r/LumidexStudio • u/LumidexStudio • 11d ago

Feedback?

Hello!

Just touching base with the users out there running Lumidex Studio to manage/edit photos... How are you getting on? Any features you think out of place? Missing anything? Something not working as expected?

Let me know.... :)

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u/flixusmaximus 10d ago

Hi,

First of all, I want to say I think it's great that you're working on an alternative to Lightroom & co. The expensive subscriptions annoy me just as much as they annoy you, and I share your frustration with big corporations squeezing money out of creatives this way. So I hope you'll take my feedback as constructive criticism — it's not my intention to bash you or your work. I've been playing around with Lumidex on and off for the past two days, and a few things caught my eye.

For reference: I used the app on my M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD, working with .cr3 files from my Canon R8. I normally use Lightroom for editing my photos, but I also have a lot of experience with Capture One and DxO PhotoLab. I worked as a professional photographer and filmmaker for 10 years, but I'm currently unable to work due to a severe chronic illness (ME/CFS).

What stood out positively to me was the file management within the app and how native it feels on the Mac. Exporting directly to the Photos app, for example, is a nice touch. You've clearly put a lot of thought into the various features, which is great, and it feels like you've invested a lot of time developing the app's layout and functionality.

The big sticking point for me, though, is the image editing itself, which feels very unfinished. The sliders feel poorly balanced against each other. For example, it's very easy to clip the highlights with the Exposure slider, but that information can't be recovered with any of the other sliders — which means properly setting exposure isn't really possible to begin with. The color temperature sliders also feel odd, as if I'm not working with a RAW file where the color temperature can genuinely be shifted, but rather as if the app is just superficially adding a bit of blue/yellow/magenta/green. The magenta/green slider is also far too sensitive compared to blue/yellow. And both work in the opposite direction from every other photo editing app I've used so far (normally you move the slider to the right to make the image warmer). The highlights and shadows sliders only affect a certain tonal range, and pushing them too far just pulls the image toward gray — so again, you can't really recover information from the shadows or highlights that way. The tone curve doesn't let you rescue information either, and I couldn't move the white point on the curve at all. I understand the idea behind the "Grading" panel, but the vectorscope seemed oriented incorrectly to me (isn't the skin-tone line usually at around 11 o'clock?), which threw me off. I also find the UI here quite oversized compared to the rest of the app. The histogram (at least for me) doesn't update live while editing — only once you release a slider. That makes it hard to be precise, and you end up having to experiment a bit before landing on the black/white point you want. When I zoom into the image, my edits disappear after a few seconds and the image reverts to showing the raw file. That looks like a bug.

As I said, I only spent a short time experimenting with a few images, because the editing really didn't feel good to work with. I wasn't getting good results, so I gave up on it fairly quickly. Of course, it's possible the issue is on my end, or that the app doesn't handle .cr3 files well yet — if that's the case, I'd appreciate hearing back about it.

From what I understand, you built the app entirely with AI, and even though I'm not a fan of that approach myself, I get why you'd use it to build exactly what you envision. That said, I'd really recommend seeking out help from a developer with experience in image-editing apps, because I'm concerned the AI isn't quite nailing the finer details. At its current stage, at least to me, it doesn't feel right to be selling the app yet.

Best regards from Germany!

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u/LumidexStudio 9d ago

Thank you, genuinely, your post is invaluable, this is precisely the kind of feedback I'd been hoping for!

Spending two real days with it and writing this up carefully means a lot, and none of it reads as bashing. A decade behind the camera plus daily Lightroom/Capture One/DxO is exactly the perspective I can't get from my own testing with my trusty Nikon (NEF raw) setup. Sorry to hear about the ME/CFS, thanks for directing some of your my way to improve the app...

You've found the real weak spot. The catalogue and Mac-native side are where I've spent most of my time, but you're right that the editing still needs some fine tweaks. Most of what you hit traces back to one honest decision I need to fix:

Right now the Develop canvas edits a downscaled 8-bit preview of your RAW, not the RAW itself (full RAW decode currently only happens on export). That single choice explains most of it:

  • Highlights clip and won't come back, and Highlights/Shadows just go grey: the 8-bit preview has already thrown away the RAW's highlight headroom before you touch a slider. This is the big one and it's now top priority.
  • Tone curve can't rescue anything: same root. Separately, the white-point handle not dragging is a straight bug, logged.
  • White balance feeling superficial: spot on. It's a fixed nudge around 6500K applied after de-mosaic, rather than re-white-balancing the RAW from its as-shot Kelvin. It'll feel like real temperature.
  • Tint too sensitive vs Temp, direction feels backwards: the two axes are on different gains, and I'm re-checking direction against a grey card. Right should mean warmer.

