Skylum Pro Bundle - Luminar 3 and Aurora HDR 2019 AI Powered Professional Image Editing Software Bundle | For Windows or Mac | Photo Enhancing & HDR Program

I am a YouTuber not a photographer. I create from photos thumbnail pictures for my videos. For that purpose Luminar 3 is great. You are not tied down to a subscription model, and it is a great editor to use. After some initial adjustments to my RAW file, I would send a 16-bit TIFF file to Luminar to finish it and give it my signature Woopnik look. Browsing your photos in thumbnail view is extremely fast. After adding photos to a Luminar Catalog, Luminar 3 has great shortcuts to find them. Sadly Luminar 3 has no keywords, no captions, no .xmp file support, no IPTC, no geo-tags, no versions or stacks and no smart albums.But there is one thing which I don’t like with version 3: As I bought version 3 the version 4 of Luminar was already ready to replace version 3. As I am writing this version 4 is released. So far I did not find a way to upgrade for free from version 3 to version 4. In my opinion that should be possible because I literally bought version 3 a couple of weeks before version 4 came out.Bottom line: Luminar 3 is a serious alternative to Lightroom.

If you are doing bracketed exposures and want HDR images then Aurora does some great things with your photos and the learning curve is not too big especially if you have used Lightroom before. Luminar has a nice erase feature which is easy to use and you can send an HDR photo from Aurora to Luminar and back a long as you don't crop it beforehand.This is the where the buggy part comes in. If you do something inadvertently that is not documented then Aurora will crash on you. And, while I thought of Luminar as the Lightroom replacement and Aurora more like Photoshop they don't work that way. In fact, you cannot view images in Luminar and then send to Aurora to make the HDR image.Recommended workflows are not well documented. Bugs are not published in FAQ's. This software is not ready for prime time. However, with Lightroom now subscription only, I decided to invest in something that will hopefully evolve over time and be a real replacement for Adobe.If you want to escape Adobe then this software does some really cool stuff. Just be prepared for a learning curve about the bugs and work-arounds.

Great product! Nice to have a non-web sourced program to work with. Very easy to use and great results. Anyone looking to have a downloadable program without monthly costs should check this one out!

When I tried to activate the software, I was stopped as having the wrong "email/key". I tried contacting support and after 3 days on what was suppose to be 24 hours, I received a message that I was 1 of 6000 for the week and they would do their best.Update: As I have a project that is on hold till this program is working, I have spend a second day trying to activate the program.

I'm hoping this is my 1st post on Luminar as Aurora seems to be working as advertised, but the problem with both of these programs is that there training videos are conflicting, as is help from their "experts." So far I've had to uninstall Luminar twice, and when I opened it and tried to create a gallery of photos from an external hard drive, which contained 170 GB of photos, it stalled at 43% after 10 minutes. I left it alone and after an hour it was still at 43%, so I quit the app. Second issue related to reinstalling Luminar is when I tried using the erase function (just 3 minor dust spots), the program stalled and remained stalled after 45 minutes. In asking for help I get conflicting information from the online videos, and the online videos are for OLDER versions of the software. I'll keep trying, but stay tuned.This is a new post from original above.Luminar tech support has been very responsive in resolving the problem of stalling. Here is what you MUST do in order not to have the same issue as I had. Note that I had to get this info from tech support as training videos and user manual are not clear. Conclusion: one must create a Luminar Catalog on your PCs internal hard drive FIRST with ZERO content, then other photos can be accessed and postprocessed on an external hard drive.

Both the Luminar and Aurora programs are difficult to maneuver through to find the type of editing you want to use. They should have a difficulty rating on these programs so that we know before we buy.

Just what I was looking for, easy to use and worth the upgrade.

I like these programs but the filters make everything so highly saturated