Very Poor Customer Support.- Luminar is a toy, not a professional editing platform.
Answered
I have contacted Skylum at least 5 times using the contact form. About bugs in Luminar 4. I have sent you all the files you request using WeTransfer,
Although you say you answer support requests in 24 hours, in my experience I have NEVER ONCE RECEIVED THE SLIGHTEST BIT OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT. I do get a survey though and you apparently pay no attention to 1-star ratings.
Yesterday I asked in the Forums why you don't offer paid high-quality live support. If you want Luminar 4 to be more than a toy and appeal to professional users, you are FAILING BADLY because your support by e-mail is too slow to the point I don't think it actually exists
That message here in the public forums was answered quickly by a low level CSR who said politely that you are not offering live support, but selling a support plan was a good idea which she forwarded to the team. So simple questions about policies, refunds, licenses, or basic operations will get a response quickly because they are easy to answer.
Yesterday after working on a photo for over an hour, with 4 layers, sky replacement, sky enhancement, painting in an area under arches that we too dark, adding detail to cobblestones, erasing a floodlight and a power panel, putting light in the street lamps and windows, and after all this work, the program started crashing. I could load backups by holding down the option key and launching the software and choosing an older backup.
However, no matter which backup I loaded, sometime soon after I started editing, repeating the edits I lost Luminar 4 crashed. I must have sent you 6 Apple Crash reports. Do you get these crash reports? What do they tell your engineers?
I REQUEST SUPPORT AND IT SEEMS TO ME YOU NEVER RESPOND. I SEND THE PHOTOS WHERE SKY REPLACEMENT FAILS AND NO ONE EVER LOOKS AT THEM AND RESPONDS TO MY REQUEST FOR SUPPORT.
Since there was no way to get any timely help, I had to reinstall the software. All that work was lost. I have to try to remember what sky I used. Where I painted in fog. ALL MY WORK WAS LOST DUE TO BUGS IN YOUR SOFTWARE THAT YOU APPARENTLY DO NOT WANT TO DISCUSS.
Good software that isn't beta should NOT CRASH. Period. End of discussion. And when it does, fixing the crash must move to the top of the priority queue.
Since you don't have background replace, I use Topaz Labs MaskAI. It too was crashing right after they updated from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2. Within 24 hours I got a response from Topaz telling me that there were other reports of crashing in 1.2.2, and they advised to step back to 1.2.1 The day after that 1.2.3 was pushed to users. That is quality responsive technical support. That is something you do not have and you should stop claiming you offer such.
Skylum Luminar is just not in the same league as Adobe or Topaz when it comes to product technical support.
It is sad because the Luminar Program is wonderful. When it works, I like it a lot. As I have said over and over again that Luminar 4 does not need any new features. It needs fixes for speed and stability. These were overdue before the last update.
When your company has no respect for my time and starts wiping out my work, I reluctantly may have to move to Lightroom. I don't want to go up that learning curve but if the program crashes and you won't provide support, you may leave me no other choice.
I look forward to hearing your response published in this forum for all to read.
Thank you.
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Hi Norm Gilbert,
We are terribly sorry to hear about your negative experience. Having thoroughly checked our e-mails history, we could not find any support request sent from you. Looks like this miscommunication happened due to this fact. Please, note that we welcome everyone to contact us via support@skylum.com. We are here to help and make great efforts to resolve all the issues reported.
Please, check your inbox - we sent you the response via e-mail. Will do our best to improve. Hope to hear from you soon.
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Norm, before giving money to Adobe please take a look at the Affinity products: Photo, Designer and Publisher. They are not subscription based and are stable products.
Photo can do over 90% of Photoshop and that last 10% is very specialized stuff anyway that is rarely used by most.
There are tons of great tutorials online to get you up to speed. You can use Luminar too.
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I basically have the same story here.
Working on a photo in Luminar 4.2.2 and then bum it crashes!
I have followed Skylum support instructions for deleting and rebuilding luminar three times now. I don't have time for this!
I agree at this stage it is a toy and a shame that they don't care about using the feedback that we provide to them for free. They should be paying us for beta-testing their unfinished product. That is pretty much what I have to say about this software at this stage.
Best regards
Michael -
Hi Michael,
I am genuinely sorry to hear about your experience with our software. Please note that we are currently working on the next update that should improve the app's performance and fix the issue with the app crashing. We expect this update to be released soon, so please stay tuned!
As for the issue itself, in most cases of Luminar crashing on Mac, the following steps help resolve the issue:
- Open Finder.
- Click Go in the top menu > click Go to Folder.
- Paste the following path: ~/Library/Caches/SentryCrash/ and click Go.
- Please locate and delete the Luminar 4 folder from the folder that opens.
I think our support team may have already suggested it, but I just wanted to share this solution with you just in case it has not been offered to you yet.
At the moment, our devs have two major tasks: the algorithm performance improvements and resource use optimization.
These are large-scale tasks that in the long-term perspective will give the app a significant boost as well as increase the development speed. Therefore, please rest assured that every day Luminar is getting better. We hope you'll be there with us to see this progress.
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Same here... I've reported multiple bugs with the detailed explanation and screenshoots. Initially silence then after a while they returned back to me asking to upload it via their platform... photos from the middle stage of editing which I do not have it.
They do not understand that people really need help shortly after problem occurred. This was too frustrating for me to continue using this toy software... I've switched to the competitor product which is delivering what's promised without bugs.
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