How can Sky Toning help your photos?

Radiant Photo from Radiant Imaging Labs offers a Sky toning slider. What is Sky Toning? Can it help your photos?

What does Radiant Photo do?

When you open an image, Radiant Photo analyzes each image and suggests edits that it feels is best for each photo. Rather than applying presets, it attempts to bring out color, detail, and light in each photo.

What is Sky Toning?

After Radiant Photo analyzes your images, you can tweak the photo further to your liking if you wish. Much of these adjustments, including Sky Toning, can be found in the Detailed Edits Menu.

Sky Toning can help you bring out the color in the sky. This adjustment is ideal for making targeted color corrections that focus on certain colors to produce an image with deeper and richer colors.

Use Sky Toning to make the sky appear more vibrant and vivid or to create a specific mood or atmosphere in the photo. These adjustments are ideal for making targeted color corrections that focus on certain colors to produce an image with deeper and richer colors.

Caveats with Sky Toning

As with many adjustments, Sky Toning works best in moderation. Radiant Photo even mentions that it works better at lower values. That said, in my examples, I used very strong adjustments to show you what it is doing.

Sky Toning is, of course, intended to work on skies. After all, there are settings for blue skies, sunsets, and nighttime. However, it can also be used to enhance the natural light in many photos. I’m always a big fan of applying a processing tool to a scene it was not necessarily designed to affect, so this sits well with me!

Just be aware that Sky Toning is not masked. From my experience, it often affects a broad area of the image. That certainly is true of Night Sky, which imbues much of the image with a deep blue hue.

Sky Toning often works well when used with Light Diffusion. Light Diffusion softens the transitions of light. In essence, it creates a softer light. You can compare what Sky Toning with Sky Toning using Sunset at 50% and with and without Light Diffusion at 50% look like.

Thoughts on Radiant Photo

I have been using Radiant Photo for several months. I never cease to be amazed at how well it processes photos without over-processing or producing garish results. Don’t get me wrong, you can overdo any software. But I feel like Radiant Photo more than most minimizes the chances of that happening. Regardless, the feature set and results are fantastic, and I believe appealing whether you are a seasoned veteran photographer or just beginning.

Location

The photo is from a barbecue during the first annual Goffs Star Party, a dark sky area along historic Route 66 and the home of the amazing Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association in California. We will be holding night photography events at this location soon.