Hey Everyone!  I hope everyone's new year is starting out good.  In this blog post I want to talk about the new Luminar 3 with Libraries and if it is an alternative to Lightroom.  I have been using Lightroom from almost the beginning of the software and watched as it has turned into the main photo editing and digital asset manager for almost everyone.  It is the true standard that all other softwares are compared to.  When it started being a subscription service, many did not like the monthly payment scheme.  I didn't mind too much because it was the price of a couple of Big Mac meals, and I remember the price of a full Photoshop or Lightroom for that matter.  Photoshop was $600-$800, and Lightroom was $150.  So the $120 a year was a small price to pay to get the most current versions of both.  But others didn't like this at all.  There were some other contenders at the time like Corral and Aperture, but they didn't have the power of Lightroom and Photoshop.  Lightroom and Adobe have had a monopoly on the image editing software business.  But new contenders are starting to come in, like Capture One and Luminar with DAM (digital asset managers) of their own, giving Lightroom a little cause for concern.  I currently have used Capture One 12 on a trial basis and did like what I got with it.  If I were a studio portrait shooter, it would be the perfect choice for me.  Its tethering capabilities are unmatched as far as I'm concerned, and its RAW conversions are beautiful.  You can see my last blog here Capture One 12 first look  luminar_sq_logo_500

I purchased Luminar last year and have been experimenting with it as a kind of go-between of Lightroom and Photoshop.  I use it as a plugin, and it works great with beautiful colors and tools that are not easily done with Lightroom or Photoshop.  And I'm all about easy.  But how does it work as a digital asset manager?

First, let me say that it is not as advanced as Lightroom as an asset manager.  You can rate your photographs and use the star system.  You can organize from within Luminar and from the outside of Luminar which can be confusing.  You basically tell Luminar what folder you're going to put photographs in, and it will look there.  It does keep a catalog with all of your changes much like Lightroom does, but not as robust as Lightroom, which can be good or bad. To me Lightroom has become a sluggish program over the years, and with the more features they put into it, the slower it becomes.  But as many of you, I have been using Lightroom for so long that almost all of my photographs are in a Lightroom catalog, and to switch to a new system now isn't really where I want to go.  But as a photo editor I think that Luminar is almost as good, and better at some things, as Lightroom is.

Who do I think that Luminar 3 is for?  I think that Luminar 3 is for new photographers who are just getting started and don't have large Lightroom catalogs already established, for people who are still using Bridge or some Finder or Windows Explorer based program.  I believe that in the future Luminar will make its digital asset manager better and better and at some point I will say now is the time to move, but now is not that time for me.  I will still use it as a plugin to Lightroom and as a go-between of Lightroom and Photoshop.  I recently went on a photo outing, and all of the photos I shot I brought into Lightroom, did my culling thing, and for the winners I did a quick edit and then sent them to Luminar to really make them look the way I wanted.  It worked out great for me, and I'll bet it could for you too.  On my travel laptop, a MacBook Air, I have taken Lightroom off of the computer and only use Luminar 3.  When I travel I only want to process a few photos and then send them to Instagram or Facebook, and the rest I can upload into Lightroom when I get home.  You can purchase it for $69, so it's fairly inexpensive.  Give it a try.  I believe after a while you will enjoy it as I do.  Here is a link to a podcast from The Digital Story that talks about Luminar 3.

The Digital Story Luminar 3 with Libraries Podcast