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):
- Album/folder structure
- Rating system
- Image previews and browsing
- Easy move from the DAM to Luminar for editing (it's all easily connected)
- Tags (which implies keywording)
- Import window
- Some sort of "smart collection" feature
- The ability to create multiple libraries/catalogs
- 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.
