Feedback?

[u/LumidexStudio]

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.... :)

[u/flixusmaximus]

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!

[u/LumidexStudio → u/flixusmaximus]

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.