Luminar for iPad Review: Edit Like A Pro On The Go

This Luminar Mobile for iPad review is the result of two weeks of solid testing to put the app through its paces.

Skylum’s latest app is truly impressive if you prefer mobile photo editing solutions.

Luminar for iPad performs seamlessly with Apple iPad, iPhone OS, and Apple Vision Pro devices.

Aided by AI-based learning, Luminar offers a fun, intuitive, and ingenious mobile editing experience.

Our helpful review showcases every feature that allows iPad users to master the mobile editing experience at home or on the go. Plus, we’ll cover all the recent inclusions and refinements from the latest Luminar Mobile for iPad version 2.2 update.

Grab your Apple Pencil, open your iPad, start a free subscription, and let’s get started.

What is Luminar for iPad?

 

Luminar for Apple iPad is the latest photo editing app by the team at Skylum.

It’s an Apple iOS-friendly mobile editing experience that’s interactive, engaging, and easy to master.

As a result, Luminar is also compatible with the iPhone and Apple Vision Pro.

However, Luminar for iPad is more than a bag of flashy tricks and a fancy UI!

It packs some impressively powerful features that give pro desktop editing software a run for its money.

While it’s an ideal app for new photographers or those editing while on travels, it’s also an excellent solution for professional photographers.

Harnessing the power of AI and machine learning, Luminar brings iPhone image editing to the 21st century and beyond.

Luminar for iPad turns the mundane mobile editing experience into an interactive experience that’s hard to put down.

Furthermore, you’ll be amazed at how quickly and easily you can create stunning photos to share with your people.

Share directly to your social media feeds, including Instagram posts, stories, and messages.

Features of Luminar for iPad

• Develop

The Develop tool is your first stop in the Luminar for iPad editing process.

With Develop, you apply basic image adjustments to correct color, manage exposure, and adjust contrast.

It’s important to note that Luminar Mobile now features enhanced RAW image file editing and management.

Finer adjustments are also made to blacks, whites, highlights, shadows, saturation, vibrance, and vignetting.

Each Develop tool features an animated interface that is touch-controlled with a finger or Pencil.

It’s a straightforward set of tools for operating and finely controlling a picture’s overall look and exposure.

A photo editing app with these features alone is excellent, but there’s more!

• Enhance AI

The Enhance AI tool is a fast method for improving the overall appearance of an image, including its exposure, shadows, highlights, and more.

It uses AI to instantly apply much of the fine-tuning achieved manually in the Develop tab.

However, instead of a static button with little user control, it offers a large dial interface to increase and decrease the amount the app alters the picture.

It’s a joy to use, given the large visual dial and the illuminating markers that indicate the strength of the impact.

It’s an ideal tool to edit a large number of photos quickly.

• Structure AI

Structure AI allows you to pull out hidden details from shadows and overexposed areas of a photo.

The tool enhances the clarity and contrast, ensuring texture and finer details stand out.

Alternatively, you can use the interface dial to soften the level of detail and clarity for a softer-looking image.

The AI-powered tool doesn’t excessively impact overall image quality with harsh adjustments.

• Relight AI

The Relight AI tool is one of the most impressive aspects of the Apple iPad app.

It allows you to adjust the foreground and background strength and direction of light to improve exposure and composition.

The interface is a little complex at first, but with practice, it’s easy to change the direction of light and how it falls upon a subject.

A background dial allows you to adjust any change’s impact on the overall image.

It’s a simple solution to add drama and depth to a poorly lit iPhone image.

• Skin AI

Skin AI is another handy tool for perfect selfies and portraits of family and friends.

Luminar for iPad optimizes its AI learning to identify and retouch skin to remove any imperfections or blemishes.

The Skin AI interface features two vertical dials to control retouching strength and remove any shine that may appear on the skin due to bright lighting.

There’s also a switch to turn Blemish Removal on or off.

It’s an impressive solution that takes pro portrait photographers hours to retouch in conventional desktop apps.

