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Should I be able to use Luminar 4 as a plug-in in affinity photo desktop. I purchased Luminar from Skylum not from the App Store as suggested. Every time I try to open it my Mac crashes. If so....suggestions would be appreciated on installing it in case I did it wrong. Thank you!

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Hi kiaora58 :)

Unfortunately the Luminar Plug-ins aren't compatible with Affinity currently, my apologies. We're working hard to improve our third party support for future updates!

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

Actually, I've been able to setup both Luminar and Aurora as plugins for Affinity in Windows 10.  Please tell me you're using a Mac.  I'd love to be able to say that there is something related to Luminar 4 that a Windows box can do that a Mac can't.

PS.  I also purchased Luminar 4 directly from Skylum as an upgrade from Luminar 3.

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I don't want to turn this forum into an ad for skylum, but since the question had been asked, Luminar does have other features that Affinity doesn't. they are good, but but not absolutely necessary.  The AI features work well for me.  The Sky replacement works well except for when it leaves a halo around the non-sky elements of the photo, and the portrait enhancement tools work well.  there are some functions that need to be improved like the 'edit' menu for Windows, and Luminar has limited selection tools, at least in Windows.  I still use Affinity as my primary program for photo editing.  I just installed 1.8 and waiting to see how that works out as opposed to the last version of the software.

 

Bob T.

Edited by bobthom
just for clarity.
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  • 3 weeks later...

I have been using Luminar 4 as a plugin on Windows 10 for a couple of months and I am happy with the results. Here are some things I have found.

First Affinity is my number one program choice and if I was only allowed one program I would not have to think about it. However,  I like the using the tools in Luminar 4 because it feels more like a creative process than a technical achievement.

Using Luminar as a standalone product and working on Raw files is very slow. This has been identified by others elsewhere. Working on afphoto files using Luminar as a plugin within Affinity is a much nicer experience. 

Handing an afphoto file back to Affinity seems to tax the processing ability of my otherwise quick laptop. If I have done a lot of edits in Luminar the time it takes to hand back to Affinity is frustrating, making a coffee might be a good option, and sometimes it hangs. This can be overcome by  making a new stamp layer of all the edits in Luminar, deselecting the layers below it and then the handing the file back to Affinity. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have been using Affinity Photo 1.8.2  with Capture One 20 and Luminar 4.2.   It would be very nice to have a plugin in Affinity Photo for both Capture One and Luminar.   I currently need to export from Capture One to my Capture One Hot Shot photo as a TIFF of JPG file and then use OPEN command to load files from Capture One Hot Shot folder into AP.   Affinity Photo takes forever to process a RAW file. (Nikon NEF Z7) 

Can Affinity Photo team please add plugin for Capture One and Luminar to next update. Thanks...

Am I missing something here?  Is there an easier way to do this?   I really like Affinity Photo and prefer in many ways to Photoshop. 

 

 

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On 3/24/2020 at 5:43 PM, RRB said:

I have had difficulty getting Luminar 4 to load as a plugin on Windows 10  (User error for sure). How did you accomplish that?

Install Luminar. In Affinity, edit>Preferences. Select photoshop plugins. Navigate and select as shown. Ensure the tick box at the bottom is checked. Hope that helps.image.png.e19d57f1e7cd3541e36cd88ac99a3b01.png 

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Thank you so much for taking time to reply.  I was able to accomplish this task a couple of days ago.....there was a problem with the location of the folder that contained Luminar since I don't use Photoshop and there was no "photoshop plugin" folder.  It is so nice to now call Luminar up from within Affinity!  In any event, thanks for helping!

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  • 3 months later...

I have Affinity Photo 1.83.  Luminar updated recently to 4.3.  Now I have not been able to get Luminar to work as a plugin for Affinity.  Luminar v. 4.2 worked fine as a plugin.  Any suggestions?  Thank you in advance

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On 2/6/2020 at 4:25 PM, Dan C said:

Unfortunately the Luminar Plug-ins aren't compatible with Affinity currently, my apologies. We're working hard to improve our third party support for future updates!

 

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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Thanks albas. After your post and some info from Skylum support I took this approach in Windows 10.  With Luminar v4.2 already installed I copied the Luminar4.8bf file from the Skylum/Luminar folder in program files  and saved it in another location. I updated Luminar to V4.3  and then replaced the Luminar4.8bf file with the version saved in the other location.  With both programs closed I only had to start Affinity, open a file, launch Luminar as a plugin and 4.3 opened.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I encountered the same problem with Luminar 4.3 as an Affinity plug in. The solution for me was to run Luminar as 'administrator' and restart. It has since run seamlessly with Affinity. This is on a PC running the latest version of Windows 10.

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/26/2020 at 8:57 AM, Oly85 said:

Are there things that the Skylum products can do that Serif cannot?

I'm not sure why one should keep them at all.

 

On 2/26/2020 at 6:53 PM, bobthom said:

I don't want to turn this forum into an ad for skylum, but since the question had been asked, Luminar does have other features that Affinity doesn't. they are good, but but not absolutely necessary.  The AI features work well for me.  The Sky replacement works well except for when it leaves a halo around the non-sky elements of the photo, and the portrait enhancement tools work well.  there are some functions that need to be improved like the 'edit' menu for Windows, and Luminar has limited selection tools, at least in Windows.  I still use Affinity as my primary program for photo editing.  I just installed 1.8 and waiting to see how that works out as opposed to the last version of the software.

 

Bob T.

If it were just for replacing the sky, there is also LandscapePro from Anthropics that seems to give more control to what one can do with the sky after replacing it. I tried the demo, but the demo can’t be used as a plugin (only the Studio version of the program and upwards, but not the trial one). In the Anthorpics’ website it says that Portrait Pro (also from Anthropics) can work as a plugin in Affinty Photo, so maybe Landscape Pro can as well.

Nevertheless, because what I read here, I tried Luminar and Landscape Pro. The first I didn’t like as a photo editing program. The second, I found more powerful than Luminar regarding a replacement and retouching of the sky in a simple and kind of automatic manner. Not my personal thing replacing a sky, as I prefer my photos to keep being photos as I took them (not a colagge) though I understand that it can be a valid thing to do, but I just wanted to try them. But I also tried for the same photo (a difficult one with trees, branches and leaves against the sky) to replace the sky working with Affinity Photo and I think it allowed me to do a more refined work (for what of course, having some photos of skies was necessary, which I managed to grasp for the exercise).

The masking tools from Affinity Photo are very powerful, but I did this masking within Affinity Photo using the Topaz Remask plugin as I have the older version of it (that works in Affinity Photo). It didn’t take me much time to do the masking and the result was better than the one I could obtain with either Luminar or Landscape Pro (which does not mean that somebody else might obtain different results and think differently). I have read that the new version of Topaz Remask, Remask AI, works similarly to the Luminar’s masking system, but that it does not allow as much control as the previous version of the program / plugin did. I haven’t tried the AI version of Remask.

Another thing that I concluded is that what I could do to edit / alter the sky with Landscape Pro I could do better and with more sophisticated controls with Affinity Photo (it only came to apply edits to the layer in which I pasted a different sky).

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

Hi guys,

This worked for me on macOS - Version 1.8.6 and Luminar AI

https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Filters/plugins.html?title=Using Plugins 

Make sure: If your plug-in entries are displayed but are grayed out, ensure that you have a pixel layer selected rather than a mask, adjustment, live filter, shape, curve, or text layer.

Hope that helps.

Marcin

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