Luma's desktop app is in open beta

Luma's desktop app is in open beta at lumaphoto.app. You can sign up with an email address or a Google account, there's no invite code any more, and the free plan doesn't ask for a card. It runs in the browser, so there's nothing to install.

I introduced Luma in June, and a fair amount of that post has aged badly. This one covers what the beta actually contains, which claims I've taken back, and the September work that nobody will see but that made me comfortable opening the doors.

Recipes, every morning

A recipe in Luma is the exact set of in-camera settings that produces a look: film simulation, white balance and its shift, dynamic range, highlight and shadow tone, colour, grain, sharpness and ISO. You dial it into the camera once and shoot JPEGs that already look the way you wanted.

Every morning Luma writes a fresh recipe for each camera system. Fujifilm recipes got more precise this week. Grain is now one value carrying both strength and size ("Weak, Small"), white balance can be a Kelvin figure between 2500K and 10000K, and the white balance shift is its own field ("+2 Red, -4 Blue"). Those are three settings the camera has always had and the recipes couldn't express until now.

Fujifilm X-Series, GFX and Sony Alpha are fully supported. Canon EOS R and Nikon Z already get a daily recipe, but their settings schemas are missing fields, so the values can still change shape under you. The app labels both as in development, and I'd treat their recipes as previews.

The landing page now carries twelve real recipes, three per system, with every dial shown and no account needed to read them. The pictures beside them are AI-generated reference frames showing the mood a recipe is aiming for. None of them were shot with those settings, and the page says so under the first one.

What's in the app

Recipe Studio is where recipes live. You save the ones you like, build your own, and hand them to someone else as a QR code, which Luma's QR scanner imports in one click.

The AI Hub has five tools:

• Recipe Generator drafts a recipe from a reference photo or a described mood.
• Image Analysis breaks down a frame's composition and exposure, with advice specific to your camera brand.
• Advanced Preview applies a saved recipe to your own photo locally, with an intensity slider and a before/after view.
• Creative Composition turns a camera and a genre into a composition challenge with setup steps.
• Gear Recommendations suggests lenses and accessories for the cameras in your kit.

The Lab holds the utilities: an EXIF viewer that reads every tag in a dropped file, a firmware tracker for the bodies you've saved in My Gear, the QR scanner, and a light meter. The firmware tracker only covers Fujifilm today. For other brands it's switched off rather than showing data I can't vouch for.

Around those sit My Gear for the bodies and lenses you own, a Watchlist that notifies you when a camera you follow gets firmware or a lens you're tracking becomes available, Photo Spots, a Journal for a shot of the day with a streak, a Community feed, and a news page for firmware, launches and rumours across the brands you've enabled.

What I took back from June

The June post said Luma had "240+ community recipes" to start from. When I went back to check, the recipes table held 28 rows, every one of them private, and nothing had been published to the community at all. A signed-out visitor could browse exactly none of them. The same figure sat on the app's own landing page and on its sign-in and sign-up screens. It's gone from all of them, and a test in the app's suite now fails if a hardcoded recipe count shows up again.

The June post also sold the Photo Vault, with automatic tagging and RAW support on paid plans. The Vault was hidden in both the desktop and mobile apps on September 24, so it isn't part of this beta, and the landing page's pricing cards no longer mention it.

What moved underneath

Most of September went into things a user shouldn't notice.

Billing moved from Stripe to Polar on September 5. Polar is the merchant of record, so VAT or sales tax is worked out at checkout from where you are, and the pricing page says prices are in USD before tax.

On September 24 at 07:55 UTC the backend moved off Supabase. Accounts, recipes and settings now live in Cloudflare D1, files live in R2, and a single Cloudflare Worker serves both the app and its API. Google sign-in runs on that Worker too. Nothing at runtime talks to Supabase any more. I did the move as one cutover rather than one feature at a time, after an earlier partial switch showed why that doesn't work: a token issued by the new system was rejected by every route still served by the old one, so a user signed in and started getting 401s within three seconds.

Earlier in the month a load pass took the landing page's cold transfer from 287 KB to 92 KB. The largest single cost was one line of CSS. A bundled stylesheet carried an @import for the fonts, which meant the browser had to download and parse that stylesheet before it could even discover the font request, and that chain was render-blocking for over three seconds. The logo was the second problem. Both the light and dark versions were rendered, with the unused one hidden at zero opacity, and zero opacity doesn't stop a browser fetching the image.

What's still missing

The mobile app exists and runs on my test phone, but it isn't in a store and there's no public build yet. Canon and Nikon are still previews. The firmware tracker is Fujifilm-only. The Vault is hidden.

One more thing, if you're in Turkey. Luma reports errors to Sentry, and Turkish ISPs currently resolve Sentry's US ingest hosts to a block page, so crash reports from Turkish users never reach me. If something breaks, email me and I'll see it.

The images in this post are design mockups. The photographs in them are AI-generated, and the recipe values are illustrative.

Luma is a CraftedPxl project. Try the beta at lumaphoto.app, read more on the Luma project page, or get in touch.