Luminar 4 vs Lightroom - BETTER in some ways, WORSE in others

I have a small confession to make I've been cheating no I have not committed adultery and no I did not get a cat but I have been using luminar for you ask anyone to name some photo editing software and most people's initial response would be either Lightroom or Photoshop and that's what I've been using for quite a few years as well and they do work extremely well but one thing that's always bugged me is the fact that there are two separate entities that you do your quick editing in Lightroom but if you want to do some more extreme editing you've then got to load everything into Photoshop to finish it off that in the fact that a little while ago Adobe caused quite a stir when they changed their pricing structure so now if you want to buy Lightroom you have to sign up to a 10 pound monthly subscription now luminar for by comparison costs about 80 pounds so 8 months worth of Adobe subscription would pay for luminar 4 but which one is better now on the face of it the luminar 4 interface does look fairly similar to Lightroom you've got all of your editing tabs up the side you've got a bunch of presets along the bottom which you can toggle on and off and then you've got all of your photos imported down the side in the editing tabs you'll find pretty much all the same changes that you can make in Lightroom your exposure your contrast your highlights or shadows your blacks your whites your color tones your saturation your luminance etc etc but there are also quite a few other tabs surrounding aí features and this is what's caelum have really been pushing with luminar for now what the AI is supposed to do is when you make changes with a slider it looks over your scene and targets specific areas that those changes should affect for example the AI structure is very similar in principle to clarity in Lightroom however I find when you ramp up clarity it can get really overpowering quite quickly and it seems to target absolutely everything with the AI structure however it seems to do a better job of defining edges and bringing out punch without destroying the smaller details in the process it is not uncommon for the light support suitors to airbrush their photos afterwards you know remove some of the blemishes on the face take out the bags under their eyes maybe you know remove some double chins and slim the people down white in the eyes whiten the teeth you know there's so many different things that people do but in Photoshop you have to do all of that manually luminar for however has its own section dedicated entirely to portrait enhancers if you change some of the portrait settings then the software uses the AI to look for faces within the frame and start making those changes and they do work extremely well and if you keep the changes rather modest then the effects do look quite flattering just don't go too overboard the only thing I did notice is that the software doesn't always recognize if there's more than one person in the scene I tried it on some couple shots and found that the software would pick the most prominent face and only edit that one so might not work for group photos but for individual shots it does do a really good job but in all honesty I'm not a really big poetry shooter I was personally more interested in the landscape tool you've got a golden hour which relights the scene to more warmer sunset shots there's also a sunrays tab which I was quite impressed with so you can drag and drop a starburst onto there but as you move it around the scene it recognizes if you're having your Sun Bursk and a half sticking out behind an object so if you've got it coming out from behind a building the sun rays wouldn't fall out in an even pattern so it tries to mimic more of a real life but the biggest tool that I was most drawn to is the sky replacement tool and this is exactly what it sounds like it's a tool that allows you to change the sky in a landscape photo now again this is something that you can do in Photoshop but it can take quite a lot of time and effort to do so with luminar however it's a simple case of clicking a drop-down box to select which sky you want to put in or you can load your own custom sky in there and then once you've selected the sky you want you can make alterations to it to get it to blend better into your images and it is a very powerful useful tool for taking what would be regularly quite mundane landscape photos and being able to just pack that extra bit of punch in there what I particularly like about this tool is the fact that it allows you to relight the scene after you've dropped a new sky in so if you have an original image that's got quite cold colors and then you drop in a very warm locking sky such as a sunset it's gonna be blindingly obvious that the two images aren't meant to be together but with the real lighting tool it warms up the original image to better match the sky but the problem with doing such drastic changes is that it can be glaringly obvious that it's a faked composite image so to try this out I did some blind tests not long after I got luminar for irie additude some of my older images and reposted them to Instagram but I made no mention that they were old images or that I'd done such major changes to them just to see if anyone actually noticed well if anyone did notice they didn't mention it in any comments incidentally that is the cheating that I was referring to at the start the biggest issue I found with the sky replacement tool however is that it doesn't work particularly well if you've got details in the sky so we're very flat overcast shots or a completely clear