This image was taken as a bracketed HDR set at approximately 3pm on the 22nd of February 2025 and developed with Luminar Neo!
Somewhere Different
Gill and I were on one of our caravanning breaks at Lady Margaret’s Park Caravan Club site near Chirk. It was our second visit of this winter, and we had already visited the usual places a few months ago, so we were looking for a somewhere different.
Despite having suffered a debilitating stroke, Gill has an incredible memory of places we’ve been to decades ago, and The Mere at Ellesmere was yet another location she summoned that I had no recollection of!
It’s a pleasant walk around the mere with a some interesting shoreside foreground to frame shots across the water.
I considered the featured image here to be the most promising capture of the day.
On1 Photo RAW Problems – again!
Despite my recent enthusiasm for returning to On1, Photo RAW 2025 became unusable after the late December update. It developed a huge appetite for RAM. My MacBook Pro 2021 handled this very competently up to around 50GB using swap files to assist the 16GB of actual RAM, but the program wanted more and more until it hung or quit.
I’m really disappointed, because I loved the software, but it has let me down far too often!
Luminar Neo
I was reluctant to try Luminar Neo for a number of reasons. One being that I’d had poor support with Luminar AI a few years ago (which made me switch to On1 again), and the other being the sales format of setting an unrealistically high price and applying a huge discount.
I’d prefer more straightforward certainty.
In reality, the program subscription was inexpensive. Being a former customer with Luminar 4 and AI, I paid less than £50 for a year’s subscription, which I am happy with.
Using Luminar Neo
Using Luminar Neo is quite different than On1 Photo RAW. It uses far less resources, which means sliders are very responsive, work more or less in real time and are easy to adjust incrementally.
With Photo RAW, there was always some resistance and delay.
Most of the tools in Neo are familiar to me from previous Luminar versions, and I like the simplicity of the workflow, with all the tools in headed sections on the right. Unlike Luminar AI, all the tools can be used again and again and are stacked in the “edits” history section.
Edits Stack
You can go back down the stack of edits and readjust the settings, but all of the edits further up the stack aren’t represented in your preview image, which is a little annoying. But it’s a small price to pay for having otherwise functional and coherent software that runs smoothly.
I wish I could name them
You tend to use the “Develop” tool over and over, but you can’t name the edits like you can in Photo RAW and Pixelmator.
Being able to name edits would be a big advantage for me.
Layers
In Neo, we now have layers again, having previously had them in 4 and lost them in AI. Being able to merge them has only just been introduced in 2025 though.
HDR and More
Neo now incorporates all the technology that went into Aurora HDR, which was one of the best HDR processing applications available. Gone are all the various slider adjustments though; it’s all done automatically and works very well.
Neo also has panorama stitching, focus stacking, and generative AI tools included.
Compared to On1 Photo RAW
Photo RAW is further along the development road in terms of functionality and features. It is much further behind in reliability and speed of use though.
I just want things to work!
So far, Luminar Neo has been far more stable and reliable than On1 Photo RAW.
And unlike Pixelmator Pro, the exported output files look like the preview.
Still Learning
I had developed a few more images before this one in order to learn and gain confidence with the software. I might get round to publishing one or two of those soon. But Gill liked this one, so here it is.
Comments welcome below:
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