• Body AI

While I’m not a fan of body altering in photography, there’s certainly a time and a place for it.

The Body AI tool identifies a single human figure in the scene and allows you to add or remove volume to the midsection or waist.

It’s a subtle tool and certainly not excessive in how it adds and removes shape to achieve more appealing outcomes.

• Landscape

Landscape iPhone photography is popular, given the ease of taking holiday vista snaps with your device.

Luminar for iPad provides a highly effective and comprehensive editing solution to produce eye-catching landscape images.

The Landscape tool provides three key editing solutions.

It allows you to alter the quality and warmth of the light and overall exposure of the photo.

For example, you can add a golden hour light quality to your composition by having a golden glow appear on background elements.

The Landscape tool also allows you to finely control the detail and color depth in foliage while removing or adding foggy haze.

• Curves

High-end pro-grade photo editing tools feature the ability to control tonal curves.

Luminar for iPad also features the ability to control tonal curves for exposure, red, green, and blue colors.

With Curves, you can finely control how each color appears in highlights, midtones, and shadows.

What’s especially neat is controlling tonal value with a touch interface to adjust the values quickly.

• Details

The Details editing tool controls finer details and sharpness in an image.

However, Luminar for iPad offers finer control of small, medium, and larger details rather than a simple single-button action.

The iOS photo editing app also adjusts sharpness via a slider interface.

It’s a great solution to bring out the details shot with a lower-resolution Apple iPad or iPhone camera.

• Monochrome

The final essential image editing tool is the Monochrome interface.

Luminar for iPad has optimized the ability to create stunning black-and-white images with looks that replicate monochrome filters found on Leica cameras.

The simple interface features a slide that alters full color to one of six monochrome looks with cyan, red, yellow, green, magenta, and blue filters.

• Preset Mode

If you love adding film-like filters to your Instagram images, you’ll love the Preset mode in Luminar for iPad.

The Presets tool is a quick and fun way to add unique looks to your selfies, portraits, or iPhone photos.

Preset filters add subtle, creative, and even dynamic looks to your shots, many of which have analog film qualities.

Luminar has gone the extra mile, visually representing each preset option as a 35mm film canister with unique labels.

When I wrote this review, the photo editing app offered six portrait toning filters and nine creative filters. I hope they continue to add to the available options.

The intensity of the preset is controlled by a large animated dial representing a camera’s shutter speed dial. It’s a nice touch to complement the film canisters.

• Sky AI

At its core, the Sky AI tool reads the photo and detects large patches of open sky.

Sky replacement overlaps the blank sky with a preset image, including blue, stormy, cloudy, lightning, sunrise, sunset, twilight, dramatic sunset, night, or your photos of the sky.

That way, if you have a great photo but the sky is dull and uninteresting, you can add a more dramatic sky.

The sky replacement feature also allows users to fine-tune the sky’s position, accuracy of the foliage gaps, brightness, and temperature.

It’s also impressive how fast and responsive the sky replacement tool is.

• Also, check out our Luminar Neo Review.

Overall Performance

Luminar for iPad is incredibly fast and responsive with next to no processing time or draw on iPad battery life.

What I found most appealing about the photo editing app was its ability to select a pic from my Photo library and begin instantly.

No compressed menu or drop-down functions are hidden in the top left corner.

When a photo is loaded, the workflow tools and overall interface are purposefully arranged and intuitive.

Every control and adjustment is animated and features a subtle sound effect.

You’ll find quick-access tools across the top of the screen, including Undo, Redo, Crop, Erase, and Share.

The Crop tool features a screen-sized adjustment function to crop and rotate a picture.

Furthermore, even if shot with an iPhone, photographers will love the display of the ISO, focal length, aperture, and shutter speed.

Anyone with any workflow experience will instantly grasp the processes.

For anyone new to it, joy awaits exploring the tools and unlocking powerful solutions within a few moments.

I found Luminar for iPad incredibly easy to master, impressive to employ, and hard to put down.

