Review of Luminar

A clarification first: Skylum Luminar does not undress photographs and offers no feature of that kind. It is an SFW photo editor for macOS and Windows, with a mobile app and a web version announced for autumn 2026, built around portrait retouching and landscapes.

Lawful use only with your own photos, or photos of adults who have given explicit consent. Responsible AI (in Spanish).

Every figure above comes from the provider’s own public pages on the date of the test. Prices change without notice, and the date is what makes the number readable.

Privacy and security (30%)

Being a desktop application, the basic editing flow happens on the user's own machine, with no need to upload photographs to a website; that is a favourable privacy profile.

Output quality (25%)

On its own ground — portraits, landscapes, restoration and RAW editing — the result is professional: convincing sky replacement, skin smoothing and non-destructive adjustments.

Price and free tier (20%)

There is no free tier and no documented trial on the page consulted: entry is a one-off licence with a 30-day guarantee as the safety net.

Speed (15%)

Processing is local and depends on the machine: on a recent laptop the AI tools took seconds per photograph in our session, and batch processing scales with the hardware.

Support and transparency (10%)

Skylum is an established company with years behind it, extensive documentation, formal support and a published refund policy: the transparency profile is the strongest in this group.

The five weights are fixed across the whole catalogue and are set out in how we review. A tool is never marked against a rival, only against the same scale.

On 22/08/2026 the desk read the provider’s publicly visible pricing, payment and help pages, recorded every amount and limit into the table above, and ran the service through the same standardised scenarios used across the catalogue: well-lit frontal photographs at medium and high resolution, taken from our own test set.

What we record is what the provider states in public and what the interface does in front of us. On the free tier the first line we check is what the provider offers without payment, and here that reads: an sfw desktop photo editor for macos and windows, with a mobile app.

What we do not do: we never test these tools on photographs of third parties, we publish no results from such attempts if they reach us, and we do not estimate figures the provider leaves unpublished. An absence is recorded as an absence, which lowers the mark on the criterion concerned rather than being filled in with a guess.

Prices and limits change without notice. The date beside every figure is what makes it readable, and the desk re-checks the catalogue on a rolling basis — the next verification date will replace the one above.

• Rombach et al., High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models — The diffusion inpainting this class of tool is built on.
• Kirillov et al., Segment Anything — The segmentation approach behind automatic garment masks.
• Diario Oficial de la Federación, Ley Olimpia reforms — The Mexican text on dissemination of intimate content, real or simulated, without consent.
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the AI Act — Article 50 sets the disclosure duty for synthetic content.
• StopNCII.org — The international removal route for non-consensual intimate images.
• TAKE IT DOWN Act, S.146 — The United States takedown obligation, relevant where a provider is hosted there.

Prices, limits and retention come from the provider’s own public pages on the date of the test. Technical and legal claims rest on the published work above. Everything else is what the desk observed in its standardised scenarios.