Skylum.com is offering Luminar 3 Professional Photo Editing Software (PC or Mac Digital Download) for Free when you follow the steps below.
Steps:
Click here and fill out your name and email address
You will receive your product key and the download link at the email you provided.
Use the link you received to download Skylum Luminar 3 for PC or Mac.
Once installation is complete, enter in the product key you received to activate the full version.
any chance on the PC link?
thank you kindly
Thanks, I did have a quick look for the PC link but got called away from my desk before I found it.
@dm01: For those wanting the offline windows installer, I found this link on the skylum forums dated 9 days ago….. https://downloads.skylum.com/luminar/win/Luminar3_Setup_offl…
they didn't send me any activation code all i got is to subscribe them any one has this problem ?
My code was sent through straight away.
Did you get the code?
where do i fill out my name and email address?
the 'click here' link isn't there
Nice - will start learning more professional photo editing when my new Xiaomi Mi10 gets here!
Is it any good?
Its free, try it out :)
It's not bad. And it's free.
I bought it when it came out last year and used it up until recently. It's not worth the money I paid for it, but for free it's pretty good. It produces some nice results but crashes constantly, freezes often and takes forever to preview and export files. My PC is definitely not under specced either.
My personal experience hasn't been the best for this software. It can be painfully slow even on my 2.9GHz i7, 32gb RAM and 1080 ti.
You can check their social media page and see what others have to say.
But since it's free, why not?
Thanks, will give it a miss. ON1 is pain free for me.
Missing Lightroom standalone, still couldn't find any alternative to that
It's much better on Mac. I've got it on both platforms and the PC version feels a bit like an under study
Its still live? I did not receive the activation code?
I just wanted to jump on and say I use Luminar 3 quite a bit as a lightroom alternative.
Its actually quite good, though as one other poster said it can be slow at times, but it has a bunch of options lightroom and darktable dont have, an intuitive interface and delivers great results.
++ recommended.
Installed and activated, this will be a short review.
If you have photoshop, then this is not needed at all. Not very lightweight.
This is a dumbed down version of photoshop that focuses on photos and photos only, not suitable for raster objects, layers etc. Applying pre-determined adjustment directions. So it feels like applying filters but actually applying a series of setting adjustments that you can adjust the intensity as a whole. Not many options to configure but gets the job done.
As to the manual adjustments you get the normal RAW adjustments, and that's it.
What I really don't like is how it aims to be a representation of your library, with a very similar design style to iTunes. Based on my testing on Windows it is not updated in real time to reflect folder contents.
Overall recommendable if you don't want to invest too much time into studying photo editing, gets the job done quickly.
Would be perfect if they have a ARM version to go with the licence because this feels very app-ish and should cross platform cuz that's where their audience is. For me as a PC user this would've been perfect if it is very lightweight because I'm sure a lot of people are looking for something that offers more then the editing options in windows image viewer and smaller than photoshop to do a quick edit on a photo. However the speed is not great.
I don't think this was meant to be a Photoshop alternative. It's meant to compete with Lightroom…
yeah it hit me afterwards, I'm brain dead
Perhaps - but one of the main benefits I find with Lightroom beyond the photo editing component is the Library module (i.e. maintaining my library of > 100K images) - does Luminar (or ON1) or anything else do this well?
I've considered moving from Lightroom - but my research at the time I looked last didn't turn up any viable alternatives for anything which both edited the images AND also did all the other useful things (powerful library management, output options (web galleries, programable export options, publishing services, etc)
Lightroom's library module is definitely the feature that's hardest to replace when moving away from Lightroom. For many years I used LR at home and Capture One at work, but I stopped upgrading LR when they went subscription only.
Now I'm Capture One all the way, and it's better than Lightroom in every possible way (that I use at least), but doesn't have a library module. That's it's Achille's heel. It's a big pain in the ass as my image library is also 100k+, but it's forcing me to revisit shooting I haven't looked at in years and reorganise everything, which was long overdue anyway.
But yes, if you're heavily reliant on LR's library features there's still not a great alternative IMO.
