Aug 05
If you use Luminar as a standalone application, you probably know it's non-destructive: you can always change your edits later on as everything you do to your image is just metadata stored in your Luminar library.
To send an image over the Photoshop as a Smart object from within Lightroom, you simply choose the Photo > Edit in > Open as Smart Object command.
However, if you run Luminar as a Lightroom plug-in, then the edits you do inside of Luminar are baked into the pixels when the file is returned to Lightroom. If you ever want to change a part of your Luminar edit, you’ll have to start over from scratch. This is the same with almost every other Lightroom plug-in, by the way.
In Photoshop, Smart Filters can be re-edited by double-clicking on the filter’s name in the Layers panel.
However, there is an alternative workflow that lets you use Luminar as a plug-in while maintaining the option of revisiting your edits. The workflow consists of sending your file from Lightroom over to Photoshop as a Smart Object and then run Luminar inside of Photoshop as a Smart filter. In this video, I cover the entire workflow, including how to re-edit your initial edit, and I throw in a couple of extra advantages of the Smart filter workflow as well.
For this image, I initially forgot to match the blur of the new sky I put into the blur of the horizon line. Thanks to the Smart Filter workflow, I could revisit only that setting without having to redo the entire edit.
By the way, this also works if you only use Photoshop. In that case, you either have to open your image as a Smart object from Camera Raw by shift-clicking on the Open button in Camera Raw or, if you already have a file open in Photoshop, you can choose Filter > Convert for Smart filters and then choose Filter > Skylum > Luminar 4 to run Luminar as a Smart Filter.
