Luminar Neo Photo Restore

I like to be creative with my photography wherever I can and I added Luminar Neo to my post processing workflow last year because it had a number of features that I found useful. I especially like the AI features such as Sky Replacement and I've rescued a number of photographs that I'd never processed in the past because the sky wasn't interesting enough. Flawlessly dropping a new sky into the photograph with one click has given some of my old photographs previously languishing on my hard drive a new life in print and given me a new hobby of collecting skies on my mobile phone to add to the software.

Skylum annually update Luminar Neo with new or improved features every Autumn and Spring and I was excited enough by Youtube reviews of their new Light Depth and Photo Restore AI tools to pay for the "2025 Fall Update"

Family photographs are precious and at 72 years of age I was keen to restore what few photographs that I had of my grandparents and parents and pass them on to my children and grandchildren so they would understand where they came from and what life was like.  

I scanned this old photograph and put it through the new Photo Restore tool. The tool gives you the option to restore scratches alone, add colour or fully restore which does both. I chose fully restore on the photograph below of my grandparents, mother and her siblings taken in 1935 at New Brighton Beach on the Wirral Peninsula where I live. 

As you can see this monochrome photograph is in a very poor state with missing corners, tape residue across the top and dirty stains everywhere.

After just one mouse click and a 30 second wait the resulting photograph is below. A quite remarkable result from my first attempt. The photograph came out with a warm cast and a little saturated which was very easy to correct in Neo.

 Below is another family archive of my Father outside the family home in the late 1930's restored using the AI tool on fully restore setting. Again the white balance and saturation was corrected in Luminar Neo. Another example of the power of AI.

The tool is not flawless yet. With another photograph I found that running it through the tool twice gave me two different results and I chose to keep the better image. You can also find some strange facial expressions where strong blemishes have run through a face. This is the first release of this AI tool and Skylum may release improvements and bug fixes in the future as customer feedback come in. There is a discussion to be had about the pros and cons of AI technology in photography and video but in this AI tool it must me a force for good.

Disclaimer: I'm not an affiliate of Skylum and I'm not being paid for this post. 

I don't earn money in any way from this blog.

Luminar Neo and AI

 I've always enjoyed post processing my photography. I don't consider it a chore as it gives me the opportunity to add my own signature look to my images. 

My software of choice has changed over the past 15 years and I've moved away from Adobe products ever since they changed to a monthly subscription model because I don't photograph every month therefore I don't post process every month. 

Everyone should capture their photographs in RAW if possible as it's the digital equivalent of a film negative providing 100% of the pixel detail and information needed to process a good image. From the RAW file you can put your own stamp on an image through post processing and every photographer has their own workflow and resulting look. 

Post Adobe products, DXO Photolab 7 is my software of choice for cataloguing and RAW file processing. The image is then saved as a TIFF and finished off using Affinity Photo eventually being saved as a JPEG. Affinity Photo is excellent software as it's just as powerful as Adobe Photoshop but it can be owned outright for only £69. I also like to use Topaz products for noise reduction, sharpening etc. I've been very settled with this workflow for several years but I'm always on the lookout for something new.

Luminar Neo has been around for a few years now and I've taken a look a few times but I've always resisted buying it because the software has been constantly developing and improving but this year I've taken the plunge and I purchased the lifetime perpetual licence for £99. I've now joined the AI revolution and I'm very much enjoying using AI in my photography. 

I've not had the software for long enough to be familiar with all that it offers, but there are a small number of tools that I'm already finding are essential to my new workflow. 

Although Neo can process RAW files I still use Photolab 7, the image is then sent to Topaz Denoise and put through the "Clear" setting. I then use Luminar Neo "Supersharp" which is really excellent. Just one "Enhance" slider effortlessly adds contrast and vibrancy but the game changer is the "Sky Replacement" tool. It's not fool proof but it's worked on about 95% of the images that I've tried it on. The software comes with a small selection of sample skies, you can purchase more but I've been capturing skies on my mobile phone for weeks now which I've added to the sky library.

Luminar Neo's AI tools are now an excellent addition to my old workflow. All of the photographs below were sitting unused on my hard drive from 2012 because the skies were either blown out, grey or just plain. Four of the six skies are my own captured on my mobile phone and put through Denoise "Clear" to clean them up. The final two photographs have Neo supplied skies. The six photographs were all processed using the above workflow using only three of Neo's AI tools. There is far more to this extensive software still to learn.

Icelandic Waterfall

Lava Coastline Iceland

St. Pauls Cathedral

The Shard London

Lower Heswall Wirral

Liverpool Reflection

I'm now finding myself going through my back catalogue of images from 2012 onwards looking for images that I would never have considered usable and giving them a new lease of life using the AI tools with Luminar Neo. Some of the skies are a poor match but as my collection of captured skies grows the more natural the results will look.