@mickeyjuiceman: I'm leaving my image library's folder structure intact, renaming some shoots to have more descriptive filenames (where necessary - my naming scheme has been pretty robust for a while now), and then adding them to one of several C1 catalogues depending on type of shooting (travel, general, work etc).
So I can still use my LR catalogue to find stuff if need be, but any new processing (and any new shooting) is through C1 now.
In C1 I'm just organising things in a collection/folder hierarchy, and once everything is transferred across, I'll retire LR and send Adobe a farewell card.
@dm01: Fair. I'm looking for a proper cataloging system to replace LR, at which point LR can just go away. I'm only shooting JPG these days, so so do very little post anyway.
"This is a dumbed down version of photoshop that focuses on photos and photos only"
So.. more like Lightroom?
@steste "not suitable for layers etc."
Have you actually used the software? Layers was the big selling point over Lightroom.
Upgrade to version 4 is AU$75 for a limited time, https://skylum.com/l/luminar-earth-day-upgrade . Apparently the usual price is $119
Not sure if the free version 3 is eligible for the upgrade, I'd assume it is.
good.
I was a beta tester for version 3
it's not too shabby
Luminar 3 is actually a really well matured stable software for photo editing. Well worth when it was a paid account.
thnx
I really like Luminar 3 and get some really nice results out of it. Main issue I've found is that the chromatic abberation and denoising is mediocre but the rest of it is great. Luminar 4 is quite streamlined and seems to focus more on AI whilst removing control from the user which is why I haven't jumped across.
Thanks OP. Just downloaded the software. See below link for a brief of some of the things you can do with this software, truly amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKf9bFRSNIk
hmmm i do some novice photo editing and usually use lightroom and I haven't heard of this software, but, a quick few google searches and it seems like this one competes directly with LR and is pretty much the alternative. Good spot OP.
Hi OP, I think I am the only one who cannot install Luminar 3, I clicked on the exe. file as an Administrator and nothing happened. I tried to reboot my computer and try it again, but it still cannot install.
Yes I did, still nothing ;(
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Thanks OP.
Just for reference - the speed and crashing issues that are mentioned here refer to the Windows version only. I have an iMac and a pretty well spec'd PC and it runs superbly on the Mac.
The main strength of this software is the machine learning algorithms they employ to tweak your photos, which makes it easier for someone who's not familiar with curves, channels, white and black points and such. I'm a professional photographer and I use this software fairly regularly alongside Lightroom and Photoshop. It's not a replacement for either, but a great additional tool to have.
I have a friend who has a large photo library (his own pics) and got Luminar 3 from Humble Bundle a few months back. It had real trouble handling his image library and would crash on every startup, and the only way to fix this (after much tone with tech support) was to point it to a subset of his library with far fewer pics. He has thousands of pics though, possibly close to 10,000.
I personally didn't find it add intuitive as Lightroom. I am giving Affinity Photo a go and it's currently 50% off, but it's not a light room substitute.
I am giving Affinity Photo a go and it's currently 50% off, but it's not a light room substitute.
It's not meant to be - it's marketed as a Photoshop alternative, which it does very well.
I think people really struggle with the concept of Photoshop and Lightroom being two very different products for different needs…
I didn't say it was meant to be an alternative to lightroom, but there is a cross over in some of it's functions, which is why I mentioned Affinity Photo, especially since it's currently $38.
Looks expired unfortunately. Link now goes to 60 day trial for Luminar 4.
Suggestions for free alternatives?
![[PC, Mac] Free Luminar 3 Professional Photo Editing Software (Digital Download) @ Skylum](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/n/96/532096.jpg?h=4d42ad07)
FYI for anyone wondering, current version is Luminar 4, released last November - Luminary's 3 is the 2018 release.
EDIT: The full .dmg of the Luminar 3 Mac package can be downloaded directly here
The file linked to in the email sent out is just an installer - it'll download and install L3 for you, but should you want or need to reinstall (or install onto another computer), it's easier just to have the full .dmg saved somewhere.