Skylum is the Cyprus-registered software house behind Luminar for desktop and mobile and Aperty for professional portrait retouching. Its AI tools handle sky replacement, distraction removal, restoration and portrait work, sold mainly as one-time licences whose generative features run on a 365-day clock.
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Skylum is not a single application. It is the software house behind a family of photo editing products, and understanding that distinction is the first thing that saves a prospective buyer from confusion. The company's own homepage groups its work into three product lines plus a content storefront: Luminar on Desktop, described as easy-to-use photo editing software for photography lovers; Aperty, a next-generation AI retouching application aimed at professional portrait photographers; and Luminar on Mobile for iPhone, iPad, Android and ChromeOS. Alongside them sits a marketplace of more than 800 editing add-ons, presets and courses. If you arrived here expecting one program with one price, the reality is a matrix of applications, licence tiers and paid content that overlap in places and are billed separately in others.
The corporate identity behind that matrix is worth stating plainly because it is not obvious from the branding. Both the Terms of Use and the refund policy open with the same sentence: "Skylum" is a trading name used by Shinyfields Limited, a Cyprus limited liability company, and its certain affiliates. The founders and much of the executive team carry Ukrainian names — the about page records that the company's roots trace back to 2008, when photography enthusiasts and gaming app developers Paul Muzok and Dima Sytnik set out to transform photo editing — while the legal seat sits in Cyprus. The governing law is a third jurisdiction again: disputes run under the laws of the State of New York and are arbitrated in New York County. A further piece of brand archaeology is visible in the page source, where static assets are still served from media.macphun.com, a trace of the company's earlier Macphun identity.
Positioned against its rivals, the family occupies a specific niche: it is built for photographers who want strong results without learning a professional retoucher's toolkit. Independent testing supports that framing while also bounding it. Digital Camera World summarised the desktop application as a remarkable "reality enhancement" tool built around genuinely smart AI, but judged it weaker at traditional photo-editing techniques, where conventional rivals are more direct and logical. Creative Bloq reached a compatible conclusion, finding that the main audience is non-professionals, particularly those just getting started with photo editing, and that the missing organisational features make it hard to adopt as a complete professional workflow.
The desktop application organises its toolset into seven named groups, and reading them in the vendor's own order is the fastest way to understand what the software actually does. Essentials covers one-click enhancement, revealing hidden detail, boosting contrast, fixing composition, refining pixels, improving colours and sculpting light and shadow. Landscape handles instant sky replacement, recreating golden hour, adding realistic fog, removing haze, adding light rays, deepening evening tones and perfecting water textures. Generative AI removes distractions, expands the scene and replaces objects seamlessly. Image Quality revives old photos, sharpens detail, denoises and upscales without loss. Creative adds dimensional lighting, luminous depth, colour grading, neon, cinematic texture and layered effects. Portrait provides bokeh, natural skin smoothing, facial feature enhancement, body proportion sculpting, background blur and replacement, and studio lighting. Photo merge brackets exposures into HDR, stitches panoramas and stacks focus.
Summed up in the vendor's own numbers, that comes to more than 24 AI-based tools and over 100 precise features, and the software can run either standalone or as a plugin that integrates with Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. The plugin route matters commercially: it positions the product as something you can add to an existing Adobe workflow rather than a wholesale replacement, which is precisely how Creative Bloq suggested professionals might use it.
A distinction that runs through the entire product and its pricing is the split between two categories of artificial intelligence. The company separates what it calls core AI editing tools — Sky AI, Light Depth, Background Removal AI and many more — from a smaller set branded simply as AI Tools: Restoration, GenErase, GenSwap, GenExpand and the AI Assistant. The first group works for as long as your licence is active. The second group is metered by time. Any assessment of value has to keep those two buckets apart, because the marketing headline and the billing mechanics diverge exactly along this line.
Mobile is a genuinely separate product rather than a companion viewer. Luminar on Mobile is an AI-powered photo editing app for iPhone and Android with its own naming scheme for its features — SkyAI for replacing skies, SkinAI and BodyAI for retouching portraits of people, RelightAI for correcting exposure — plus conventional tools such as Erase, Crop, Filters, Develop and Curves, making it a universal all-in-one app in the vendor's description. Cross-device editing exists but is currently one-directional: the official pricing FAQ confirms you can begin editing on your mobile phone and pick up right where you left off on your desktop or tablet, and that currently, it works one-way (Mobile → Desktop). Two-way syncing is tied to the still-unreleased web version.
