Radiant Photo: Bringing out the natural beauty in portraits instantly?

If I told you that Radiant Photo processed portraits instantly — and did it well — would you be interested?

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.

I wanted to see how it might process portrait photos. I used a headshot from gifted photographer Mike Martin. 

Processing a photo of Jake Carroll by Mike Martin

I used Radiant Photo as a plugin in Photoshop. It took about four seconds to analyze the photo on a mid-2017 27″ iMac (i7 chip, 40 GB RAM). The photo looked brighter, as is typically the case. I noticed immediately that the eyes seemed more detailed and vibrant in a rather pleasing manner.

Eyes – Catchlights

I opened the Eyes section in the Smart Editing menu. Interestingly, I noticed that there were some catchlight settings. I played around with some of the effects, including the Umbrella setting, even though the eyes already had catchlights.

Face

I also played with the Face Contour and Lip Sharpening, which worked effectively. When adjusting the settings for Face Contour, Lip Sharpening and Catchlights, Radiant Photo took several seconds to fully render when I was zoomed in on the photo on my five-year-old computer. I probably wouldn’t use this ordinarily on this photo. This is for demonstration purposes only, basically just kicking the tires on the features.

Radiant portraits

Like some of the other genres of photos I used with Radiant Photo, I found that the initial Quick Edit upon import had already gotten me largely where I wanted to go already. The ability to actually analyze the photo and process it accordingly separates Radiant Photo from many other photo editing software programs. The instantaneous processing was pleasing with portraits. 

Right out of the gate, Radiant Photo seems very useful. I look forward to seeing how it progresses. With any sort of machine learning, it can only get better. We’ve seen the seemingly exponential rise in the capability of AI and machine learning capabilities. Radiant Photo seems to leverage this in a useful manner that makes photo processing easy. And best of all, it doesn’t overdo the processing.

Check out more photos at the Mike Martin Photography website.