Skylum Does It Again

 It's that time of year -- announcements of new photo editing software -- and Skylum, publishers of Luminar AI and Aurora -- has just revealed a new product, again angering its customer base.

Luminar NEO logo

A few days ago, Skylum had zoom calls with its photographer-ambassadors to reveal the planned winter release of Luminar NEO, a new product that's not compatible with Luminar AI. When Luminar AI was introduced, existing Luminar users complained because AI dropped layers. Now, layers from Luminar 4 will be back in NEO, but existing users are again indignant over incompatibility and other issues if you believe the responses to the ambassadors' YouTube postings.

The Skylum announcement does not surprise me. My impression is that Skylum (formerly Macphun) is an innovative company with no long-range strategy for building a base of satisfied customers. An engineer has an idea for a new tool. They build a new app to sell around that idea, then move ahead next year with a new sales scheme for the marketing department. 

Every year there seems to be customer outrage over the abandonment of an app. Just look at the history of Snapheal, Tonality, Photolemur, Aurora HDR and the various iterations of Luminar. 

Snapheal and Tonality (once the best app for converting color images to black and white) were designed back when the company was Macphun, a Mac-only developer, and then later abandoned. Photolemur was an interesting little app for quickly improving an image. The company marketed it for a while, then quickly moved on to other products.

When HDR was the flavor of the year, the company developed Aurora HDR with the assistance of at least one photographer who was producing innovative results in HDR. It's probably still the best HDR product on the market, but there appears to have been no effort to incorporate AI in Aurora. The latest release remains Aurora HDR 2019.

And then there's Luminar, Luminar 2014, Luminar 2018, Luminar 4 and Luminar AI. Each introduced innovative ways to improve and speed up the editing of images. But each version had compatibility issues with the previous. Luminar Flex fell somewhere in there to work as a plugin to satisfy some of the complainants.

The real culprit for many of the problems in my opinion was Luminar's attempt to make the app a digital asset manager, too. That became a library with flashy images filling your screen but no way to store and access EXIF and IPTC data and no logical procedure for searching the library for an image. Plus, the library was a data hog on the hard drive.

Because of the cheap introductory price with return guarantee for current users, I'll buy Luminar NEO. But I will continue to use it as I use Luminar AI, as a plugin only. 

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