Over a decade ago, I undertook the project of scanning all my family photos. We’d had a fire in our condo, and fortunately, all of our family photos were spared—unlike 90% of our belongings.

After recovering from the rebuild, I made it a point to scan all of my family photos and store copies off-site, ensuring our family photo history would be safe from future threats.

In May 2025, I experimented with the Photo Restoration Neural Filter, which I first discovered in Adobe Photoshop 2025. The graduation photo above shows a before-and-after comparison between the scanned original and the neural filter’s restoration. This post, however, is about Luminar Neo’s new Restoration tool in version 1.25, released in late October 2025. The opening photo comparison features the before-and-after using Luminar Neo’s Restoration tool.

The photo above is an original scan of a picture of my father and mother, likely taken in the early 1930s. The original was damaged at the top, and a significant amount of detail was lost in the old photo due to simple age. A noticeable chromatic aberration was introduced in the scan, as well.

I then used Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop to remove chromatic aberration and manually clean up the image as best I could. This restoration attempt was completed manually before I knew about Photoshop’s neural filter. When I learned that Luminar Neo had an AI photo restoration tool in its latest release and saw some of the pre-release YouTube videos by people like Anthony Turnham here, I was excited to try the new tool when it finally became available to me in early November.

Initially forgetting about the original scanned photo, I quickly found my manually restored photo of Mom and Dad to test Neo’s new feature. The colorized result is in my opening comparison. The new tool offers two options: restoration to black and white and colorization. I next tried the black-and-white option. It, too, produced a remarkably restored black-and-white image. It seems, however, I gave the program a head start by doing much of the clean-up manually in Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.

Both the black-and-white photo above and the colorized version in the opening comparison photo surprised me with the quality of the restoration.

Finally realizing that I wasn’t giving Neo the chance to try a restoration from the scan of an original print, I quickly found the original image in my folder of scanned photographs.

I dropped the original scan into the Restoration box in Neo’s Catalog module, and this was the result. The colors are much more subdued than in the version I previously edited. It’s still quite an improvement, and I could manually adjust the saturation if I wanted to.

In further experiments, I discovered that the colors generated by the Restoration tool can sometimes be oversaturated, while at other times, they are more subdued. I will be running more of my scanned family photos through this process to get a better feel for how the tool works, but I can say I am impressed with Neo’s restoration abilities.

As a test, I ran the colorization tool on a scan of the pen-and-ink sketch my son gave us for our 50th Anniversary. This was just an experiment—our cherished black-and-white original is still framed in our photo bookcase. I’ve only used Neo’s new tool on a handful of old photos, and all turned out well; however, before assuming the tool is perfect, this video from Anthony Turnham shows otherwise. One thing I gathered from his review is that restorations are subject to the whims of the AI at the moment you click the restore button. If you don’t like the results, rerun the tool; it will likely yield different results. No doubt, Skylum will be improving Neo’s AI in future upgrades.

Another new tool released in Neo’s 1.25 version is the Light Depth tool. I took this photograph of a waterfall in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, featuring my son (the photographer on the left) and the fisherman. I thought this image would be a good example of using Neo’s Light Depth tool, as it effectively brings out the waterfall and the rocky cliff by accentuating the light on them.

Before the introduction of Light Depth, I could have used a linear mask or the original Relight AI to achieve the same goal; however, the Light Depth tool offers a more granular approach to adding depth to a photo.

In the screenshot of the original photo on Luminar Neo’s desktop, the cloudy sky lit the scene evenly, and the waterfall is hidden in the shadows. I have better images of this waterfall, but this photo is an excellent example of how the Light Depth tool can enhance a photo. The even lighting and generally busy foreground don’t allow the viewer’s eyes to immediately spot the subject. Is it the photographer, the fisherman, or that waterfall in the distance?

As I noted above, this new tool builds on Relight AI’s foundation, offering finer control and more nuanced adjustments than its predecessor. The new Light Depth tool, located in the Creative section, presents an interface similar to a Linear Mask. Using the Light Depth tool, I set the amount slider to 72% and adjusted the exposure to light the opposite riverbank and the waterfall. That created a stronger leading line that draws the viewer’s eyes along the bright wall into the scene, allowing the viewer to discover the waterfall.

My final example illustrates how the photographer can subtly use light to draw the viewer’s attention to the subject, whether it’s the mountain in the background, the midground’s interesting coloration, or the foreground. With the Light Depth tool, photographers can more easily show the viewer what was in their previsualization as the photo is composed in the photographer’s viewfinder.

To operate the tool, I set the Amount slider to 100% to start, then use the handles below the Amount slider to adjust the light’s depth and position.

Once I’ve decided where (and how wide) to place the light, I reduce the Amount until it achieves the balance I like. In this case, about 70%, though if this weren’t a demonstration of the tool, I’d have brought the Amount down further for a less obvious mix.

Again, setting the tool amount to 100 percent, I narrowed the tool’s reach and moved the strongest light to the center. I then reduced the Amount slider to about 70% for this demonstration; however, a more subtle adjustment is best. Let your eyes guide how much light to add.

Finally, I shifted the emphasis to the mountain in the background, but I restored some of the light’s width to include that interesting midground. When overused for demonstration purposes, one artifact of the tool is the potential for haloing around the extra light, especially noticeable in the sky around the mountain. This tool needs to be applied more subtly.

In the final version of this photo, I used Light Depth to add additional emphasis to the midground and background, setting the Amount to 47%. The Mask option is available in this tool, so I masked the sky to minimize haloing around the mountain. Finally, I used the Advanced option, which includes four sliders: Brightness near and far, and Warmth near and far. The key to using this tool is applying the changes lightly and masking out areas of the photo that shouldn’t be relit.

All of the photos featured here are also in my Flickr gallery. The images are displayed in 2K HD, and the photo metadata is available for those interested in the details.

I first connected with Skylum Software’s Luminar 2018, then Luminar 4, and Luminar AI before the developer’s complete rewrite of the code to create Luminar Neo, released in 2022. Luminar Neo has undergone a significant evolution since its launch, with frequent updates introducing new camera support, performance enhancements, and expanded AI capabilities. The program is much simpler to use for editing photographs than many professional editing tools on the market. For those just getting started with photo editing, I almost always recommend Luminar Neo, a simple yet powerful consumer-grade editor that provides basic and advanced editing features.

John Steiner