Radiant Photo 2.1: Faster, Smarter, and More Natural by Design

If you joined our recent sneak-peek webinar, you already saw what’s coming. Radiant Photo 2.1 is a deep quality release: dozens of performance and polish fixes, plus a handful of features that make everyday editing faster and better. The focus is simple—natural-looking photos with less effort—powered by assistive AI that maximizes the pixels you actually photographed (no generative fakes, no fabricated clouds or spaceships).

Below is a concise tour of what’s new, why it matters to help you get results on day one.

Highlights at a Glance

• Black & White tool (zone-based, feathered control, partial color, plays great with LUTs)
• Load your own LUTs in the Looks panel (.cube and more)
• “Uber” sliders on the top bar (Develop & Color Grade) for one-move fine-tuning
• Keyboard navigation for Looks/Presets + nudge/rotation shortcuts for Crop
• Noise Reduction “Detailed Scan” chooser (picks the best method per image)
• EXIF viewer to see essential photo details
• Open Recent, and Reopen Last Session for non-destructive continuity
• Apple Photos external-editor workflow (simple round-trip + revert)
• Lightroom plug-in loads notably faster; optional “keep running” + headless batch export
• Workflows: scene-aware modules, now with import/export and scene assignment for your own presets
• Many small-screen and UI refinements; 80+ performance fixes under the hood
• New creative packs: Newborn & Baby collections; Neo Tokyo urban tones are coming to the marketplace.

Zone-Based Black & White (with Partial Color)

Most B&W tools lock you into six or eight color targets. Ours uses a zone-based approach with reassignable samples and featherable ranges. If your image doesn’t contain “red,” reassign that zone to a hue that does exist and target it precisely. The range handles control coverage; the outer handles control feathering. Translation: smooth, halo-free transitions and clean edges without painting masks.

Want a hit of color for effect? Flip on Partial Color and leave one (or more) hues behind with subtle feathering. You’ll also find a preset menu that mimics classic lens filters (e.g., red filter for dramatic skies) and a great workflow: selective tweaks in color first (Selective Color), then convert to B&W for maximum control.

Tip: Layer a B&W LUT on top of the B&W tool for custom filmic conversions. It’s a superb double-act.

 

Bring Your Own LUTs (My Looks)

You asked for it: load third-party LUTs directly into My Looks. We support common formats (including .cube) and normalize what you import for better reliability. This opens Radiant Photo to the vast world of film stocks, creative grades, restorative LUTs (e.g., negative inversion/channel ops), and your own looks from other apps.

Pro move: Save three versions of a favorite grade—Light, Standard, Max—and audition them quickly with arrow keys.

Essential EXIF Viewer

The new EXIF viewer gives you the essentials at a glance—camera, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length—right inside Radiant’s viewer so you can make smarter edits faster. It works in the standalone app and in the Lightroom/Apple Photos workflows (Photoshop is excluded because layered files break the original metadata chain). 

Pair it with the histogram to troubleshoot exposure decisions (e.g., “Why is this soft? Oh—1/30 sec at 85mm”) and to spot consistency issues across a set (mixed white balance, creeping ISO, unintended focal shifts). When you’re culling from a card or external drive, the filmstrip plus EXIF makes quick keep/toss calls easy, and Reveal in Finder/Explorer lets you jump straight to the source. It’s a small panel that removes a lot of guesswork, so you can fix what matters and move on.

Edit Faster: Top-Bar “Uber” Sliders + Keyboard Everything

Radiant Photo 2.1 adds two global fine-tune sliders to the top toolbar:

• Develop boosts/fades the core tonal/color corrections with an exponential response (big moves move more; small moves move less) so you can “back it off 10–15%” or “lean in” in a single gesture. It intentionally does not affect vignette, portrait tools, or noise reduction.
• Color Grade does the same for your look/grade intensity.

Pair these with keyboard navigation in Looks/Presets and you can audition entire collections at speed. 

We also added Crop refinements: arrow-key nudging plus rotation shortcuts (tiny 0.1° finesse or big 10° jumps). 

On small or high-scaled screens, Tab/Shift-Tab toggles panels to keep the UI uncluttered.

Smarter Noise Reduction (That Stays Natural)

Noise reduction should be appropriate, not nuclear. The new Detailed Scan analyzes your image and suggests the best method (Night, Phone/High-ISO, Portrait, etc.). Even a Strength of 0 applies a baseline improvement, and Detail lets you balance smoothness and texture. If you regularly deal with extreme noise, dedicated tools still have a place; for most images, Radiant’s NR is fast, natural, and integrated.

 

Non-Destructive Continuity: Sidecars, Recents & “Reopen Last Session”

Radiant 2 introduced sidecar files so you can close a photo and reopen it later with every Radiant setting intact. In 2.1, continuity gets friendlier:

• Open Recent lists your last images so you can jump back instantly.
• Reopen all photos from last session restores your entire working set—great after a quit, batch close, or (rare) crash.

Prefer pixel saves? You’ll now see a helpful prompt on quit so nothing gets lost.

