After a year of drumming up anticipation and sneak peeks, Skylum today finally announced the availability of Luminar 3. The all-in-one imaging package is both an image editor and library, meaning it’s now a direct competitor to Adobe Lightroom.





Skylum says the new Library panel in Luminar 3 is the culmination of years of research, analysis, and interviews with photographers. The company aimed to optimize the system for speed and efficiency, responding to age-old complaints from photographers that “existing library options” (read: Lightroom) are “cumbersome, cluttered, or impractical.”

The Luminar 3 library is a customizable catalog featuring a photo wall with images from hard drives, connected devices, and cloud storage. Photos don’t need to be re-imported: all you need to do is select the folder for the contents to be added to the library.

Photos in the library are automatically organized by the date and time they were shot. You can also label and filter images by color and rate them by stars (out of 5).

Changes made in Luminar are made in real-time in the original folder on your computer.

Edits made to photos in Luminar 3 can also be synced to a selection of other photos.

Accent AI and AI Sky Enhancer are two features that also aid in analyzing and fixing issues across multiple photos for simultaneous editing.

Here’s a short announcement video introducing Luminar 3:

And here’s a longer 22-minute video that discusses everything that’s new in the update:

Luminar 3 will launch on December 18th as a free update for Luminar 2018 users. New users can now pre-order Luminar 3 at a special price of $59 — it’ll go back to the regular retail price of $69 after December 18th. You can also view a roadmap to see everything that’s currently planned for Luminar.