Right panel controls

The right panel helps you control your edits. It also allows for cropping and color grading.

Smart Editing

These sliders control the AI-powered editing tools that make per-pixel corrections. While easy to use, they are incredibly robust and accomplish a lot to improve an image.

You can learn more about Smart Editing here.

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—1/4 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, so you can fix what matters and move on.

Histogram

The histogram can help you understand how the pixels in your image are distributed according to intensity.  Shadow details are shown on the left, midtones in the middle, and highlights on the right.  The histogram is a useful way to judge the exposure of your image.  

• In the upper left and upper right corners, you can check the boxes to show clipped pixels.  
• Press the J key to toggle both clipping indicators on or off.
• Blue areas show cold pixels that lack detail in the shadows, and red areas are hot pixels that lack details in the highlights.  
• You can use the manual sliders for tone or preprocessing to recover details if needed.

Crop & Straighten Tool

The Crop & Straighten Tool allows you to crop images from within Radiant Photo 2.  Cropping is not available in the Photoshop plug-in.

1. Click Start Cropping or press the C key to switch into crop mode.
2. Use the Aspect Ratio menu to define the height/width of the crop frame.  Select ‘Free Resize’ to set an arbitrarily sized crop.
3. The three buttons allow you to transform your image
   • Flip vertical
   • Flip horizontal
   • Rotate 90˚
4. You can switch between four different composition guides while cropping with the buttons at the bottom of the crop tool
5. Use the Straighten slider to apply small rotation amounts to fix a crooked photo.
6. Click Apply Crop to use the newly set cropping or Reset Crop to exit.

Tools Panel

The tools panel contains all of the editing tools. The Workspace controls the exact tools you can see in use. You can easily switch Workspaces to see different combinations of tools for the task at hand. You can choose a default workspace by clicking on the drop-down menu near the top of the editing panel.

Two useful Workspaces to try out are Responsive and Professional.

• Responsive – Shows only the tools used by a Develop setting or preset. As you switch develop settings or presets, the workspace dynamically updates.
• Professional — Shows every tool offered by Radiant Photo 2 and is ideal for comprehensive editing. Most users work top-to-bottom through the list, but a nonlinear workflow is also allowed.

To learn more about Workspaces, click here.