Aperty is the third pillar and the most recently launched. The company describes it as the ideal photo editing solution for professional portrait photographers seeking to streamline their workflow. Its own pricing page sets out the capability envelope: every plan includes local processing, unlimited edits and software updates, with plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom, and feature modules named Presets, Masking, Essentials, Retouch, Reshape and Creative. Local processing is a meaningful differentiator for photographers handling client material who would rather images did not leave the machine.
Landscape and travel work. This is the strongest fit and the one independent reviewers validate most consistently. The Landscape group alone covers sky replacement, fog, haze removal, light rays and water texture, and TechRadar's hands-on testing of the power line removal tool was emphatic: the reviewers tried it on four or five images, with powerlines that featured either prominently or diminutively in the composition, and came away impressed, noting one case where the cables faded into an area of over-exposure and were still detected and cleanly removed.
Portrait and people photography. Between Luminar's Portrait group and the dedicated Aperty application, this is the area where the company has invested most recently. Skin smoothing, facial feature enhancement, body proportion adjustment, background replacement and studio lighting simulation are all present, and Aperty adds Retouch and Reshape as first-class modules for photographers doing this at volume.
Photo restoration and archival work. Restoration is one of the metered AI Tools, designed for reviving old photographs, and pairs naturally with denoising, sharpening and lossless upscaling from the Image Quality group. Anyone planning a large family-archive project should read the pricing section below carefully, because this is exactly the capability that runs on a clock.
Client and commercial photography. This is permitted, and the vendor says so explicitly rather than leaving it ambiguous. The Fair Use Policy lists editing client photos and commercial projects, the results are yours to use among the things that are included. That said, the EULA separately forbids using the software in the operation of a web service or other online service you provide for others — meaning you may edit for clients, but you may not build a photo-editing service on top of your licence. Aperty is carved out as an exception where any business use is allowed.
Mobile-first and hybrid shooting. Photographers who capture on a phone, or who want to start a rough edit in the field and finish at a desk, are served by the mobile app plus one-way sync. The workflow works in that direction only for now.
Learning photography. The marketplace angle is a real use case rather than an afterthought. Courses and e-books from named external creators — Max Rive's Forest Photography Masterclass, Armand Sarlangue's Landscape Photography: from Gear to Editing, Nicole S. Young's The Luminar Neo Handbook — are sold alongside the software, and asset library access is bundled into higher licence tiers.
Step 1 — Work out which product you actually need. Decide between the desktop application, the mobile app and Aperty before looking at prices, because they are separately licensed. If your work is portrait retouching at professional volume, Aperty is the purpose-built option and has its own pricing and trial. If you want general-purpose editing on a computer, Luminar on Desktop is the entry point.
Step 2 — Choose the licence tier deliberately. The desktop-side offer runs Desktop Only, All Platforms and Max. The differences are device coverage and what is bundled: the Desktop Only perpetual licence covers Luminar for Desktop on 2 devices (macOS and Windows), All Platforms adds perpetual access to Luminar Mobile on 3 devices plus web access when it ships, and Max additionally bundles a year of Luminar Prime.
Step 3 — Understand the 365-day clock before you buy, not after. This is the single most important step in the entire process and is covered in detail in the pricing section. Generative tools like GenErase, GenSwap, GenExpand, Restoration and AI Assistant are included with your licence for a period of 1 year from purchase for perpetual plans.
Step 4 — Install and connect to your existing workflow. If you already run Lightroom Classic or Photoshop, set the software up as a plugin rather than treating it as a replacement; independent reviewers consistently recommend this hybrid pattern over wholesale migration.
Step 5 — Import and set expectations for the catalogue. The application uses an import-based catalogue rather than opening files directly. Be aware of its limits from the outset: TechRadar found there's no keywording, captioning, or support for sorting by EXIF or IPTC data, though you do get the ability to flag and reject images.
Step 6 — Fix raw files first. If you shoot raw, address lens corrections manually at the start of your edit. Digital Camera World flagged this as a genuine workflow irritation, noting that if you open a raw file, it won't automatically apply a lens correction profile, and you have to dig into the Edit mode's Develop panels to fix that.
