I'm in Rad-Love

For the past couple of weeks, I've been talking DH into letting me buy RadLab. Why? Well, here's my thought. I dislike photo editing. I have a bunch of free photo actions installed in my Photoshop, but end up running the same 2-3 all the time. I thoroughly hate having to run an action to know what it will look like, just to end up not liking it 95% of the time. It is such a huge loss of time. So when I heard about the new product by Totally Rad, RadLab, I immediately thought it was made for me: instead of running actions, you apply stylets to the photos. Technicalities aside, the point is that you get an instant preview of what your photo will look like, without having to wait for any action to run! Magic!! And the interface is really cool and easy to use. Anyway, the price is pretty steep for me (especially since I just confessed I don't like to edit photos... ;) ), so I've just been dreaming about it for a while. But then the people at Totally Rad (I guess the name didn't come out of nowhere, huh? ;) ) put out a 30-day trial of RadLab, so I went and installed it. It really is magic like it sounds. Here is the first example I ran. I started with a very crappy photo DH took of me last Halloween.

Yak. I just played around with the 'actions' I liked the most, and ended up with this:

Now, if I were to show it to DH, I'm sure he'd say that it looks a bit yellow. ;) He's unartistic like that. Umpf! :) Honestly, though, I have never received so many comments in the gallery for my photo processing. Here are some of the comments I got in the galleries for this LO: "LOVE the effect on the photos - makes them look kinda spooky :)"; "[...] great photo effects too", "This is beautiful! I love the edit on the photos! Great choice for the background paper."; "This is awesome!!! Love the photo, love the patterned paper!"

Here's the close up:

OK, let's look at another example. It's yet another horrendous photo of me taken by DH. Last year he botched all of the photos of my birthday, but I really wanted to salvage this one.

A few months back, I used a mish mash of actions to produce this result, of which I was (and still am) very proud:

Now, playing with RadLab, I came up with this instead:

Here are the close ups. Before (clearly! ;) ):

After bunch of actions:

After RadLab:

The result is clearly over-processed to compensate for the awful picture (in fact there is plenty of color noise, especially on the dress, and what not), but I think I do prefer the RadLab result.What do you think? I asked DH and he also likes the RadLab edit best.

Speaking of crappy pictures, I also edited one of the pictures my mom took with her point-and-shoot during out train trip last May. Here's the before:

And the after:

Pretty cool, huh?

As a last example, here's how I edited a photo that was already pretty good. Before:

And after:

As much as I've been loving RadLab, there are a few things I wish were different. Here are the complaints I have:

• I wish you could zoom in and out of the photo (there are only 2 options possible, full - which is way too close - or fit - which fits the photo to the screen). I'd like to be able to zoom freely like in Photoshop.
• I am not happy with any of the black and white actions. They all end up a bit dark. I probably just need to learn how to tweak them. And the cool thing is that once you've tweaked the actions as you see best, you can then save the recipe and reuse it in the future.

In conclusion, I have to say after just a few days of using it, I am totally sold on RadLab. The price is a bit high for my pocket, though, so I am hoping to score a Black Friday sale or something (fingers crossed!)...