Like Radiant Photo for desktop, Radiant Photo Mobile has LOOKs built in to overlay on your develop settings to achieve beautiful visual and emotional effects with your photos. The range of LOOKs covers everything from particular film stocks, to eras like 1960. For a limited time you can get Radiant Photo Mobile free.
Radiant Photo is coming to mobile and for a short time you can get Radiant Photo Mobile free when you join the Radiant Photo Mobile Beta Community. Check it out here and get involved helping this software be the best it can be!
Using Radiant Photo Mobile to develop your photos before applying LOOKs
Radiant Photo Mobile opens on your Gallery of recent photos so there is no importing involved. This makes it super handy for quickly editing and enhancing phone photos. In these examples I am capturing some of the winter plants around my (Australian) home and I wanted to make everything look a little more lush.
Like the desktop version we know and love, Radiant Photo Mobile starts working as soon as you open a photo. (Remember, you can batch edit by clicking the stacked photo icon to select more than one photo from the Gallery.)
The Enhance tab is where Radiant Photo Mobile shows which Smart Preset has been detected. Auto Radiant works beautifully where there’s no obvious subject (People, People — Night, Newborn & Baby, Animals and Food & Drink are some of the subjects that Radiant Photo Mobile will auto-detect).
I’ve then adjusted some of my favorite settings in the Develop tab: I often add a little Super Contrast (Develop > Tone > Super Contrast) and if needed I tweak the Exposure (Develop > Tone > Exposure). The good thing about adjusting Exposure like this here in Radiant Photo Mobile is that it is applied relative to the specific photo. Using the powerful Perfectly Clear engine that’s under the hood, you can turn the Exposure all the way up to 100 and still be in the realms of a sensible exposure, because it’s adjusted for the photo.
Another setting I like to adjust is Fidelity and Vibrancy (find these in Develop > Color), especially with photos of plants and flowers.
Adding LOOKs over your edits in Radiant Photo Mobile
LOOKs are nondestructive in Radiant Photo Mobile in two ways. Firstly, Radiant Photo (either version) is never editing your originals: It exports a new copies with your Radiant Photo edits applied. But LOOKs are nondestructive too in that they are applied separately to your Enhance, Develop and Portrait settings. You can apply a LOOK, then go back and change your Develop settings separately.
This is different to Lightroom, for example. When you apply a preset in Lightroom or Lightroom Classic, it is just one set of settings. There’s no obvious separating of a preset that affects your basic develop settings versus your color grade settings, unless they have been very (very!) carefully built. It’s for this reason that newcomers to Lightroom can find it hard to buy and use presets. It’s hard to get them to work as you see it in the Instagram video!
I like that about Radiant Photo, by comparison: Separating your develop settings from the color grading settings makes sense. It brings your photo to a correctly exposed, clean photo before applying the color grading. It’s flexible, clear what’s going on, and powerfully controllable.
Radiant Photo Mobile LOOKs built into the beta release
So, let’s have a look at the, well, LOOKs, that are packaged into the beta release. We’ve got everything from black and white LOOKs, color film stocks and more:
- BW and Color Film Stocks — matching different processing techniques from the film days
- Light — these I love, as they let you match the feel of different times of day like Sunset, Moonlight and more
- Retro — these mimic film photos from the Polaroid days with specific washes and color saturations
- Stylist Color — these LOOKs enhance different color palettes in the photo for different effects
- Color Grades — these are more extreme grading options which desaturate some colors and enhance others
- Vintage — the Vintage set processes the image into the color grading common and popular during different eras from 1960 to 1995.
Adjusting LOOKs with the manual controls
After applying a LOOK to your image, tap the LOOK again to open the manual controls. You can control the Strength, Saturation and Contrast to fine tune how the image is finished off.
This gives you more control over your image. Remember, you can go back to the Develop settings at any time without affecting your applied LOOK.
Try Radiant Photo Mobile free in the Beta Community
I am getting a lot of use out of Radiant Photo Mobile. It is a fast, effective tool to quickly develop and enhance photos on the go. For a limited time you can get Radiant Photo Mobile free. Join the Beta Community to dive in and have a go for yourself.