Luminar Mobile for iPad Version 2.2 Updates

Skylum has recently rolled out an update for Luminar Mobile to provide cross-device support, improvements to the interface, and full RAW file support.

One of the most significant updates to Luminar Mobile for iPad is the ability to optimize cross-device support across iPad and iPhone.

The Luminar Mobile v2.2 update allows you to harness iCloud Sync and switch between your iPad or iPhone without losing editing data or progress.

Luminar’s latest update features an autosave feature that automatically saves editing steps and progress. As a result, you can pick up where you left off without fear of starting the workflow process from scratch due to lost progress.

One of the most exciting v2.2 updates to Luminar Mobile is the ability to edit RAW image files. It’s a huge win for enthusiasts and professional photographers looking for an all-in-one editing application conveniently accessed via an iOS device.

RAW image editing is now optimized with access to a wide range of pro-grade editing tools, including exposure, highlight, and contrast control.

However, managing RAW image files on an iOS device is still problematic, but that’s a hardware limitation and is not a result of Luminar’s software or processes.

The new Luminar Mobile version 2.2 update also delivers an overall tune to the app, ensuring an optimized user experience.

Luminar’s interface refinements also feature a new Revert to Original button that acts as a quick reset function to remove all edits and reset the image to its original form.

The Luminar Mobile for iPad version 2.2 update delivers thoughtful and meaningful improvements to an already impressive application.

How I Tested Luminar for iPad

I tested Luminar’s mobile app on an iPad Air 4th Generation running iPadOS Version 17.5.1.

My iPad Air utilizes iCloud to sync seamlessly with my iPhone 14.

As a result, any photos I shot with my iPhone appeared on my iPad within moments and were ready to edit.

I tested Luminar for iPad over two weeks with photos shot in multiple lighting conditions.

Luminar had a minimal noticeable impact on my iPad’s overall performance. iPad Pro users will also have a seamless experience.

Furthermore, I made the most of my little-used Pencil to manage the AI tools and interface.

I also tested Luminar for iPad on several higher-resolution JPEG and RAW files shot with my Fujifilm X-E4 mirrorless camera.

I used Apple’s AirDrop app to transfer the JPEG files from my MacBook Pro to my iPad wirelessly.

Quickly processing my higher-quality photos via my iPad was surprisingly simple, intuitive, and successful.

Once complete, I could save my photos from the app to Apple Photos for quick access.

Value for Money

The best part about Luminar for iPad is the ability to trial the software for free for seven days.

Ongoing Luminar Mobile Photo Editor access costs around US$18 for a 12-month subscription.

One-month and six-month subscription plans are also available.

Putting aside the trial period, Luminar for iPad is excellent value for money.

For a few dollars a month, you get a powerful, intuitive, accessible, and feature-packed application.

It’s compatible with Apple iPad, iPhone, and Apple Vision Pro devices, making it an incredibly portable mobile editing experience.

What’s also impressive is Skylum’s dedication to delivering timely updates to Luminar Mobile to enhance its capabilities and user experience further.

Luminar for iPad Review | Conclusion

Having spent two weeks playing with the Luminar for iPad app, I can confidently say it’s a keeper!

I upgraded from the trial to the 12-month subscription before the free access period had lapsed.

The Skylum team developed the Luminar for iPad app, which is one of the most intuitive and powerful photo editing apps for smart devices.

Once you start processing your iPhone and iPad shots with Luminar, you’ll find it hard to stop using the app.

Moreover, if you also shoot with a DSLR or mirrorless camera, you’ll soon be editing RAW and JPEG files on the go.

What’s most impressive about Skylum’s Luminar Mobile for iPad is the brand’s dedication to enhancing the app in meaningful ways further to support the needs of enthusiasts and professional photographers.

The recent Luminar Mobile v2.2 updates elevate the app’s capabilities through better RAW file handling, iCloud Sync, and clever tweaks to the user interface.

I highly recommend the app for anyone wanting to optimize their smartphone photography and take it to the next level.