Luminar Flex (Luminar as a plug-in) by Skylum Software

A review by Donny Yankellow (@rtteachr)

If you enjoy editing photos on your Mac, but Photos is not enough power for you, and you don’t like having to use an external editor to edit photos in, Luminar Flex might be what you are looking for. It has the power of Skylum’s Luminar in an extension that can be used in Photos. If you prefer Photoshop, Lightroom, or still use Aperture Luminar Flex installs a plugin for those apps too (yes, it even supports Aperture!).

Flex is very easy to set up and use for the most part. I would be remiss not to talk about an installation issue I had. The installer could not connect to the Skylum server (something with my router blocking it) and I ended up hotspotting to my phone to get the installation to work. Your mileage may vary, but I think this is worth bringing up. Through the installation plugins and extensions are installed for the apps you have installed on your computer in addition to the standalone app in your applications folder. For me, I only use Photos so I had to go into system preferences and enable the extension through the Extensions preference. After that I could easily use the software like any other extension in Photos.

Continue reading → Luminar Flex (Luminar as a plug-in) by Skylum Software

Adobe Elements 85% of the Power, 15% of the Price

Essential Apple Podcast 75: 85% of the Power, 15% of the Price.

This week Elon sent the Falcon Heavy up to put his Tesla Roadster, with the spacesuited mannequin ‘Starman’ playing Bowie on the stereo, into an orbit around Mars and missed slightly, sending it out towards the Asteroid Belt instead. Meanwhile the flat earther “Mad” Mike Hughes failed to get his steam powered rocket to lift off (again).
MacUpdate served up crypto miner infected files and a flaw in the Hotspot Shield VPN can expose users’ locations.
That’s all fine and dandy but much more importantly we have a very special guest with us on the show this week. Bob Gager from Adobe joins us to talk about the Elements versions of Photoshop and Premiere. The no-subscription, home user, versions of two of Adobe’s big hitter professional applications.

Continue reading → Essential Apple Podcast 75: 85% of the Power, 15% of the Price.