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

Radiant Photo 2.1 is a high-quality update that offers various performance and polish enhancements along with a number of features that enhance and expedite daily editing. The fundamental objective is simple: shoot natural-looking photos with less effort because by assistive AI you and optimizes the pixels you actually shot (no fakes, no clouds or spaceships created).

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 have six or eight color targets locked in. Ours employ featherable ranges, reassignable samples, and a zone-based approach. If "red" is not present in your image, reassign the zone to a color that is there and precisely target it. While the outer handles feathering, the 

range handles controls coverage. Translation: halo-free transitions and clean edges without the need for mask painting.

Zone-Based Black & White (with Partial Color)

Would you like a pop of color to make a statement? To leave one or more colors in place, turn on Partial Color and employ delicate feathering. A preset menu that mimics conventional lens filters (such the red filter for dramatic skies) and a great procedure that lets you selective tweaks in color first (Selective Color) and then convert to black and white for maximum control are also included.

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)

Loading third-party LUTs straight into My Looks is what you requested.  For increased dependability, we standardize what you import and support common formats, such as .cube.  The extensive realm of film stocks, creative grades, restorative LUTs (such negative inversion/channel operations), and your own looks from other programs are now accessible in Radiant Photo.

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

Essential EXIF Viewer

With all the information you need at your fingertips—camera, lens, focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and focal length—the new EXIF viewer allows you to make more intelligent adjustments more rapidly.   It works in the standalone program as well as the Lightroom/Apple Photos workflow (Photoshop is excluded since layered files break the original metadata chain).

When combined with the histogram, it can be used to troubleshoot exposure settings (e.g., “Why is this soft? Oh—1/30 sec at 85mm”) and spot consistency issues throughout a set (mixed white balance, creeping ISO, accidental focus shifts). When you're culling from a card or external storage, the filmstrip with EXIF makes quick keep/toss calls easy, and reveal in Finder/Explorer lets you go straight to the source. It's a small panel that removes a lot of confusion, so you can continue after making the required adjustments.

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 used instead of nuclear power. The new Detailed Scan determines the best setting (Night, Phone/High-ISO, Portrait, etc.) after examining your photo. Detail may balance texture and smoothness, and even a Strength of 0 gives a baseline improvement. If you often work with high noise, dedicated tools are still helpful; Radiant's NR is integrated, fast, and smooth for most photographs.

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 only show the aspects that are required (black and white, landscape, portrait, etc.).   In addition to presets and carefully selected looks, workflows go one step further by incorporating scene-specific detection (for instance, Portraiture prioritizes skin, Landscape recognizes golden hour, night, and sky versus foreground, and Birds & Pets recognizes fur, feathers, and backdrop).

Version 2.1 allows you to assign your own presets to scenes and then import and export sets to share or backup.   Radiant is an open, modular solution that may be used alone or as a handy first or last stop in a multi-app process.

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

Adding more sliders is not the goal of Radiant Photo 2.1.  With clever detection, tidy masks underneath, elegant defaults, and controls that let you work more quickly without sacrificing pixels, it's all about letting craft win.  This release makes your photographs appear their best with less effort and more confidence, whether Radiant is the first thing you touch (quick turnarounds) or the last step (finish and polish).

Adding more sliders is not the goal of Radiant Photo 2.1.  With clever detection, tidy masks underneath, elegant defaults, and controls that let you work more quickly without sacrificing pixels, it's all about letting craft win.  This release makes your photographs appear their best with less effort and more confidence, whether Radiant is the first thing you touch (quick turnarounds) or the last step (finish and polish).

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.