Who Should't Buy Luminar AI (and who should)

i've been doing videos on luminar ai for a while now and one of the things i've noticed in the comments are there a lot of people who want to know how to do things they can't find to do inside of luminar ai and that's because luminar ai doesn't do those things so if you're wanting something that the tool doesn't do i'm going to help you out i'm going to give you five reasons for people who should not buy luminar ai hi my name is william beam i'm a photographer just like you why don't we go ahead and take a look inside the first thing i want to talk about is the fact that there are no selections inside of luminar ai so let's bring up a photograph here and let's say i want to cut this person out and put her on another background can't do it there's not a single tool over here we go into edit we can go under the tools nothing over here says selection you have some local adjustments and masks but that presents a problem of its own but basically if you need on a regular basis to go in and cut out subjects and put them into another photograph another background luminar ai doesn't do it you're going to need photoshop for that number two there are no layers inside of luminar ai luminar 4 and previous versions had layers skylem and the developers made a decision with luminar ai that they would not use layers that's upset quite a few people their strategy and their workflow require layers there are other tools that don't have layers lightroom for example does not use layers doesn't mean you can't make a nice photograph without layers but if you absolutely insist on layers avoid luminar ai it's not the tool for you if you need fine edge masking we mentioned there's no selections in here so maybe you're thinking all right i can just build a mask no not really a detailed one so let me give you an example we'll go over here to local masking we'll go on basic and a lot of the tools also have masks built into them and there's three kinds of masks that you have there's a paint mask there's a radial mask and there's a gradient mask none of these are meant for fine tuning so for example if i want to come over here with a paint mask i can choose my radius and you see those two circles well the softness is what the inner circle is so as i move this over i can make a very hard edge brush and let's say that i want to mask this person out well i can take the eraser i can maybe make a bigger mask and it's very easy to get the outside edges and just kind of remove that the problem comes when i need to get over here into fine detail and you end up with a very very small brush trying to zoom in and do masking almost on a pixel level to say i'm cutting out everything in the background and then you've got to worry like did i cut out something that's on the skin of the person or part of the subject that you're after or did i get the background and then you can go wipe out all the other stuff it'll be very painstaking very detailed tedious and time consuming if you had photoshop you could go in open the thing up click a selection brush and then click select subject and you're done it's much faster in photoshop than it is in luminar ai and it's not really supposed to happen inside of luminar ai so if you're looking for fine edge masking or like the range mask inside of lightroom it doesn't exist here so if that's what you need don't buy luminar ai something else that people are thinking is they're going to get rid of their adobe subscription so they don't have lightroom they don't have photoshop and they don't pay 10 a month to get it but then you find out that managing photos inside of luminar ai is not quite as robust look there's places you can put your photos in here and you can build little folders you can build albums and that's it if you need to manage metadata if you need to update keywords and tags if you need to manage other metadata inside of your photograph there's simply nothing here for you to use it does not manage your metadata so don't have the expectation that it will if that's something you need and i agree that most photographers do need that to keep organized then don't buy luminar ai at least not for that purpose and finally there are no complex edits so what do i mean by complex edits basically if you've got this long arcane very detailed craftsman-like technique that you use in photoshop and you want to replicate it here that's not what this tool is for this is a tool for people to get in and get out and there are wonderful tools inside of luminar ai that can do a lot of the things that perhaps you used to do but they do it in a different way and if you like the results that's great if you like the process then luminar ai isn't really for you the process inside of luminar ai really starts off with templates and taking a look at what's built in is kind of like recipes for you you can also build your own templates and get your own looks there are a number of wonderful tools that you can use but if you're someone who has this process laid out that you're going to go through and you're going to put in eyelashes on somebody then this is not the tool for you it wasn't designed to work that way here's a bonus for you don't buy luminar ai if you have not looked at the minimum requirements one of the things i've heard are some complaints about performance and then when i go find out they don't have a current system or they don't have a system that meets the minimum requirements of luminar ai keep in mind minimum requirements means minimum performance it does take a bit more horsepower than luminar 4. so if you've got an older system and you're not thinking about upgrading sometime check out the system requirements for luminar ai it is not the fault of the program if you don't have a computer that's capable of running it so who should get luminar ai well really that comes down to people who need to prepare a photograph to look nice and use it somewhere it's not a place where you go in and do retouching where you're going to add eyelashes to somebody or you're going to manipulate them too much there's a nice little feature in here with body ai but as far as individual warping of features on somebody or some subject that's not in here this is something where you can very quickly and very easily make a beautiful photograph but the manipulation that you're used to in photoshop and other tools simply doesn't exist here i think luminar ai is a wonderful tool to use as a plugin with lightroom and photoshop if you need to work with other plugins this doesn't really host other plugins but photoshop and lightroom do so you can combine this with other tools that you like but it's not the platform to host them so that's just a quick look at who shouldn't buy luminar ai if you really need those features if you're disappointed if it doesn't have them then i'd recommend you don't buy it all right that's my quick list of who shouldn't buy luminar ai if this helped you out or you like it please go ahead click like that tells youtube we did something right and maybe they'll share it with a few more people i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: William Beem Photography

Views: 12,779

Keywords: Who Should't Buy Luminar AI, Before you buy luminar ai, luminar ai, luminar ai features, luminar ai missing features, william beem photography, photoshop alternatives, lightroom alternative

Id: jpVp7ZNmf7w

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021