Step 7 — Apply presets before anything else. The ordering here is not stylistic preference but a hard constraint. Creative Bloq's testing established that you need to apply the Preset before applying any other edits, or it will override them, and that you can't inspect or edit the settings: you either apply them or you don't.
Step 8 — Verify AI results individually. Treat the automated tools as proposals rather than finished work, particularly the ones two independent outlets found inconsistent.
Budget for year two at the moment of purchase. The renewal figures are published on the same page as the purchase prices, so there is no excuse for surprise: renewal in 1 year for $33.00 on Desktop Only, $49.00 on All Platforms and $59.00 on Max. Write those numbers into your decision rather than treating the one-time payment as the full cost of ownership.
Do not assume dust removal will work. Two independent outlets tested this feature and both found it unreliable. TechRadar reported that one image with a pair of enormous dust spots failed completely, with Neo unable to detect or remove them, while Creative Bloq measured that Dust Spot Removal only worked for us around 50 per cent of the time. If sensor dust is a routine part of your workflow, keep another tool available.
Keep a separate cataloguing solution. Both the missing keyword support and the basic catalogue mean that if you manage a large library, you should pair this software with something built for asset management rather than expecting it to do both jobs.
Read the fair use rules if you batch. Unlimited does not mean unmetered in every sense. Automated or bulk generation — running the AI tools through scripts, bots, or automated pipelines, or processing images in large batches to generate output at scale — falls outside fair use even on a paid plan.
Buy licences that match your team size. The EULA is unusually explicit here, and getting it wrong is a licence breach rather than a grey area. If you are an individual intending to use the Software jointly with others, such that two or more people, including your independent contractors, will be using the Software, you may only select a multi-user plan.
Treat promotional prices as temporary. On the Aperty side the footnote is unambiguous: promotional price only valid for the first three months, or first month, or first twelve months, depending on the subscription term of the plan you choose, after which the account renews at standard price.
Check the refund window against the product. The two product lines do not share a window, so calendar the right one: for Luminar products it is 30 days; for Aperty it is 14 days.
Consider where your files are processed. If client confidentiality matters, Aperty's local processing is a deliberate design choice worth weighing against cloud-based competitors.
Enthusiast photographers moving beyond phone filters. This is the core audience and the one independent reviewers identify most clearly. Creative Bloq concluded that if you're new to photo editing on a desktop computer, but used to making tweaks in mobile apps like Instagram, the software offers a great way to move to the next level, with an interface that is much less intimidating than advanced software like Photoshop.
Landscape and outdoor photographers. The concentration of tools aimed at skies, atmosphere, haze, light and water, plus the well-tested distraction removal, make this the best-served genre.
Portrait photographers, especially at volume. Aperty exists specifically for this group, with local processing, unlimited edits, Photoshop and Lightroom plugins, and dedicated Retouch and Reshape modules.
Photographers resisting subscription pricing. Much of the appeal is the one-time payment framing, and a good deal of the customer sentiment on review platforms centres on wanting an alternative to subscription-only rivals. The caveat, developed below, is that the one-time payment is not quite the whole story.
Existing Adobe users wanting a supplement. Because it runs as a plugin for Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, it can be added to an established workflow for specific tasks rather than replacing anything.
Who it is not for. Professionals who need a serious digital asset management system will find the catalogue insufficient — this is the single most consistent criticism across independent reviews. Anyone who needs guaranteed, contractually committed upgrades will find the EULA offers no such promise. Teams should note they cannot lawfully share an individual licence. And anyone building an automated pipeline or a paid editing service on top of the AI tools is outside the fair use boundary.
The desktop application runs on macOS and Windows, and the Desktop Only licence covers 2 devices across both operating systems. The mobile application covers iPhone, iPad, Android and ChromeOS, with clear system requirements: it requires iOS 17 or newer on Apple devices and Android 11 or newer on Android devices, and the vendor warns that owners of older devices may encounter feature limitations and advises checking device RAM capacity first, since RAM determines how large and complex an image you can handle comfortably.
