Frequently Asked Questions

The Luminar Flex plugin helps photographers and designers of all skill levels create better looking images in far less time. Thanks to its unique artificial intelligence and image aware filters, great images are easier than ever.

The Luminar Flex plugin allows you to take advantage of our powerful photo enhancement and styling filters while still being able to use your existing photo software.

We know that there are plenty of Adobe and Apple users who want to use Luminar in their workflow. So we’ve come up with a solution that will provide the easiest way of using Luminar as a plugin to the most popular apps.

Luminar 3 is meant to be used as a standalone application. It offers three different editing workflows:

• Library – Add folders that you want to track to your library for organizing and editing.  Easily sync adjustments between multiple images.
• Quick Edit – The Quick Edit command is perfect to open individual images or a group of images for editing.  You can work with these images without adding the parent folder to your library.
• Batch Processing – You can target multiple images or folders for quick batch processing.  Easily apply smart Luminar Looks based on Accent AI for automatic image enhancement

If you ever want to use Luminar as a plugin, we recommend installing the Luminar Flex plugin. Luminar Flex is designed to work as a plugin with applications like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom Classic, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Apple Aperture and Photos for macOS.

Luminar 3 requires a graphics card that supports OpenGL 3.3. If you’re using a laptop, make sure you run Luminar on a discrete card. Refer to the laptop’s manufacturer for detailed instructions. If your card supports OpenGL 3.3, try fully reinstalling drivers for all graphics cards on your computer. Make sure to download drivers from the card manufacturer’s website.

Luminar lets you add folders from cloud storage locations that are synced to your computer.  In this case, synced means that a physical copy of the photo resides on either your internal or external hard drive.  If only a reference copy of the photo is located in the cloud storage photo, Luminar will not be able to create a thumbnail or be able to edit the image.  

Adding folders from synced cloud storage is very useful in situations where a client or family member adds images remotely to a cloud service server. Once these images are synced locally to your computer, Luminar automatically adds them to your Library. 

Check out this video for instructions on how to import your Apple Photos library into Luminar 3.

On Windows 8 / 10:

1. Close Luminar.
   
2. Right-click any empty space on your desktop > Display settings.
3. In the window that opens, set the Change the size of text, apps, and other items dropdown to 100%.
4. Start Luminar 3 and finish the setup wizard. You can safely change the display scaling back to its initial value after this.

On Windows 7:

1. Close Luminar.
   
2. Click the Start button.
3. Type Display in the Search box.
4. Click Display in the Control Panel section of the results.
5. In a window that opens, set the scaling value to 100% and check if you can see all the controls in Luminar.