the top of the list for every photo you edit.
• The much-requested Dodge & Burn tool offers extra control over a photo’s exposure, letting you tweak areas of an image as you would in a darkroom.
• Luminar artists can use the long-anticipated Clone tool in their editing.
• User interface refinements include the addition of a convenient selection preview on hover in the Catalog; a new look for headers in the Catalog, Presets and Edits tabs; and a useful grid in the Lens Distortion slider in the Optics tool.
• Now you can easily create a duplicate Layer — just use the shortcut D.
• The Layers workflow added support for RAW files and other new capabilities. Now you can reorder Layers as you wish. Plus, on added Layers, you can use Fit, Fill, and Stretch in Image mapping and retain the desired proportions. Double-click the slider button to reset the Layer opacity to the default setting.
• Extensions are also improving. Luminar Neo’s HDR Merge Extension now gives results with reduced chromatic aberrations.
• The app also added support for new cameras, including the Canon EOS R6 Mark II, Sony A7R V, Olympus OM-1, Panasonic Lumix DC-GH6, Canon EOS R3, Fujifilm X-T5, Fujifilm X-H2, Nikon Z30, OM Digital OM-5 and Hasselblad X2D 100c.

Luminar Neo: Buy 1, get 1 (year) free offer

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Luminar Neo — and all the achievements described above — Skylum is offering a special “1+1” deal.

It’s a buy one, get one free opportunity for photographers who want great editing software plus extras. They can buy a plan and get a second year free, and more. Plus, you can use coupon code CultOfMac10 at checkout and get an additional 10% off your purchase.

The offer is available through February 27, 2028. Read more about the deal.

Where to buy: Luminar Neo