Radiant Photo LOOKs have a wide range of color grade options and they are perfect for creating a mood or conveying emotion in your photos. I’m using Radiant Photo to edit some recent lakeside photos. Let’s have a look at how to capture the summer vibe when editing with Radiant Photo.

To start with, I’ve chosen my photos and drag-dropped them into Radiant Photo. They open as a batch in the bottom filmstrip, ready for editing. Radiant Photo immediately applies the auto-detected Smart Presets to get my photos from RAW to developed.

For this set I left the Smart Preset settings as applied and dived straight into LOOKs.

How Smart Presets, Presets and LOOKs work when editing in Radiant Photo

In Radiant Photo, unlike the Lightroom Classic workflow you might be used to, LOOKs or color grading is separated from developing. Smart Presets and Presets apply to the develop, aka Detailed Edit, settings. LOOKs apply color grading independently to the develop settings. Then, finally, things like color temperature and tint are tweaked in the Finishing Tools.

The benefit of this method is that you can control the balance of what’s being done to your photo with finesse. When you use Smart Presets then all your photos in the batch will be edited within the same Smart Preset collection. In other words, if you are using the Radiant Photo – Pro set of Smart Presets on a batch of photos, then your landscape photos in that batch will be developed in a consistent style (by the Landscape Smart Preset), to the people photos (which are developed using the People Smart Preset).

Presets, on the other hand, are not “smart” – i.e. there’s no auto detection of what your scene needs. They are like traditional Lightroom Classic presets in that way. You can easily add your own presets to Radiant Photo just like in Lightroom Classic.

Editing with Radiant Photo LOOKs

LOOKs, in contrast, apply just to the color grading of the image. I’m working with these in the Color Grade panel and have chosen the Light set:

Color Grade > Color Grading > Light > Warm Midtones

The Warm Midtones LOOK has a lot of applications and here I’m using it to bring out the summer vibe of these photos. There are so many options for LOOKs and you can add more to your library from the Radiant Photo community.

I have adjusted the Contrast slightly but otherwise it is a straight click-and-done.

Finishing Tools in Radiant Photo: Fine-tune your edits

The Finishing Tools tab is found in Color Grade: Find it with the crosshair icon in the right hand panel. Finishing Tools are using to tweak the final exposure and color balance of the image right before saving. Color Temp and Tint are found here, for any final corrections that are not performed by the Smart Preset applied.

editing in radiant photo
The Finishing Tools have the tone tools that you need to put final touches on your images.

With all Radiant Photo editing the control is yours to fine tune everything that you need to. The AI editing applied on import good at getting my photos almost exactly how I like them. I am usually only adjusting one or two things here and there to get the look right.

The power is there to fix almost any problem that needs addressing in your image. Blemishes, shine, and powerful face adjustments are all under control.

Syncing your edits to the whole batch of photos in Radiant Photo

Once I edited the first photo in my batch I used the Sync all button in the filmstrip to apply my changes to all the photos. Save All in the top right exports my images. Done.

Radiant Photo is very fast, so it’s a solution for editing family photos quickly, optimizing noise reduction and retouching faces as part of your main editing workflow.

The new version of Radiant Photo Mobile is coming soon (and you can get the beta for free for a limited time). It’s got RAW editing under the hood and is going to make it easier than ever to edit amazing photos on the go.