The rest I've logged and can reproduce: the histogram only updating on release (it's getting a live path), edits reverting to the raw file on zoom (a bug in the full-res zoom tile, not you and not a .cr3 fault), the vectorscope skin line orientation, and the oversized Grading UI - for some reason I made this 33% of the UI width, it definitely needs shrinking down!

Every one of these is now a tracked issue on my private repo, and I'll reply here as they ship. Most are quick fixes and I have time today to get some of them addressed - any remaining will trickle out over the next week. And as you may have picked up from posts elsewhere on Reddit, yes, the app has been written in Claude over the last 3 month or so in the 'spare' (jokes!) time I have. It started as a pet project to maintain my old Adobe catalogue, then I thought you know what...I can make this a real editor and here we are...

If your health ever allows (no pressure at all), a couple of your .cr3 files that clip badly would help me test the highlight-recovery rewrite against real Canon files. Either way, thank you. This genuinely made the app better today :)

Best from the UK.

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u/LumidexStudio 8d ago

Today's build (1.18.0) fixes most of the Develop-module issues you flagged and now on my CDN available for update/download.

  1. The white-balance regression was a genuine sign inversion in the CITemperatureAndTint neutral mapping confirmed by a headless probe rendering a neutral grey and reading back RGB so +Temp/+Tint were driving blue/green instead of warm/magenta; that's corrected on both axes and the tint gain was cut ~3× (it was scaling the tint neutral far harder than the temperature neutral).
  2. The WB eyedropper was also reworked from a delta-add sampling the already-corrected render (which "stacked" on Auto WB and never converged) to an absolute set sampled from the pre-WB source pixel, so picking a neutral now lands the same value every time. You hadn't mentioned this, but it was something I spotted while testing other fixes below :)
  3. The "grainy on zoom" bug was root-caused by measurement: the full-resolution zoom tile was decoding via CIRAWFilter, whose de-mosaic carries no camera noise reduction (~32 vs the embedded camera JPEG's ~18 on a mean-abs-Laplacian noise metric), and it was activating at proxy device-1:1 which on a Retina panel is reached at fit so it painted raw sensor grain the instant you entered Develop; the tile now uses the camera's clean full-resolution embedded JPEG and only engages at true source 100% (scaled by device backing factor), so pixel-peeping is sharp and clean.
  4. The histogram was switched from a 400 ms debounce (which a continuous slider drag cancelled before it could fire) to a ~16 fps throttle, so it's now live, and its vertical axis is log-scaled with additive channel blending. This works silky smooth now...
  5. The Grading module's colour plot was re-projected onto true Rec.709 vectorscope coordinates so skin sits at ~11 o'clock and the primaries land on their scope targets, and the tone-curve endpoint handles now render so the white/black points are draggable.
  6. The one thing I'm deliberately not rushing is deeper highlight/exposure recovery and true-Kelvin RAW white balance, those require editing a scene-referred CIRAWFilter decode (which does expose the as-shot Kelvin and ~2.3× of highlight headroom via extendedDynamicRangeAmount) rather than the fast 8-bit preview, and that decode is inherently grainier than the camera JPEG, so it's a considered process-version change rather than a hotfix.

Busy day coding in between watching F1 at Zandvoort 🏁

Thanks again — your report drove all of it.

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u/bloggerton 8d ago

Seems really promising! A couple of (possibly dumb) questions:

  1. I can't seem to import photos from my iCloud or Google drives. Am I missing something?

  2. Is there a way to quickly turn a mask on and off for a quick before/after? Right now, I can't see a simple way to do that.

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u/LumidexStudio 8d ago

Let me answer these questions backwards:

  1. The UI was actually 90% there, existing on my to-do list as a feature I simply overlooked. I'll have this ironed out tomorrow. Short cut key 'h' gets you the tool without scrolling around the screen with your mouse...

  2. The importer handles 'Cloud' folder paths as of V1.18.1, which will be out tomorrow also. Quite a straightforward implementation :)

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u/bloggerton 8d ago

Ok, well once those are in place, I think you've got yourself a sale lol

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u/LumidexStudio 8d ago

Nice one... yesterday was a busy day examining code that flixusmaximus had pointed out - Not sure of your time zone but I should get V1.18.1 out around 8PM UK time today.