We tried out the freshly-released Radiant Photo V2. We wanted to see how it would do while processing a Milky Way photo in just a few, automated steps!
What is Radiant Photo V2?
Radiant Photo analyzes each image and suggests edits that it feels are best for each photo. Rather than applying presets, it attempts to bring out color, detail, and light individually for each photo. After this, you may use additional controls to tweak the photo further if you wish.
Radiant Photo V2 is the next generation of this. It recognizes the content of your photos and selects the ideal optimization. But of course, you can also adjust everything manually.And it does so without the cloud, locally on your device. It corrects colors, color casts, and addresses dynamic range automatically, using intelligent sliders and a customizable workspace to optimize your images quickly.
What I liked about the first version is that it allowed you to do this, but still adjust many parameters to my liking if necessary.
Milky Way photos are some of the more challenging photos that a photographer might need to process. I was curious to see how Radiant Photo V2 would handle this.
Processing Mobius Arch with Radiant Photo V2
Just like the first version of Radiant Photo, it automatically identifies the kind of photo you have, and adjusts for it based on machine learning.
From there on, you can adjust various parameters in the Color section to your own liking.
Radiant Photo V2 has reorganized everything. Above, we began experimenting with the Develop Collection parameters, beginning with “Landscape – Night.” This is located on the left, where the Preset section was formerly located in V1.
As with the first version, Radiant Photo V2 allows you to easily make tweaks to its Develop Collection or Workflow. It’s not supposed to be a “one size fits all,” and every photo is a little different.
The Color sliders allow you to make tweaks to various parameters in the Color Menu.
The Finishing Tools are very similar to the previous version, allowing you to make some final adjustments before saving the file.
Although Radiant Photo V2’s power is in its analysis and suggestions of each photo, it’s still nice that you can create presets to further tailor something to your own liking.
Workflows are on their way
Because we have an early version of Radiant Photo V2, we could not evaluate many of its Workflows. These sound like they would be very powerful. Workflows are sold separately from the Radiant Imaging Labs website.
Landscapes Workflow
This is a workflow intended to customize the user interface for, well, Landscapes. It features Develop settings (all hand-tuned to specific scenes). In all, there are 16 intelligent scenes: astrophotography, beach, cityscape blue hour, cityscape day, citiscape golden hour, cityscape night, desert, fields, forest, landscape, landscape blue hour, landscape golden hour, landscape night, mountains, waterfall, and Auto Radiant.
Birds Workflow
This is a rather unique and unexpected Workflow. Radiant Photo claims that this is the world’s first dedicated intelligent software for bird photographers. There are 14 intelligent scenes. These include Birds of Prey, Flamingos, Fowl and Gamebirds, Herons, Cranes and Pelicans, Hummingbirds, Kingfishers and Woodpeckers, Ostriches and Emus, Penguins, Pigeons and Doves, Shorebirds.
Pets Workflow
For those who consider their pets to be like children, there are several styles of technical and creative edits for popular photography category: Auto Radiant Pets, Birds, Cats, Dogs, and Horses. It would be interesting to see how much overlap there might be between this Birds section and the Birds Workflow. If you have more unusual pets such as the rare and elusive Pushmi Pullyu, you might have to contact Radiant Photo about that!
Portraiture Workflow
This features tools for portraits, of course, including 10-point skin detection, intelligent color cast removal, custom film and color grading LUTs, 11 intelligent scenes, and new scenes for outdoors scenes and groups.
A word about AI
Radiant Photo wants to make it clear that they are trying to make your existing pixels the best they can be while keeping you in complete control of your image. They do not generate new pixels. They do not generate new images. And they do not transfer personal data from you to their servers. Every edit is processed locally on users’ devices, ensuring the fastest speed as well as privacy and security.
Read more about Radiant Photo V2 on their press release.
Sierra Nevada Mountains in the distance.