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.
