Luminar will get a DAM in 2018!

DAM straight! Digital Asset Management is coming to Luminar!

In case you aren't familiar with the term DAM, it stands for Digital Asset Management and is a common term in the photo business to represent a library and cataloging function in software. This is essentially a tool for managing your images, instead of just having them sit in a folder somewhere. It gives you the ability to preview them, rate them, add keywords, create albums, organize them and so much more (though to be clear, I do not yet know what functions will or will not be in the Luminar DAM, and I do not have a copy of it).

DAM is incredibly important to photographers, and as your image count grows it becomes more and more important because managing a vast amount of images is unwieldy and basically impossible. For example, Lightroom has a DAM (and it's what I currently use) in addition to it's various editing tools. It's a core component of the product and one that is generally really useful to me.


Side note: Adobe announced some interesting changes to Lightroom this past week, essentially creating a secondary version of Lightroom, aimed more at hobbyist and mobile-phone-first photographers, which is all cloud-based. Macphun set up the below site in response. Whether you are going to continue with LR or move on, Macphun has products that can help. This is actually a very informative website, and you will learn a lot about their plans for Luminar if you browse it.

Click here to read more about this on the Macphun site.


A video preview and some screenshots!

This week my friends at Macphun publicly shared a tiny little sneak peek into the DAM they are developing, which will be added to Luminar sometime in 2018. I am very eager to see this DAM and play around with it. I imagine it will be powerful yet intuitive, just like the rest of their products. 

You can watch that sneak peek here (or just watch it below): https://youtu.be/9FCHmJiF894

Macphun has also provided a couple of screenshots of their upcoming DAM, which you can see below. At first glance, it looks very interesting, though admittedly there is not a lot to go on just yet. This is, after all, just a quick glance at what they are making.

Things that I do notice, that are important to me (and again, these are total guesses because I have only seen what you are seeing here, so some of this is assumptive):

  1. Album/folder structure
  2. Rating system
  3. Image previews and browsing
  4. Easy move from the DAM to Luminar for editing (it's all easily connected)
  5. Tags (which implies keywording)
  6. Import window
  7. Some sort of "smart collection" feature
  8. The ability to create multiple libraries/catalogs
  9. I suspect a quick and easy transfer of images to Aurora HDR will be included

Taken together, this looks like a really solid product, especially as a first effort. There is obviously a lot of thought and planning going into this and they want to make a great first impression.

I'm very interested in this and will be sharing more as it comes to me.


Thanks for stopping by and let me know if you have any questions!

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