Luna Display

- This week on The Practicing Photographer I'm gonna talk about something that is a Mac only product. I'm sorry Windows users, I don't hate you. I don't think you're using inferior products. It's just that this particular thing is only made for the Mac, although the company is talking about releasing a Windows version so you might want to watch this anyway. If not, come back next week. I feel like there is an essential Photoshop editing utility that not enough people are using. You got to have an iPad to use it. But I'm talking about something that we've covered here before at The Practicing Photographer and that is Astropad. A combination Mac/iPad piece of software that lets you use your iPad as a pressure sensitive drawing tablet, like a Wacom Intous screen.

It's a pressure sensitive screen. I love Astropad, I use it all the time. It's an essential part of my Photoshop workflow. Now, the people that make Astropad have made a piece of hardware called The Luna Display. It's this little gizmo right here. This is the USB-C version. It also comes in a mini display port version. And what this does is let me turn my iPad into a full on second monitor for my computer. So I'm gonna take this and plug this into a USB-C port on my Mac here and I'm gonna launch Luna Display on my Mac and I'm gonna launch Luna Display on my iPad.

Both devices have to be on the same WiFi network for this to work. Now, I've tried using this in hotel rooms sometimes and it hasn't worked and on the Luna Display website it says that sometimes public WiFi doesn't work. If you run into that situation you can actually just plug a lightening cable into your iPad and connect it to your Mac, it'll work fine. It's cool having wireless cause it means you can carry the iPad around. So, both of these are plugged in and if you look at my displays here, if you're used to using a second display on your Mac then this should look familiar. I've got the faded menu bar here, well I had the faded menu bar here, that shows that this is a second display.

So I'm gonna pick this up and drag it over here and it is a full on working Mac monitor. The refresh rate is pretty good. You can see some little blocky artifacts around there. It may not be as smooth as what I would have with a dedicated second monitor but wow, this is completely usable. So why am I showing you this today? From a photography standpoint this is great because it means if I'm used to working with a dual monitor situation at home, now when I'm in the field I can have that again.

And what's particularly cool about that is for Photoshop I can set up a screen over here and move all of my palettes off to my second screen giving me more work space. On a laptop this can be particularly useful because laptop screens are smaller. If I want a lot of room to edit in I can have all my palettes off screen and buy myself a lot of screen real estate. I can even do this with my iPhone. I can run the Luna Display app on my iPhone and turn it into a second monitor. It's a nice little palette size monitor that works just great.

But, this is more than a monitor. This is a touch screen device. I'm going to pull this over to here. I'm gonna actually just swap these. Make this my palette monitor and now with my Apple Pencil which I happen to have right here this becomes a pressure sensitive display that I can draw directly onto. And it's wireless. I can pick this up, go sit on the couch and scribble away. Do whatever I want. On the Luna Display demo movie they show this functionality for not just photo stuff but maybe you're just browsing the Web and you would like to do that in your Mac rather than on your iPad.

You can run Safari on here, go sit on the couch and do your Web browsing and whatnot. Video editing, this is a great tool. Again I could use it as a palette monitor. But it's this touch sensitive stuff that makes this the killer Photoshop thing because I can sit here and paint masks, I can cut masks, I can do my retouching and all that other stuff and I'm actually working in Photoshop. This is the Luna Display. You can pre order it right now for 70 bucks. They're saying it's gonna ship in January. Again this comes in USB-C or mini display port variants.

They say they're talking about a Windows version. They don't have anything up on their site about that yet. Really great addition if you work on the road but even really handy for working at home just to break up your work space and give you more options.