A web version is announced but not shipped. Every licence tier lists Luminar on Web with the annotation Coming Fall 2026, and the perpetual tiers describe perpetual access to Luminar Web on 3 devices (coming Fall 2026). Until it launches, any purchase decision should treat web access as a promise rather than a feature — and note that the Fair Use Policy explicitly states that Luminar for Web is not included yet; separate terms will apply when it launches.
Language coverage is broad but differs between platforms, which is easy to miss. The desktop product is available in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Czech, and Ukrainian. The mobile product covers a different set that adds Hindi, Indonesian and Turkish but drops the Nordic languages. One further limitation applies to the bundled educational content: Library of Assets courses are currently available in English only.
Integration-wise, the products work as plugins for Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, and Aperty ships Photoshop and Lightroom plugins as part of every plan.
The published desktop prices are three one-time figures: Desktop Only at $129.00, All Platforms at $159.00 against a $259.00 list, and Max at $199.00 against a $399.00 list. All three carry the label one-time payment, use apps forever, and Luminar purchases come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
That headline is accurate but incomplete, and the incompleteness is the most important thing on this page. Three official sources, read together, define what "forever" actually buys.
First, the pricing page itself. The Desktop Only description grants a perpetual licence with continuous access to updates, bug fixes, improvements, and some new features — but immediately qualifies it: big upgrades may require extra upgrade payments. The same block grants only 1-year access to the AI tools — Restoration, GenErase, GenSwap, GenExpand, AI Assistant.
Second, the binding contract. The EULA does not leave this to marketing interpretation. It distinguishes an "Update" — any modification, addition, enhancement, revision, bug fix or other change to the then-current version — from an "Upgrade", meaning a new version of the Software containing additional features, and then states flatly: Upgrades will be offered for a separate fee. It goes further, disclaiming any obligation to ship anything at all: nothing in this Agreement imposes upon Skylum any express or implied obligation to announce or make available any Updates or Upgrades. Even ordinary updates carry a caveat, since some new features within an update may or may not be available to you, depending on the type of license to the Software you have.
Third, a terminology gap worth knowing about. The words "lifetime" and "perpetual" appear throughout the marketing and pricing pages, but the EULA — the document that actually governs your rights — never uses either term. It frames everything through Authorized Devices, Updates, Upgrades and subscription licences instead.
So what happens after 365 days? The AI tools stop, and restoring them means starting a subscription: to restore access to the AI tools (Restoration, GenErase, GenSwap, GenExpand, and AI Assistant), you can purchase a Luminar Prime subscription. The renewal prices are published alongside the purchase prices — $33.00, $49.00 and $59.00 per year for the three tiers respectively — and the vendor notes that AI tools and Library of Assets operate on an auto-renewal model with a Luminar Prime after 365 days. The core AI editing tools such as Sky AI, Light Depth and Background Removal AI are not affected and remain usable as long as your licence is active.
Independent reviewers reached the same conclusion from the outside. Digital Camera World put it directly: they are 'lifetime' licences in that they will never be revoked, but they only come with one year of free updates, so it seems unlikely you'll get a lifetime's actual use.
Mobile is billed separately from the Desktop Only tier, with the mobile page listing $49.99 and $29.99 options that both include a 7-day free trial, plus a $6.99 tier. Aperty is separate again, and interestingly it is the product with the cleaner buy-once story: monthly at $44, annual at $194, and a Lifetime plan at $174 as a one-time purchase, with every plan including software updates and a 14-day money-back guarantee plus a 3-day free trial.
Historic pricing shows the direction of travel. Creative Bloq recorded a one-off price of $79/£59, Digital Camera World recorded $119/£99 in 2025, and the figure verified for this article is $129 — three data points on the same tier trending upward, which is a good reason to check the live page rather than trusting any quoted number, including this one.
Refunds carry conditions that are easy to overlook. Subscription renewals are never refunded — the guarantee applies only to the first time you are billed, and the policy states plainly that renewal payments will not be refunded whether due to your oversight of upcoming renewal charges or for any other reason whatsoever. Certain products carry no refund at all: digital products including education content such as video tutorials, e-books and guides, professional content such as presets, LUTs and textures, and extra seats. Purchases made through a reseller or third-party store such as the Apple App Store or Microsoft Store must be returned through that channel, not by Skylum.
Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop are the obvious comparison and the one every reviewer makes. They win decisively on cataloguing, on the depth of traditional editing controls and on ecosystem integration; they lose on price structure for occasional users, since they are subscription-only. Several reviewers suggest running Luminar as a plugin inside this ecosystem rather than choosing between them.
ON1 Photo RAW is the closest structural competitor: Digital Camera World describes it as combining image cataloguing, raw processing, effects filters and presets with AI tools of its own, and it can layer images like Photoshop and Luminar too. For photographers who want a one-purchase package but need the cataloguing that Luminar lacks, this is the most direct substitute.
DxO Nik Collection works best with a host application like Lightroom but can run standalone, and the same review rates it hard to beat for sheer scope, variety and creative inspiration in effects work.
Affinity Photo is the recommendation for anyone wanting the closest thing to the Photoshop experience without the subscription, though it is considerably more intimidating for beginners than the Luminar interface.
Capture One and Darktable occupy the raw-processing end of the market, with the former favoured for tethered and colour-critical studio work and the latter free and open source. Skylum itself maintains comparison pages against many of these, which are useful for feature lists but are naturally written from one side.
Choosing between them comes down to a simple question: if what you value most is fast, impressive atmospheric and portrait results with minimal learning, this family is competitive. If what you value most is library management, colour precision or contractual certainty about future versions, the alternatives are stronger.
The perpetual licence is time-bounded in its most modern features. This is the central caveat and it is documented by the vendor rather than inferred. Generative tools, Restoration and the AI Assistant run for one year on perpetual plans, big upgrades may require extra upgrade payments, and the EULA confirms that upgrades will be offered for a separate fee with no obligation to release anything.
Cataloguing is weak. Two independent outlets converge here. There is no keywording, no captioning and no sorting by EXIF or IPTC data, and the catalogue itself is useful but basic. For anyone managing volume professionally, this is disqualifying on its own.
Some AI tools are inconsistent. Dust removal in particular failed outright in one outlet's testing and worked roughly half the time in another's. Independent testers also questioned whether Structure AI and Relight AI were particularly useful ways of making edits compared with more traditional tools.
Presets are limited both in quality and mechanics. Digital Camera World judged that they just look like random variations on colors, tones, and low-fi looks with not much imagination or variation on display, and getting more means paying through the marketplace. Mechanically, they cannot be inspected or edited, and must be applied before other edits or they override them.
Raw handling has a rough edge. Lens correction profiles are not applied automatically, which is an irritation when so many modern mirrorless lenses rely on these digital corrections.
The commercial presentation itself draws criticism. Digital Camera World's verdict named a constantly changing marketing strategy that may leave you baffled as to what you're buying this week, alongside strange workflow oddities and distinctly average preset effects. The bundle, subscription, perpetual licence and membership options were described as often bewildering.
Vendor figures are self-reported and internally inconsistent. The homepage advertises 12 launched products, 100+ team members, 16 years in business, 200+ markets and 1M+ customers, none of it independently audited. Founding dates disagree across the company's own channels: the about page traces roots to 2008, the homepage says 16 years, and the company's own Trustpilot profile says almost 14 years. The asset library counts contradict themselves within a single page — the plan cards list 2150+ presets, 500+ LUTs, 400+ overlays, 550+ skies and 50+ courses, while the licence description on the same page lists 2900+ presets, 490+ LUTs, 490+ overlays, 70+ skies and 24+ courses. The mobile page shows a 4.8 App Store rating with no sample size or date, which is not a figure anyone should rely on.
Review-platform sentiment needs a bias caveat. The Trustpilot profile shows a rating of 4.6 across 6,847 reviews with 884 in the last twelve months, distributed 84% five-star, 8% four-star, 2% three-star, 2% two-star and 4% one-star. That sample is large enough to be meaningful, but the profile is claimed, carries a paid Trustpilot subscription, and the platform notes the company actively invites customers to review and has replied to 97% of negative reviews — all of which are recognised sources of selection bias. The platform's own summary records negative themes too, including occasional hangs and images reverting after a reboot.
Generative AI use is governed by mandatory rules with real teeth. The Generative AI Guidelines are incorporated by reference into the EULA. Using outputs to train any AI or ML model is expressly prohibited. Style imitation is banned with an unusually concrete boundary: producing output that is "the same as", "similar to", or "in the style of" a named living photographer is prohibited, the only exception being if the author deceased, or the work was created, earlier than 120 years ago. Breaches can lead to termination of your licence without compensation and prior notice.
