A few hours with 3.0.2 on iMac

I don't know if I am fortunate or getting advantages from a cautious approach to using Luminar 3 but unlike many others I have not had many problems with Luminar 3 running on a year old iMac with 32 Mbytes of memory. While I had some crashes with the original release 3.0.1 was totally crash free for me.

I currently have 4700 images in the catalogue I am using to explore Luminar and also try to evolve my post processing skills. I accept that this is much smaller than other people have but is enough for my purposes, and folders are synchronised with my main Lightroom catalogue to pick up Tiffs that I generate when I am happy with an image. So in fact not much different from the process I used to use with Luminar as a plugin.

Being in Australia I got access to 3.0.2 this, Australian, morning. I see no problems with Skylum making an update available to a subset of users to test their distribution systems. Perhaps future releases will go out to other countries as the trial.

The update installed without problems for me. I reloaded my system after the installation which is something I often do after installing/upgrading an application, not linked to Luminar particularly. Behaviour since then has seemed similar to 3.0.1.

Full screen views in Library now seem to be using a preview so it is possible to skip through images quickly. However, if stay on an image for a while it then seems to start loading the full image. This means that the image can change a few times as layers and filters get applied, same delay is still there when switching to Edit mode. So more work to be done to speed that up, it should be possible as loading a set of filters in a Look is much quicker. I did hit beach ball a few times during the loading of an image for editing, seems as though once this process has started it can't be interrupted.

For me with my Library load time is very good. It took 10 seconds to come up in Library view. On1 2019 took 13 seconds with similar set of folders catalogued and DxO PhotoLab 27 seconds. Lightroom with my full 40000 image catalogue took 26 seconds.

The problem of folders being linked to physical disks making backup/cloning impossible has been addressed by the addition of a find folder option. Right-click on a missing folder, locate on new disk and select, reconnected almost immediately and all edits preserved.

There is now an automatic catalogue backup, but I have yet to find out how one could recover from a problem using this, need to wait until updated documentation is available.

On the negative side some of the DxO Nik plugins still come up with a red screen of death.

So from a few hours just trying things at random it feels that 3.0.2 is no worse for me than 3.0.1, performance is good and seems better than 3.0.1 and a major issue with losing edits if a disk had to be restored from backup has been addressed.