What’s new.

Faster ways to find the shot: a preview in about a second, and settings that fit your Mac.

In this release

• Preview: a quick picture with every effect at full quality in about a second, then Render makes the full picture of that same moment.
• Optimise my settings (Settings tab): measures what each live effect costs where you are and suggests what to keep for renders; offered once a session when the live view is slow.
• Set up for your Mac: at the first start, Luminous chooses settings that fit the Mac’s graphics and display, and says what it chose.
• Depth of field can be kept for renders, like the other effects.
• The release notes link in About opens these pages.
• The login screen is dark to the edges on wide windows.

Known issues

• Quitting while connected to voice can occasionally crash. Your settings are saved before it happens.
• The standard snapshot window does not show Luminous’s effects. Use Render in the sidebar instead.
• Switching effects on and off many times in one session slowly uses more memory. Restarting clears it.
• Luminous’s own windows are in English only until 1.0.

Requirements: A Mac with Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later and 16 GB of memory.

Download Luminous 0.8.3

Luminous is a Second Life viewer for taking better pictures, for Macs with Apple silicon. You set up the shot in a quick live view, and Luminous draws the costly effects in full in the rendered picture.

In this release

• Light: volumetric light and sun shafts, projector beams, soft shadows that harden at contact, contact shadows, GTAO and enhanced reflections.
• Lens: depth of field with real bokeh, bloom, halation, anamorphic streaks, lens flare, vignette, chromatic aberration and lens distortion.
• Tone and colour: film curves, colour balance and ranges, black and white, film grain and colour tables (LUTs), including your own.
• Renders of many frames averaged as light, at up to twice the window’s size, in PNG, JPEG, BMP, 16-bit TIFF or OpenEXR. They fit themselves to the memory your Mac has.
• Twenty styles, skies made for portraits, and presets of your own.
• Share a render to your inventory, your profile feed, Flickr or email.

Known issues

• Quitting while connected to voice can occasionally crash. Your settings are saved before it happens.
• The standard snapshot window does not show Luminous’s effects. Use Render in the sidebar instead.
• Switching effects on and off many times in one session slowly uses more memory. Restarting clears it.
• Luminous’s own windows are in English only until 1.0.

Requirements: A Mac with Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later and 16 GB of memory.