Commercial use of generative output carries unallocated risk. The vendor permits it but explicitly declines responsibility: you are fully and solely responsible for any consequences of using the Output. We do not assume any responsibility for the Output generated by you. There is no copyright indemnity here, which is a meaningful difference from competitors that offer enterprise indemnification. AI labelling is discretionary rather than guaranteed — the policy says the company may mark the output with metadata.
Terms around submitted materials are broad. Submitting materials to the website grants a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, transferrable, sub-licensable, worldwide, royalty-free licence including the right to monetize and to commercially use the rights of publicity, persona, image and name of the individuals depicted. Photographers submitting images of people should read that clause before uploading.
Liability is capped very low. The Terms of Use cap damages at $500.00 and exclude indirect, incidental, punitive, special and consequential damages entirely.
Jurisdiction may be inconvenient. Disputes are governed by New York law and arbitrated in New York County in English, regardless of where you live.
One positive counterweight deserves equal billing. The Fair Use Policy, updated 4 August 2026, promises that terms changes never apply retroactively — for your paid 365-day term, the terms stay as they were when you purchased — and sets out a graduated enforcement process: contact first, temporary feature limits if it continues, blocking only in serious or repeated cases, with an appeal route.
Several. The company publishes Luminar for desktop, Luminar for mobile and Aperty for professional portrait retouching, plus a marketplace of add-ons and courses. They are licensed and priced separately, so the first decision is which product you need rather than which plan you want.
The licence itself is not revoked, but what it entitles you to is narrower than the word suggests. Major upgrades cost extra, the EULA states that upgrades are offered for a separate fee and imposes no obligation to release them, and the generative AI tools last one year. Independent reviewers reached the same conclusion, noting that a one-year window of free updates makes a lifetime of actual use unlikely.
The core AI editing tools such as Sky AI, Light Depth and Background Removal AI keep working for as long as your licence is active. Restoration, GenErase, GenSwap, GenExpand and the AI Assistant stop, along with the asset library, and restoring them requires a Luminar Prime subscription at the published renewal price for your tier.
Yes. The Fair Use Policy explicitly includes editing client photos and commercial projects with the results yours to use. Two boundaries apply: the EULA forbids using the software to run an online service for others, and for generative output the vendor accepts no responsibility and offers no indemnity, so the legal risk of AI-generated elements sits with you.
The desktop tiers are published at $129.00 for Desktop Only, $159.00 for All Platforms and $199.00 for Max as one-time payments, with annual renewals of $33.00, $49.00 and $59.00 respectively for continued AI access. Mobile and Aperty are priced separately. Prices have moved upward over time, so check the live pricing page before purchasing.
Luminar purchases carry a 30-day money-back guarantee and Aperty carries 14 days. Subscription renewals are never refunded. Presets, LUTs, textures, courses, e-books and extra seats are non-refundable entirely, and anything bought through the App Store, Microsoft Store or a reseller must be refunded through that channel.
Desktop runs on macOS and Windows; mobile covers iPhone, iPad, Android and ChromeOS with iOS 17 or Android 11 minimums. A web version is announced for Fall 2026 but has not shipped. Desktop supports seventeen interface languages and mobile a different set of sixteen, though bundled courses are English-only.
No. The EULA requires a multi-user plan for any legal entity, any business, or any individual who intends to use the software jointly with two or more people including independent contractors. The Fair Use Policy repeats the point, listing sharing one licence across people among prohibited practices.
Yes, and they are mandatory rules incorporated into the EULA rather than guidance. Training AI models on the output is prohibited, as is generating content in the style of a real person's work unless the author died or the work was created more than 120 years ago. Prohibited content categories cover deceptive, defamatory, pornographic, discriminatory and violent material. Violations can end your licence without compensation or notice.
For most photographers, no — and independent reviewers generally recommend pairing rather than replacing. The AI atmosphere and portrait tools are genuinely strong, but the absence of keywording, captioning and EXIF or IPTC sorting means library management has to happen elsewhere, and traditional editing controls are less direct than in established rivals.