blue sky the programme does a pretty much faultless job of picking out what sky and what's not but if there's a lot of detail already in the sky the software just can't handle it you try and drop a replacement sky in and it doesn't replace all of it you end up with ghosting effects but when I ask I'll I'm about it they said it's a limitation of the software that it's not really designed for changing already interesting looking skies that it's more for in changing the dull bland skies so overall the AI features within lumen are fought do a fantastic job and take what could be say a half an hour or an hour long edit within Photoshop trying to relight an entire scene can be done in a couple of minutes with a few slider changes unfortunately it's not all sunshine and roses wildly really big edits can be done so much quicker in luminar for the more mundane stuff does take quite a bit longer I've noticed that overall luminar four is just much more sluggish than the Adobe software just importing and loading up the previews takes more time whenever you make the changes there's always quite a noticeable delay from you making the original change to the it coming up on your screen so the time to actually make the editing changes is generally longer but even the export times are substantially longer as well I tried to do is close the direct comparisons for these tests as I could but obviously the feature sets within lumen are are different to Lightroom but I took a test image and I did some basic tweaks you know change the contrast added a little bit of clarity adjusted the color temperature slightly and ran an export test Lightroom was able to export a finished image in about three-and-a-half seconds from me clicking export to the loading bar finished and me being able to start on the next image was it less than four seconds whereas luminar four took fifteen seconds but even with no edits at all I just imported a raw file and then exported it straight back out as a JPEG and Lightroom is able to do it in a little over two seconds whereas luminar took over nine now for the other day a couple of seconds extra here and there isn't gonna make much of a difference but if you are someone who is editing a big project of a few hundred images and every image is just a few edits of changing the contrast than the exposure just the basics tabs and trying to export all of those images then the the difference is going to be extremely noticeable now all of that is just software optimization but there are a few other little aspects about the usability that I hope they iron out as well first is that you have the ability to look back through your old projects all of the imported libraries are still accessible much like in Lightroom however it only displays the subfolder name not the complete route path which can make it quite difficult to distinguish one project from another if the folders have the same name the second is file export now with luminar for much like lightroom once you select export you're given a box full of different options where you can change a load of settings like you file format your resolution and more importantly where you want to save the file to now with Lightroom you can select a specific folder anywhere on your hard drive that you want to save the files to but there are a couple of easy preset options which is what I tend to use which is things like exporting into the same folder that you imported from and the ability to select a subfolder as well with luminar however they don't appear to have the same preset you have to export to a specific folder that you can change but it defaults to the last place you saved an image to every single time so I really hope that they do add the feature to export back to where you got it from in the first place so in conclusion - should you pick luminar 4 or Lightroom it really depends on the kind of editing you are going to be doing luminar 4 has the advantage in cost like I said once you've had Lightroom for more than eight months luminar falls paid for itself anyway if you're doing the big drastic changes to an image where all the AI features come into play then the overall editing time with luminar 4 is certainly quicker but if you're only doing occasional edits then that extra processing time probably doesn't offset and justify the additional cost of Lightroom but if you are editing a lot of images regularly then at least against the current luminar for version I would say Lightroom is definitely the better way to go because what you would spend in additional cost buying Lightroom you are going to save in time waiting for the thing but if you are interested in luminar 4 there is a link in the description down below but that's it for this video guys which one do you prefer Lightroom or luminar 4 leave your thoughts and comments in the Box down below while you're down there if you haven't already please consider hitting the subscribe button and there is also a link to my patreon account where you can go and support the channel get some exclusive behind-the-scenes content and some prize giveaways as well thank you so much for stopping by and hopefully I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Dave McKeegan

Views: 131,977

Keywords: luminar, luminar 4, ai structure, sky replacement, lightroom, photoshop, adobe, editing, photo editing, best photo editing software, photo editing software, portrait, portrait mode, portrait filter, quick edit, photography, photographer, camera, software, gear, tech, dave mckeegan, iso what you did there

Id: gbAakpVPKB8

Length: 11min 14sec (674 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020