

Here is a side-by-side using Luminar Flex’s black and white filter. Luminar Flex added richer colors in the sky and water. The right image is from Luminar Flex’s aerial improvement filter. The middle was a one-touch edit with another of Skylum’s tools, AirMagic plugin for drone photography. The left image is right out of a drone with difficult lighting.

Because the vast majority of casual photographers out there will likely use presets as they are delivered in the software, I used preset filter styles without applying different layers or blending modes. Let’s take a look and see how Luminar Flex did. The bottom line here is that while it is one-touch simple, you also have complete creative control.Īll this sounds great, in theory, but what really matters is how the end results look. In addition, you have complete control over how the filters are applied by changing blending modes. You can apply different style filters in different layers, blending them to get really impressive results. On the right side of the screen is a complete palate of image controls where you can manually adjust nearly every part of the image enhancement process. In addition, you have complete creative control. They are AI-driven to analyze your image and make smart adjustments to improve contrast, bring out details, enhance the sky and foliage, reduce haze, reduce color casts, simulate a polarizing filter to eliminate reflections and so on.

There are over 50 preset styles that can attack whatever issues you need to improve in your image. You can resize on export, apply additional sharpening, change color space, and resolution. If you are editing via the standalone app, you can export the image as a JPG, PNG, TIFF, JPEG-2000, Photoshop or PDF image. Once you get what you like, clicking the Apply button on the upper right applies the changes and returns you to your image editing software. To change styles, just click on a style window along the bottom. The selected style (along the bottom on the right) shows a slider where you can reduce the intensity of the style until you get something you like.

For this sample, I used the Warm Sunset style.