Apple Photos: Seamless Round-Trip

Apple moved from extensions to External Editor workflows. That’s great for us—and you. In Photos, choose Image → Edit With → Radiant, adjust in Radiant, click Save, and Photos stacks your result with an option to Revert to Original anytime. Works with HEIC, RAW, JPEG—anything Photos supports.

Lightroom Plug-In: Faster Loads, Smoother Batches

We shaved load times significantly (especially if you have lots of presets/workflows installed). Two quality-of-life upgrades:

• Keep Running (when using Open With) so you can send multiple photos without relaunching the plug-in every round trip.
• Headless Export (File → Export → Radiant Photo) for batch processing with a preset—Radiant doesn’t bring the UI forward, which speeds up and improves the return-to-Lightroom handoff.

 

Workspaces & Workflows: 
Scene-Smart by Default

Radiant Photo’s power comes from assistive intelligence and sensible order of operations:

1. Core Develop fixes problems (exposure balance, cast removal, tone)
2. Color Grade stylizes (LUTs, creative looks, vignette, gradients)
3. Finish polishes (print black/white points, diffusion, fine sharpening)

Workspaces show only what you need (Portrait, Landscape, B&W, etc.). Workflows go further: they add scene-specific detection (e.g., Portraiture prioritizes skin, Landscape understands golden hour/night/sky vs. foreground, Birds & Pets recognizes fur/feather/background) and ship with curated presets/looks.

In 2.1, you can assign your own presets to scenes, then export/import sets to share or back up. It’s an open, modular approach—use Radiant alone or as a friendly first/last stop in a multi-app workflow.

Frequent Fixes for Smoother Performance

We’re prioritizing performance in a series of short, frequent updates—think monthly polish drops that make Radiant feel faster, stabler, and simpler without waiting for a “big” release. For the next several months, about 50% of our dev time is earmarked for real-world issues from customers, triaged directly with our support team. 

The quickest path to a fix is a great bug report: clear steps to reproduce, sample image(s), screenshots or a brief screen recording, plus system info (OS/GPU/camera/plug-in versions) and any crash logs. When you file tickets and follow up with support, we can reproduce, score, and prioritize them—so your everyday annoyances turn into next month’s improvements.

 

New Creative Packs (for sale)

We have new LOOKS packs on the way to the market place.  Each also includes a suggested develop setting and scene detection to make them easier to integrate with our new workflows.

• Newborn & Baby: seven collections tuned for young skin (uneven color, splotchiness, IR nuance). They also look great on any portrait; just adjust smoothing to taste. Includes Dreamtime for low-light, Filmic, Instant Film, Sepia, Teal & Orange, Vintage, and more.

• Neo Tokyo Tones: two urban-centric collections for cityscape/street/urban landscape—optimized for neon/city night palettes but versatile enough for general use..

All packs are workflow-aware and play perfectly with the new B&W and Look systems.

Why We’re Doing It This Way (Ethics & Pixels)

You’ll hear us say pixel integrity a lot. Our philosophy:

• Assistive, not generative. We don’t fabricate pixels. We help you get the most from what you captured.
• Natural first. If someone says “nice edit,” that’s not a compliment—back it off 10–15%. (The Develop and Color Grade sliders exist for exactly this.)
• On-device, privacy-respecting. We optimize for speed and reliability without shipping your photos to the cloud.
• Open workflows. Radiant plays nicely with Apple Photos, Lightroom, Photoshop, Mylio Photos, and the file system. Bring images in from memory cards, external drives, or your camera—and send them right back where they came from. Only better.

Availability & Next Steps

Radiant Photo 2.1 rolls out with the feature set above and more than 80 performance and polish fixes. If you haven’t launched Radiant in a while, be sure to explore recent additions like FaceLight, Selective Color, Split Color Warmth, improved skin detection, and filmstrip tweaks—they’re all built to complement the new 2.1 tools.

• Update: We'll post an announcment when its live.  The Radiant Manger app will also let you know.  We expect to ship by the end of August.
• Join us: Bring questions, ideas, and feature requests to the Radiant community. Your feedback directly informed many of the changes in this release.

Final Thoughts

Radiant Photo 2.1 isn’t about piling on more sliders. It’s about letting craft win—smart detection, clean masks under the hood, tasteful defaults, and controls that help you move faster without compromising your pixels. Whether Radiant is the first thing you touch (fast turnarounds) or the last step (finish and polish), this release makes your photos look their best—with less work and more trust.

 

 

How to update

Thanks again for using Radiant Photo. This article on the Radiant Manager explains how to upgrade. 

Radiant Manager is a helpful application for keeping your software and add-ons current. It can be quickly launched from within Radiant Photo. Look in the lower right corner of the screen. Click the Open Radiant Manager button. You'll also find it in the folder with your Radiant Photo software.

1. Launch Radiant Manager and locate Radiant Photo 2. You may also see an update telling you that it needs to open.
2. If an update is available, click the Update button.  

 

Note: To prevent any problems, make sure to quit any host applications such as Photoshop or Lightroom Classic as well as Radiant Photo when running an update.

 Other Issues?

Our team is here to help. We have real humans who answer questions. Just visit https://support.radiantimaginglabs.com/hc/en-us.