Radiant Photo promises to process photos instantly … and do it well. I was curious to see how it would do with Milky Way night photos.
What is Radiant Photo?
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 individually for each photo. After this, you may use additional Quick Edit and Detailed Edit controls to tweak the photo further if you wish.
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 would handle this.
Processing an old, dark Milky Way photo
I began by importing an old dark photo from 2012, one of the first night photos I ever took. I had used an old 2008 Nikon D90 12.1 MP camera for this photo. The image straight out of the camera was a little dark and noisy. How would Radiant Photo handle this?
The example above shows before and after editing, simply using the Quick Edit function. Without doing anything further, the photo already looks noticeably better.
Processing a Milky Way photo from Trona Pinnacles
The second photo was a photo from 2022. The photo was appropriately exposed, detailed and clean. However, it had a bit of a color cast. How would Radiant Photo respond to this?
The Quick Edit picked up on the color cast, making the sky (but not the foreground) more blue.
Smart Presets
Switching to the Detailed Edit Panel reveals the Smart Presets. This reveals some of what is going on under the hood. For instance, the Smart Presets had already chosen Landscape – Night. I switched it to Radiant Photo – Subtle to see what it would do, and it changed the feel somewhat, also making the sky slightly darker.
Detailed Edit
The panels to the right of the photo offers additional control if necessary. These include the Smart Editing panel, Cropping (and the cropping includes a Golden Ratio overlay!), Histogram and more. It also offers Tone, Face Selection and Color Grading.
Finishing Tools
Finishing Tools, located at the bottom of the Tone section, includes Color Temperature, Tint, Exposure and Contrast. I was surprised that these were located at the bottom of the Tone section. I am used to these being near the beginning of editing tools. Other than this surprise, I found the layout easy to use.
The radiance of the program
I found that the Quick Edit had already gotten me largely where I wanted to go already. It is this quality that separates Radiant Photo from other photo editing software programs. The tweaks for these night photos seem to be, well, intelligently done and bring out more color and richness. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it handled these two Milky Way photos!
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