Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmarquez | Hacker News Reader

If you're thinking of pre-ordering Luminar 4, I'd strongly urge you to wait for actual reviews or try the demo yourself.

I purchased Luminar 3 and it was a sluggish, unstable mess, especially on Windows. They promised many features like a DAM, which was still missing features like the ability to edit metadata. But hey, it checked off the marketing checkbox, right?

They're prioritizing adding new features to generate publicity and hype while ignoring actual speed, stability, and usability.

Only the comment sections of photography websites actually comment on speed, example: https://www.dpreview.com/news/3286739394/luminar-4-available...

View on HN

Yup, listen to this guy. I have the top of the line MacBookPro and Luminar is not even barely usable even with nothing else running on it. The features are ok, but it's basically an unusable product.

I mean, if it's using DNN then you're going to be pretty much shit out of luck for perf unless your machine has an nvidia graphics card right?

If you’re using pretrained models then they should run ok. It’s the same reason why Tensorflow runs on phones: to run models, not necessarily to train models. DNNs take a lot of time to train.

TF runs at seconds-per-frame speeds on phones without dedicated accelerators.

Even inference is going to be slow when working on a 20 megapixel image. That's as much work as a 1220 sample batch at 128x128 resolution.

If they are CPU throttled why not advertise egpu or igpu as requirement?

I’m more curious if the results are as consistently good as advertised, as usually NN results are cherry picked for good ones.

Odd. Works relatively well on my 2014 MBP. (With LR running in the background, too)

I mean, it goes further to your point -try it out. It seems that it depends _very_ much on the use cases.

I've got Luminar 3 on a 27in Retina iMac and it performs adequately. Some of its "AI" filters are quite impressive. The Sky filter, for example, really finds the sky, and only the sky, in a picture and changes it. To get the same result in PhotoShop I'd have to spend half an hour making a carefully masked Curves layer.

OTOH, the absence of IPTC metadata editing means I can't use it to manage my image library, because I rely heavily on IPTC keywords.

Also, Luminar has a very strong "hands-off" attitude toward the file system and the original image files. So all the fancy improvements you make are held in the app's catalog. If you want an actual file containing your improved image you have to "Export" it. You can't use Luminar, as you could use Adobe Bridge, to move or copy image files from folder to folder.

As a general rule, never pre-order stuff and always wait for reviews.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com